Written by Rachelle Klemme

“I’m finally cultured!” I announced to my friends, the urban sophisticates, in our Minnesota junior college. “I attended my first poetry reading and…I now know what pesto is!” Never mind that my first taste was in the processed sandwich counter of a suburban SuperTarget. The light green goo probably wasn’t the real thing, but it was a nice break from other poor college student food. And while I have repented of my former ways, the sight of ramen still makes me nostalgic for 2005.

I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes Midwestern town where a “vegan diet” means you prefer little chunks of chicken in your soup rather than a whole pack of buffalo wings. If my high school self saw the way I am now, she would have been annoyed at me. And I believe my annoyance at health food snobs was somewhat justified. I remember going to a mountain campground run by Lutherans—not the Lake Woebegone-type Lutherans, but the kind of Lutherans straight out of “Stuff White People Like.” I was searching for a soda machine because I wanted caffeine and, being the heretic I am, I have never liked coffee. The hostess told me, “We don’t have soft drinks here. We have fruit juice.” In her tone of voice and the way she calculated my pants size, she really meant, “You don’t need soda.” So I went up to the vending machines, and the so-called healthy drinks were twice as many calories as plain old Coke, with lots of added sugar and maybe only 10 percent real juice.

I would also get annoyed (and still do) at people who complain that everyone in the United States (with the exception of themselves, of course) is contributing to the obesity problem, and those 500-calorie McDonalds cheeseburgers will be the death of the uneducated masses. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan either, but isn’t it slightly hypocritical when an anti-fast food rant is coming from someone chugging an 800-calorie Double-Cream-Mocha-Choca-Frappe-Latte-Venti from the equally corporate Starbucks?

I have to admit, I’m not a paragon of consistency either. I would go through phases of swearing off all saturated fats just like this one Radiohead song, and then my wanderlust would set in. I had this obsession with maps and road trips and would get this nostalgic craving for sketchy gas station food … and shock my family when they discovered me buying a cardboard-tasting burger at a rest stop. (At least, back in my junior college days, I didn’t participate in this one clandestine rite that took “eating on the road” to a whole new level – it involved going out at night, placing a prepackaged pie in the middle of the road, letting it get run over, and immediately eating the subsequent road kill. I kid you not!)

But finally, after that long period of being lukewarm and sitting on the fence between my self-denial and my worldly desires, I had a conversion experience. It was around finals before last Christmas when I didn’t have the time to make something healthy in my apartment. I washed down too many breaded, fried, mechanically separated, microwave chicken patties with too many Vaults and Diet Cokes, and my tummy convicted me that I had gone astray.

In that dark season of the stomach, I could eat nothing but bread and saltines for a while, then moved on to other bland plant products and accidentally discovered I like tofu. Now I’m an avocado’s worst nightmare, and scrubbing shower mildew makes me crave a portabella. I eventually decided to become…not quite vegetarian, but more of a pescatarian, because salmon fat is happy pills!

Later on, though, I had a disturbing revelation on a trip to Whole Foods. They had a wide selection of LUNAbars women’s nutrition. Lest healthy snacks be deemed sexist, they carried a Man’s Bread as well. And then I found the result of what happens after hours when the LUNAbars and Man Breads crawl off their shelves and meet each other – they had a Bellybar for pregnant women! It was a dilemma because apparently, whole grains are people too. We should start a chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Soy Proteins! Come for chapel credit and free piz…- I mean, hors d’oeuvres…