It's Like Twinkies . . .

Today I had SpaghettiO's with sliced hot dogs. I'm trying to learn how to eat poor again, as I have the goal of remaining unemployed all summer. Hot dogs and canned food figure high in this, if I remember my youth well. I was surprised at how good SpaghettiO's still taste to me as an adult. Tomorrow: Hot dogs and beans. Maybe I'll also make potato salad. Potatoes are cheap.

The other goal I have with food over the next month (besides losing weight, because hey--I'm a girl) is to eat more diverse meats. Since the seventh grade (many many years ago), I have only eaten poultry and fish. No red meat. No pork. I did it to be different at the time, I'm sure. It wasn't a stance on animal rights or anything like that.

I'll be travelling to the UK at the end of June, and I'm told they don't have nearly the food selection they have at US restaurants. In case I don't have any chicken or vegetarian options, I am trying to eat some red meat again. I can't bring myself to bite into a steak or burger just yet; rather, I am taking what I call the "Bugs in Twinkies" approach to eating meat.

The US FDA allows a certain number of bug parts, rodent hair, etc., into any processed food. I first heard about this nasty truth in regard to Twinkies, though I have since found out it's true of all processed foods. The parts are of course small enough so that you don't detect them individually, and in total we eat from one to two pounds of insect each year. They aren't harmful to us and in some cases are even healthy.

If you have ever picked your own fruit at an orchard or farm, or gotten fresh corn on the cob, you know that there is a chance you may bite into an apple and find a worm. And of course, as the old joke goes, what is worse than finding a worm in your apple? Finding half a worm in your apple...ba-dum-dum!

Still, despite these truisms, we don't want to eat insects, and if we can manage to not think about the 90 insect parts allowed in our Twinkies, we will go on eating them. But that doesn't mean we will eat a chocolate covered cockroach (which they sell at the Seattle Zoo gift shop, by the way).

So I am taking the Bugs in Twinkies approach to reintroducing meat into my diet. I had a queso sauce with ground beef mixed in it the other day; I've had potato skins with bacon bits on them. I had gumbo with sausage bits in. So long as it's all bits and pieces, I'm doing ok so far. Still don't want that pork chop, though.