Save the fusilli!

Wait, were you going to eat that? Stop! Don't you know that every single food ever is incredibly problematic - to the environment, to the farmers/gatherers, to the organisms themselves? Why are you so arrogant as to think that piece of fusilli exists to be your nourishment?

So after assessing that I guzzle plenty of olive oil and, at least the week of the scientist dinner-dance, an appropriate amount of wine (other weeks, my devotion to seltzer wins out), I was left struck by the fact that I don't eat enough fish. I... go back and forth on fish, sometimes cooking whole snapper or branzino (or whatever they really are - 'snaggle-toothed poison-fish' or who knows), sometimes finding them kind of prehistoric and creepy, just a bit too close to eating lizard or frog, which I have thus far, to my knowledge, avoided. That, and fish is expensive, even if relative non-squeamishness allows you to buy them whole. Splurging occasionally, like every few months, on some minute portion of lamb chops makes sense, because lamb chops are delicious. With fish, it's more like, a really good lentil salad might have been better and cost 50 cents (if that) to prepare. But one needs solid food to go with the wine-olive-oil vinaigrette, and fish is the key to living forever like the napping Greek islanders.

Except you really shouldn't be eating fish. The same publication that brought us the Mediterranean Diet quiz is now urging us to find alternate sources of protein. Well, the panelists themselves are more nuanced, but the comments are going, leave the fish in the sea where they belong! And protesting human overpopulation, when it's like, perhaps so, but we who were born need to pick up something at the supermarket.

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Meanwhile, I'm trying something of a diet experiment of my own. Not that I'm somehow above vanity and wouldn't want to wake up built like Miranda Kerr, famed Victoria's Secret/high fashion crossover model, and not that I think any voluntary change in food consumption in our society can ever be 100% non-vanity-related, but the goal here is meal-variation, not weight loss. (Kerr-ness would, for me, involve gaining a significant amount of height, and is thus futile.)

Thing is, I started to realize that I was eating a lot of pasta. A lot. As in, if working from home, this might end up being not just dinner most nights, but lunch as well. While I do combine the pasta with vegetables and cheese, it was still starting to get repetitive and kibble-like. I'd read recipes online and think, wow, that sounds great!, and then put up the water because it's easier.

So I'm trying to see if I can last a week without pasta. Not low-carb, low-wheat, low-gluten, anything like that. As much bread, pizza, dessert as I'd have otherwise. Just no pasta. I'm counting from Saturday night's ravioli. So far so good, but I'm not quite convinced I'll make it the whole week. But if I do, perhaps an announcement. If I do this and somehow emerge looking like Miranda Kerr, WWPD readers, you'll be the first to know.