Crisis

I try to be a healthy eater. I buy whole grain bread and eat fruit with breakfast and lunch. I drink skim milk and eat white meat when I have a choice. I spread natural peanut butter on my sandwiches. I avoid soda and potato chips (though I have to admit that I don’t really like either of them, so avoiding them isn’t particularly hard). I have even been trying for years, with some small success, to learn to like fish since everyone claims it’s so darn good for you.

In part I do all this because I know that I feel better when I am eating healthy foods, and in part I do it because I’m a runner and supposedly I’ll run better if I’m eating right, but I also think I do it in an attempt to balance out all the many ways that I don’t eat right—chocolate, cookie dough, ice cream, chocolate. I have a pretty bad sweet tooth, and I figure that the more I avoid the unhealthy stuff in my regular meals, the more easily I can excuse dessert, whatever time(s) of day it comes at.

But I’ve been running into problems with my vegetables lately. I really, really try to get in my five-a-day of fruits and veggies, but although an orange or nectarine or kiwifruit for breakfast and an apple or pear or grapes for lunch is easy, my vegetables keep falling short. For one thing, there aren’t really any vegetables that you can eat with breakfast (although I recently discovered green juice which is much better than it looks, and which I figure ought to count for half a serving of vegetables). This means I have to cram all my vegetable intake into lunch and dinner.

In the past this has never been a problem. I always have a serving, maybe even two, with my dinner, thanks to frozen vegetables and bagged salads. And because I am a creature of habit when it comes to meals, I packed a bag of carrots with my lunchtime fruit and sandwich and Dove Dark Chocolate Promise for years. Carrots are easy, and they’re tasty.

At least, they used to be. For some strange reason, I’ve had a really hard time forcing my carrots down lately. Last time I bought carrots, I bought a little one-pound bag instead of the normal 2-pound bag, and this morning I finally through the bag away because after one handful, I hadn’t touched it for weeks. I don’t know if the carrots just haven’t been up to par, or if my tastes have changed, or if I finally just got sick of carrots after eating them day after day after day, but this is proving to be a huge inconvenience. I can’t figure out what else to pack for my lunchtime vegetable serving.

I have tried cucumbers, which are slightly less convenient because you actually have to slice them instead of just grabbing them from the bag, but they’re kind of bland and, I suspect, not as nutrient-packed as other options. I’ve tried broccoli, but I cannot stand raw broccoli unless it’s accompanied by real ranch dressing, and that seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried green peppers, but those are even harder to prepare, and also kind of bland by themselves, and sometimes they taste funny to me when eaten raw. I’m not thrilled about celery, which is cheap but a chore to chew. My most recent solution has been to buy Roma tomatoes and eat one or two of them (depending on how small they are) like a piece of fruit, and that’s worked so far. And the other night I made sweet-sour red cabbage, which has vinegar and brown sugar and apples and caraway seed in it, and is really, really, really good cold. And I figure that anything so brightly colored (and naturally so) must be good for me.

I guess it’s kind of good for me to branch out a little bit. I do get stuck in food ruts. Anyone who knows me at all or who has read this blog knows that my breakfast staple has remained unchanged for some four or five years. Lunch is not much better. I used to eat peanut butter sandwiches every day, then when I got on a graduate stipend and had some small amount of money I added the option of a sandwich from some nearby sandwich venue, and recently I am quite proud of myself for adding another homemade option to my lunchtime diet since discovering flatbread hummus and turkey wraps. And on the weeks that I don’t coordinate my grocery shopping and menu preparation on time to actually cook a real meal (most weeks) my dinner options stand at about four, one of which is also a lunch option. Having to replace my standard carrots with something else may help introduce some much needed diversity into my diet.

Of course, to my credit, I am not unusual. I have heard that despite all the choices available to the modern shopper, the average American eats the same 10-15 foods on a regular basis. And even growing up in a home in which homemade, sit-down dinners were the norm, my memories are limited to a small sample of standard fare (tuna casserole, open-face tacos, cowboy delight, and of course the much-loved Sunday-pot-roast-and-potato-leftover casserole).

But though the limited diet may not be ideal for our physical health, I think it is just as it should be for the sakes of our emotional health. After all, as fun as it is to try new foods, we’re already faced with enough complex decisions on a daily basis. If we can reduce the cognitive complexity of our lives just a little bit by unthinkingly tossing that bag of carrots into our shopping cart every week, and filling that little plastic bag with a handful of the same fruit every morning when we make our lunch without having to consider other options, then perhaps the rest of life is that much more manageable.

You know, maybe the stress of the last couple weeks wasn’t due to school or misunderstandings with my professor or social concerns or hormones. Maybe after all that it was just the carrots.