Salad Makes Me Grumpy

So it’s full of chlorophyll, folic acid, various vitamins, and fills up space that would otherwise be home to chocolate and (non-weetbix-based) cheesecake, but c’mon! If it were really as delicious as perky wholegrain-fed proponents of health food make out, everyone would be eating it: fussy children, steak-and-potato men, those whose sole exercise involves transporting doughnuts from the box into their mouth, and who only leave the house if four burly firemen cut a hole in the wall and carry them out on a door…

If my diet were a pantomime, salad would be the wicked, green-hued stepmother who does away with my sweet, sweet, refined-sugar mum, and I alone would be able to see through salad’s seemingly wholesome appearance to the bitter, stalky truth beneath.

“No!” I would cry out, as salad crept up on my sleeping fast-food dad, a murderous glint in her cherry tomato eye. “Not the mandoline!”

But I would be too late. Pretty soon my new wicked stepfather (vegetable juice) and my three detestable stepsisters (nine-grain bread, bran cereal and ‘occasional small treat’) would have moved in, and before too long Lonie would no longer be a polony, but some horrible soy sausage sold only in health food shops run by fruitarian hippies.

Grim digressive phantasms aside, I believe the blame for my recent real-life nightmares can be placed squarely on a salad-prompted sugar-withdrawal. This morning I dreamed I was in a bleak post-apocalyptic world with two old acquaintances I’d never liked much. There was something about a terrible deadly contagion and a doctor driven insane by the pressures of stemming its spread, such that he descended into heinously un-Hippocratic behaviour, but the salient point for me was this: The diet must have worked, because I looked great.

Glum as it makes me, bring on the salad. I want the body of my nightmares.