Watch What You Eat
Not much healthy comes out of this truck,
but it sure does taste good. Photo by Ezra Wolfe
The human body is the most extraordinary machine. We navigate, refuel, procreate and make stuff all the time without a great deal of conscious thought. Just as we must top off the fuel tanks on our automobiles, so we must also obviously keep our own machines fueled. That means eating, and regularly.
Excessive eating is the archetypal American overindulgence. Tossing back a milkshake, sitting down to a generous platter of fried shrimp or popping a few M&Ms offers a reliable endorphin boost. As sinful indiscretions go, culinary excess also doesn’t carry quite the moral baggage as might grand larceny, elder abuse or murder. However, as a result, some 73.6% of Americans are currently overweight. More than a tenth of us have diabetes.
We eat to relieve stress, set the mood, pass the time and make ourselves happy. We’ve all been there. However, once while I was on a long cross-country trip with my family, a bit of recreational mastication went quite sour.
Tactical Travel
When I was a kid, ours was a family of modest means. However, my awesome parents always made sure we took a nice family vacation each year. That often meant driving like the Mongol hordes to get someplace well distant so we could spend the rest of our time enjoying ourselves. A fringe benefit of this travel mantra was that we didn’t do a great deal of discretionary stopping.
Mom always packed us an ample cooler with drinks and snacks, but tending to the demands of nature typically meant urinating into an empty Coke bottle while on your knees bouncing down the highway at 65 miles per hour. I was forever mortified that some school bus full of cheerleaders on a photography expedition might pull astride us at that precise moment and document the event for posterity. When I became an adult myself, I resolved to dial that back a bit, stopping for restroom breaks and store-bought snacks as the spirit led.
Fresh cold chocolate milk is ambrosia, the food of the gods. The same stuff inappropriately aged
is unimaginably hideous. Public domain.
A Most Horrible Circumstance
My wife and I were on a permanent change of station from one Army post to another, and we had very little money. Under those circumstances, if you agreed to move your household goods yourself, the Army would give you some extra cash to do so. As a result, my wife and son were in the minivan absolutely filled to bursting with the sundry detritus of life. I was similarly entombed within my little Toyota pickup truck.
Every cubic centimeter of that thing was filled with junk. There was just enough space to worm my skinny carcass in behind the steering wheel. We coordinated the details via a pair of silly little walkie-talkies, as cell phones had not yet been invented.
The refuel stop at the roadside Quik-E-Mart was uneventful, and I had helped get my family mounted up in the van before retiring to the pickup. During our brief respite, I had availed myself of a modest carton of chocolate milk and a package of Nabs. Down here in the Deep South, Nabs are peanut butter crackers that come packaged in cellophane. I have no idea what the rest of the world calls them. Peanut butter crackers, I suppose.
Thankfully, I was driving in the trail position, my bride in the lead. Once we accelerated to interstate speeds, I skillfully drove with one knee and prepped my snack for consumption. I chewed up a Nab and then tossed back a generous slug of cold chocolate milk to wash it down. I then suddenly realized, to my horror, that my chocolate milk was indeed well past its sell-by date. In fact, it was actually quite chunky. It was also nearly to my stomach before I appreciated this unsettling fact.
Now, I had a hard decision to make. I tried and failed to swallow the vile concoction. In desperation, I began driving using the Force and took the toxic carton in my right hand, desperately rolling down the manual window with my left. Without much fanfare and in violation of Lord-only-knowns how many littering laws, I unceremoniously ejected the carton onto the highway, followed by everything I had eaten in the previous two-and-a-half years.
If any of you happened to have been driving behind Jed Clampett’s little tan Toyota pickup truck on Interstate 40 east of Oklahoma City back in 1994 and got unexpectedly showered with sour milk, partially digested crackers, and vomit, legit, I’m sorry. It certainly wasn’t intentional. I just should have done a better job of watching what I ate.
