Health Nut
I think, like most people these days, the trend is to eat healthier. As one of the young women I work with says, “Eat clean.” In fact, I work in an office with a bunch of healthy eaters – a lot of them vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free. I admire them for that, but since I belong to the Bacon On Everything Club, my eating habits severely differ.
But I’m trying. At lunchtime in our MidWeek office, we’re pretty family-ish and often eat together. I don’t retreat to an executive lunchroom (not that we have one) or have a Mad Men two-martini lunch. I go to lunch with a random set of guys and gals simply because we have fun doing it and genuinely enjoy each other’s company.
The other day we all decided to head down to our office complex open courtyard to enjoy our lunches. Although on concrete, we’re surrounded by trees and foliage in a breezeway, which almost makes it feel like a picnic. Some bring their own lunch and some of us buy something from one of several restaurants around the courtyard.
In my effort to eat “cleaner,” I bought something called a spring mix salad. It’s loaded with greenery I’m not familiar with: baby green leaf, radicchio, red oak leaf, mizuna, arugula – you get the picture. If it’s not head lettuce covered in Thousand Island dressing, I have no idea what kind of salad I’m eating.
Anyway, we were all talking and eating when a huge gust of wind blew through. It literally picked up things, like my napkin, which I hastily tried to grab in midair. That distracted me from the other stuff that the wind picked up and blew into my salad. As I resumed my salad consumption, I pulled a twig out of my mouth along with what looked like a seed pod shell. Not wanting to seem like a clean-eating novice, I continued to eat what I thought was healthy salad ingredients. That’s when one of the gals yelled out, “Ron, the wind must have blown a bunch of leaves and stuff into your salad!”
Sure enough, on closer examination, my salad looked like a landscaper prepared it. Everyone had a pretty good laugh, but I was out a lunch.
The good news was I didn’t need a toothpick. I just used one of those twigs sitting on my plate.
