In Place of a Food Pyramid,

In place of a food pyramid of my eating habits, I present many building blocks.  Many rectangles.  And why is it called a food pyramid?  Why not just a food triangle?  The pyramids were built with thousands of blocks of relatively the same size.  We are not expected to eat thousands of different things of the same quantity, are we?  They are asking us to eat a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a lot more of this, and a lot less of that.

In lieu of a pyramid, I propose a highly complex, inclusive, inducive, all-encompassing, all-knowing shape–the merimekko.

If there’s one good thing that came out of my tech career on wall street in one of the big banks getting a bang for your tax payer buck, it was the glorious charts we learned how to create.  Mesmerizing charts.  Dazzling charts.  Utterly useless and over indulgent charts.

In walks the “merimekko chart.”

The vertical axis represents the daily consumption of the item, the horizontal axis represents the day of consumption AND the amount of time spent during that day consuming said item.  Ingenious diagram.  Showing two elements of time at once.  Dazzling.

There’s just dabs of water.  I should be drinking a lot more water.  Without having that water cooler and or water bottles to lug around I just don’t drink enough.  Something just eeks me about drinking out of the tap. Maybe it was all that time spent living in New Jersey where you could smell the water in your glass as you brought it up to your nose.

Salt.  I eat lots of salt.  At night I eat salted pumpkin seeds.  Shell and all.  You get more salt by eating the shell.

Soy sauce.  I can put soy sauce on anything, except on the above chart.

Hot sauce.  Tabasco’s the best.  But any other will do.  Louisiana style.  Not too much keen on the green ones.  They are just eh.  Can’t go too hot and spicy, like the chipotle ones.  That’s just raw pain.

There should be a pickle in this diagram somewhere.  So throw in a pickle a day, or every other day.

See, for all the analysis there is, if there are leftovers in the fridge, I’m pretty much going to just eat that.  But for the most part this is what I’m dealing with.  Days and days of coffee, scotch, rice, and meat.  I used to be a fruit and green tea guy, but there’s no time anymore.  There’s just no time to eat a piece of fruit.  It’s just too damn messy.

What?  No time to eat fruit?  Impossible.

The apples get in between your teeth, then you gotta floss.  The bananas always leave some residue on your fingers.  Pears are just annoying as hell.  They just drool everywhere.  Peaches.  Drooling.   Watermelon’s pretty good, but you can’t really eat that during the day at the office.  You’d be spittin’ seeds at the whiteboard while the guy is trying to draw the sales curve and it just wouldn’t carry the right tone in the meeting.

Grapes are good, but then again, you have to wash them and put them in a bowl and then wash that.  Raisins are better, but again, residue on the fingers.

Do you get my point?  You might as well just keep drinking coffee all day.  Someone there at the office will make it.  You’ll get your water intake for the day (8 cups of water = 8 cups of coffee).  You get your caffeine for the day.  So you’re productive now.  And then, you get some fiber and stuff, and you know what I mean so I don’t have to elaborate on that one.

So coffee it is.  Just drink that and you’re pretty much covered.  Have some crackers or saltines or something, so you don’t dehydrate.  Get the salt in the system.  And then maybe some peanut butter on hand for some calories.  That should pretty much get you through the day.

Good luck!  Keep a log of it.  Let me know how it goes.