As you can see, I have two weeks left in this apartment.  I’m packing boxes; next weekend, I’m driving all my stuff (except camping gear and the minimal amount of necessary clothing for work) 1000 miles to my fiance’s apartment, where I’m leaving it, and then flying back here.  What a pain!

Nonetheless, this is going to be my first week where I try to eat foods.  Michael Pollan defined “food” roughly as mostly plant matter, unadulterated by other impulses.

Well, I’m going to try and eat food.  I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me that there are three main obstacles to eating mostly plants.

1. Breakfast
2. Lunch
3. Dinner

Namely, I have very little time; I hate cooking for myself; and how do you eat mostly plants for breakfast, anyway?  There’s frittatas.  There’s fruit.  And then there is a big blank space in the middle of my mind, where I can’t really figure out what else to put in there.  No pancakes, I’m sure (and besides, those are too hard to make and I don’t like them.)  No whole-wheat Trader Joe’s waffles stuck in the toaster (I admit, those are what I usually do.)  No Go-gurt.  No sausage or bacon or scrapple (yuck), except as a condiment.  I guess you can make toast and load it up with lettuce and tomato.  Oh well.  No bright ideas there, but that’s enough variety to last me a week, and I suppose I’m going to have to hope for a brain wave sometime in the middle.  So I now have the makings for several different breakfasts.  Let’s hope this works.

Now, on to lunch.  There’s a meal in the middle of the day where I usually sneak down to the cafeteria at work and grab a cup of soup or a sandwich, and I’m sure that both the soups and the sandwiches heartily flunk the “mostly food” test.  I think this means I’m going to have to start packing salads.  (How this will work when I no longer have a refrigerator is going to be another problem–but one I’ll cope with at that time.)  So, I’ve now gotten spinach and butter lettuce and tomatoes and marinated artichoke hearts (less than five ingredients, all of which I recognized) and avocado and walnuts, all good things for salads.

Finally, dinner.  My biggest problem with dinner is that I’m just freaking lazy.  By the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is cut up a bunch of vegetables and wait for them to cook.  I eat so much absolute crap at dinner; honestly, if I could just make myself successfully eat good dinners, I would never have gained so much weight in the first place.  So this week, I bought a good selection of veggies that I know I like, and I cut them all up today.  Zucchini, leeks, corn off the cob, broccoli, a handful of shallots.  I have spinach to throw in to pastas (more vegetables than pasta, of course) and stir-fries by the handful.

Also, I bought some gorgeous artichokes, which are steaming on the stove as we speak, and can be easily reheated for a simple yet yummy dinner.  Mmmm.  Yummy.  Those will get a butter-olive oil-herbes de provence dipping sauce.

Truthfully, I am going to miss fast food in that I-can’t-believe-I’m-still-cracking-my-knuckles way.  I know it’s bad for me.  I don’t even like the taste all that much.  I don’t like the way it feels.  But, yeah, I’m kind of addicted in the worst possible way.  That’s gonna have to change.