Eating Totally Healthy during the Pandemic is for Suckers

There’s been, naturally and uber-naturally, a whole mouthful of talk about making sure you eat healthy during the pandemic – chow down on fresh fruits and veggies; make room for the legumes; make meat a treat.

It certainly makes some semblance of sense. Eating within some ballpark frank of health should be some sort of priority, for chances are most of you (not me of course) are spending some serious wads of time creating prodigious dents in your couch punching the clock watching HBO, Showtime, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, or Netflix.

By the way, anybody watch Ozark on Netflix? Holy crap what a delicious combination of the nasty smart and nasty dumb. Hillbillies and High-End crime are such a tasty combination!

OK, back to food. First, clasp hands and thank the Lord of Lard. Everything with taste has some sort of fat in it. Fight me all you want, but you know I am 135% correct.

Yeah, I’m putting nature’s bounty down my gullet, but c’mon, people. What do you want me to do? Try to turn my diet on a dime into chewing on Kale like a cow with its cud and letting absolutely no one know I’m the king of cuisine? Oh hell no. No one wants to see me post recipes of nasty-ass Kale dishes on social media.

Speaking of Kale, are you aware Kale was once just a decoration (see above pic), a hard wave of green they’d put in and around buffets to try to gussy them up? Yeah, that was Kale – and now people are eating it rather than the vat of delicious banana pudding that somehow snuck its way into the salad bar section. Which, has an aside, I would like to meet the Dr. Evil of the Buffet who decided puddings were best placed in the salad section. Marketing genius.

Don’t ask me to drop food photos onto social media either. Won’t do it. You can if you want, I’m not judging. Some of you out there have some serious chef chops. And will I attempt to show the cyberworld how I am being so health-conscious while I’m trying to retain some sort of positivity? I can’t. Positivity? Yes, I have that down, but it’s not coming with 135% healthy eating. It’s come mostly with exercise, meditation and yoga. Look, I’ve been sequestered since March 11. I’ll do the math for you. That means I am now into my 10^th week at home. 10, MFers. 10. I’ll body positive myself how I want.

As far as food, it’s not like I start my day off scraping Cap’n Crunch out of my molars. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Why? Because it’s first, and to paraphrase Ricky Bobby ‘If you’re not first, you’re not breakfast.’ For breakfast I will fry an egg or two and lay them atop a couple waffles with some fresh fruit. Or, I’ll just drop those berries into granola or in oatmeal. I’ve been known to put peanut butter in oatmeal. I’ll make oatmeal, chill it, put some fruity yogurt in it and eat it that way. I like to call that concoction the Election Day breakfast because at this point I would vote for a cold bowl of oatmeal rather than have Orange Julius Caesar for another four years.

So sure, I start the day off just fine thankyouverymuch… then allow it to slide downhill from there. I like to think of it as a semi-controlled slide, like a luge run, but occasionally the run takes a turn too much for the sled and I fly right out of the corner. In spite of the possible internal damage, I am comfortable with the results. Why? Because people, I designed the course.

What have I had for lunch and dinner, or sometimes lunch, linner and dinner? For starters, pizza. I’ve rolled out enough pizza dough to start my own franchise… and I’ll go to my grave knowing this pizza dough is far better than the crap any sucker gnaws on from Papa John’s. Probably another thing to fight me on. Fine, try to dazzle me with your sweet science. I fight southpaw so be prepared.

And the toppings for said countless pizzas? Well it ain’t Kale. Oh, sure I’ll get fancy with them, garnish with some Italian Parsley or Arugula, make a BBQ chicken pizza to add some variety, throw some giardiniera on top. But healthy pizza? Get the Chef Boyardee out of here with that nonsense. Veggies? Sure, but they’ll be sharing those slices with mounds of cheese and Italian sausage.

Is that the only Italian crossing my lips? LOL. C’mon now. My stomach cries for me to fill it with pizza and then yells ‘pile on some pasta, pussy!’ and I do: ravioli, lasagna, fettuccini, rotini, all with spicy Italian gravy chunked with hot Italian sausage and peppers.

Are my taste buds so narrow as to only enjoy the finest American Italians have to offer? Oh no, I have reached across many ethnicities: Chinese, French, Murrican and especially Mexican. I am a crockpot chili gourmand. My gastrointestinal system begs for chili – rich red chili with beef; green chili with chicken and plenty of sharp cheddar cheese; white chili loaded with navy beans; Colorado green chili with pork and hatch chiles. Every chili dish has just enough spice to sparkle clean my colon.

Am I a gastronome with a complete disregard for my body? Maybe. Of my body’s desires? Oh hell no. While I am for certain, eating, I am for damn sure eating well. I am not eating fast food. Yeah I know all of us here at the Fancy Boys Club spent the whole month of March with our plates full of March Fatness polls. And yeah, it was fun. Does it mean I have to shove a single mouthful of fast food into my pie hole? Nope. And I haven’t. Anytime I go out to curbside pickup some lunch or dinner (never breakfast, for fuck’s sake breakfast is the easiest meal time to prepare for a reason – half of us are so bleary-eyed we can barely function), I go to Crystal Lake’s fine local diner, Café Olympic, and grab a salad, sammich and/or side that I won’t make at home. It’s amazingly good, maybe not all good for me so to speak, but damn it I can have a Chicken Bleu Salad and follow it up with a cinnamon roll the size of my head if I want.

And this is what everything parboils down to – Want. I am eating like I want to eat. Why? Because this pandemic is not normal, not in the stretches of anyone’s imagination. This is not the time to try to change your eating habits. Curb them for certain, everything in moderation is recommended (except for ice cream), but for the love of pie we are all in survival mode. Eat what you want, eat well, but eat. And if you know anyone who’s struggling to eat anything, or doesn’t have enough, help them. But don’t give them Kale unless you want to end your friendship.