Singularity

Adventures in lunch

Nov.25, 2009, filed under Miscellany

I have a bizarre and near obsessive relationship with food. I don’t mean necessarily in a way that could be described as a disorder: living with an invisible illness for as long as I have has meant developing a more intimate relationship with my bodily functions than the majority of people might consider to be normal. As much as I try to plan my meals, because the various dietary requirements and restrictions need careful planning, frequently all plans go out of the window as my biochemistry jumps up and down demanding something completely different for no apparent reason. More than once I have been asked if I’m pregnant.

It became clear to me about mid morning, shivering still from the ride in, which was particularly cold and wet, that my body wanted something hot for lunch. Not any old hot thing, either. It wanted — no, demanded — noodles.

“Pot noodle? You are not having pot noodle,” I informed it, quite severely.

Body observed that there are instant style noodle things that do not contain MSG, half a Swiss mountain of salt and the equivalent of a pig in lard.

“Fine. We shall seek out this fabled healthy noodle option.”

I needed to go to JJB for replacement weight-lifting gloves anyway (WHY are all the girlie ones in “champage” or hot pink?), and so I drove to the retail park down at Hermiston. Having found some men’s gloves in a size small enough to fit (black, thankyouverymuch) I dashed through the rain to Tesco’s next door. Therein I searched the shelves for noodley snacks that I could take back and either heat in the microwave or reconstitute with boiling water, thenceforth to nom upon with my chopsticks.

Pot noodle. Golden Wonder noodle. All manner of ramen-style noodley arrangements, every one of which, when presented to Body, Body sniffed at (literally, apparently able to smell the contents through the wrapping — man, do I get strange looks in supermarkets) and said “Ew!” before demanding, yet again, noodles.

I sighed and went to look at chicken noodle soup. It does, after all, contain noodles.

“But no!” sang the invisible chorus. “You may not have chicken noodle soup for that commits the great sin of mixing PROTEIN with CARBOHYDRATE and you shall become SICK and even, perhaps, VOMIT.”

“Noodles!!!” cried Body.

“OK,” said I, by now somewhat narked and fed up with wandering up and down the aisles of the supermarket. “How about some sort of vegetarian pasta soup? I mean, that’s nearly noodles. Then we don’t have to worry about mixing protein and carbs.”

“Noodles!”

“Well, maybe. But check the ingredients lest there be sin involved.”

And lo. It turned out that all the pasta type soups contained tomatoes, which are banned under the Nightshade Convention of 2009. By now I was ready to give up and go back to the office and starve myself over the course of the afternoon, as all I had at work was miso soup. That’s a meagre 29.5kcal per serving, which is about as much energy as you’d find in a single nosepicking of snot, albeit much tastier.

I plumped, instead, for some butternut squash and sweet potato soup, which contained a little dairy. Dairy is currently bordering on being sinful however I growled at the invisible chorus and told them to shut the fuck up because I was hungry. To placate Body I bought a packet of rice noodles, which we couldn’t eat at the time but they were there to admire and they are wheat-free and gluten free and organic and therefore devoid of objectionable content in any shape or form. Body had its noodles and so stopped behaving like a 3 year old wanting a pet rabbit, even if all it could do was hug them.

There are times when being a slave to one’s mutant biochemistry is a pain
in the arse.

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