Food Industry Books Have Motivated Me To Give Unhealthy Foods the Evil Eye

Motivated by a deep-seeded desire to appear smart and insightful, I recently read Fast Food Nation back-to-back with the Omnivore’s Dilemma, both of which made me extremely hungry.

There’s no question that these books are important and educational, which is the exact message I wanted to convey to people seeing me reading these books on the subway. However, after you read for the eightieth time that every meal you eat is some form of twenty bushels of corn, the message makes its way across.

At first I thought that the message was some form of those jokes about the farmer with the hot daughters who lets the traveling salesman sleep over as long as he stays away from the daughters, but turns out, I was wrong.

These books have something to do with this, now I have to find out what

The moral is something along the lines of everything you eat is bad. Not just bad for you, but bad for the environment, the animals and the economy. Almost everything you eat is corn. If you eat meat, the cow, chicken or pig was fed corn. The bread is corn, the sweeteners are corn, the flavors are corn. And the corn is loaded with chemicals that taint local water supplies and is harder to digest, which – or something like that – leads to obesity and diabetes.

I know that’s not word-for-word what the book says, but you can sum it up with something like food is bad.

Here’s the thing, I have no idea what to do with that information. I mean, yeah, I can shop at Whole Foods instead of Safeway, but they never double-bag, or they give you a dirty look if you ask for an extra, so I would have to eat all the groceries in the store, which can’t be healthy.

Nor can I guilt trip everyone, because then I sound like the annoying, preachy, passive-aggressive encyclopedia who gets on everyone’s case nonstop. But then I found the solution.

I have decided to start guilt-tripping the food itself. Now I shoot dirty looks at any corn-related products and it solves all my problems. Whenever I go to the movie theater, instead of getting on people’s cases for downing a tub of stomach-expanding chemical corn, I give the popcorn itself the angriest look I can muster.

That’s right, I just stand there, seething, staring down corn. It makes me feel high and mighty and it makes me feel like the corn should know why I’m angry with it.

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