At work we have a man that comes around at 10:30am every morning selling sandwiches and cakes from a little trolley. This is a good thing because that means we don’t even have to leave our desks to get food let alone take a lunch break! Yes it is a little bit scary too but you have to trust that the freaky looking man with the food really knows about food hygiene don’t you?
Since I have been working there I have been buying his wares for the convenience more than anything, by the time he gets to our section I know that all he is going to have left that I will like is either a corned beef and tomato sarnie or sausage and pickle but that’s ok, I am not an adventurous kind of person and to be honest cottage cheese and pineapple or brie and grape just don’t do it for me. What does get my goat though is the amount of spread that is put on to these things. I do not have the most developed taste buds in the world, actually they could be but I wouldn’t know because my nose was broken when I was 16 and the nerves were severed so now my sense of taste is almost non existent. This means that texture of foods is one of my major things these days and spread is slimy and feels like I have been to some weird sweat lodge place and been licking toads all night so to have a sandwich plastered with the stuff is not something I like, as you may understand.
Now butter on the other hand, butter I like, it has a nice texture and it does not impede on my enjoyment of the said sandwich. This in mind I asked sandwich dude why they used spread and not butter, I mean considering the cost of these damn things I think the least they can do is give us quality ingredients right? Apparently it was decided by the owners of the sandwich business that they will use a well known brand of cholesterol friendly spread because butter is bad for you!! But surely that is my choice?? But no, it is not my choice, never has been and never will be all the time he is selling me food because “do you know what butter does to you?!?” He then went into a long ramble about how my heart is not going to like butter and how my arteries will clog up and in a few years I will die on the toilet floor all alone flapping like a fish. Ok he might not of said the fish thing and that might have been my imagination and yes he might of become a little peeved when I did a dying fish impression for the whole of the office but it is my body and I will die how I damn well want to!!!!
I don’t drink because I did that a lot when I was young and now I am all growed up I have better things to do with my money, I don’t smoke because I have seen all of my closest relatives die from cancer from smoking (allegedly! Before all you smokers rant at me!!), so I eat a little butter now and again! Sue me!
At this point I could start a tirade against all the people that have made McDonalds stop doing supersize meals and have made most of the popular fast food places serve salad… you want salad you go to a salad bar, you want a burger you go to a burger joint. How hard is that??? Just because you make them sell salads doesn’t mean someone is going to walk in to McD and look at the board and think “hmmm now I was going to have a Big Mac and fries with a chocolate shake but now because they do salad I think I will have a salad and a mineral water and oooh those radiated fruits look oh so yummy!!!” But I won’t do that because I believe in freedom of choice and if you want a salad in a burger bar then more power to you!
But why is this whole thing so funny to me? I spend 90% of my working life at the moment trying to get the asbestos problem sorted out. I speak to at least 1 person a day that is dying from Mesothelioma (if you don’t know go and look, please!!) It is not a nice way to go and usually the person who is dying from it is trying to get their message across to others and stop it happening to anybody else ever! And here is a guy telling me that a small piece of butter a day will kill me. So yes my fish dance was a bit silly and yes I did make light of something that can be serious but as he arrived I had just finished talking to a 43 year old that is dying. His whole family had died of Mesothelioma and he wanted to know if we knew of any cures. He was calling from France for Gods sake!!
So to sum up, I don’t care what I eat, I don’t care what I drink and I will probably pay for it later but as they say, you only get 1 shot at this life and I am not going to spend the whole of my days worrying about the little extra bit of weight I just put on or the extra few seconds I could have had alive if I had not had that extra bit of bacon for lunch. One day I am going to wake up dead and I can quite honestly say if I went tomorrow then I would not regret a single thing. I have done a hell of a lot of living and will look back with a smile on my face.
Enjoy it people, it won’t happen again. Although for the reincarnationists among us it might!