I have mentioned on this blog before that I am a compulsive eater. One easy way I have found to manage my weight is never to buy and bring home more than I plan to eat at any one sitting. While this is a more expensive way to eat, it didn’t used to be that unreasonable. You could generally eat for $5, and there were any number of $.99 snack food items in any drugstore or minimart you happened to pass.
Now, I understand that everything is more expensive now. I don’t like it, but I am beginning to accept it. What I don’t understand, however, is why there don’t seem to be single-serve portions of anything anymore anywhere. I regularly find myself with five minutes to spare before work running into every damn drugstore all up and down the snack aisles, and there are just giant bags of chips, huge cans of nuts, jumbo pouches of trail mix. What is this? I don’t want seven servings of a snack. If I take seven servings of a snack into the office, I will be eating seven servings of a snack.
The only single-serve portions available anywhere now, however, are those 100-calorie pack things, which are just totally worthless. One hundred calories on an empty stomach just prods it enough to make it furious – you’re better off not eating. I operate from a continuous base of low-level hunger, and when that hunger kicks from low- into high-level, I want to have just enough food in my purse to knock it back a little. If I have more than that, I’m going to eat until I’m actually really full, and then I’m going to eat whatever small amount is left after that, because there’s not that much left and I may as well finish it. And then I’m also still going to eat dinner three hours later anyway, even though I’m totally full, because I was so looking forward to dinner that I can’t bear the disappointment of just going straight from the office to whatever I’m working on that evening without my dinner break. And there you have it – the Duane Read has just ruined my whole day just because it’s no longer stocking single-serving bags of nuts.
I have this dream that there would be a wonderful grocery store that caters to people like me. This grocery store would have nothing but inexpensive, single-serving portions of all different kinds of food, and for an added bonus, maybe it could even be healthy food. And a wide variety.
Well, actually, there is such a place. It’s called Trader Joe’s, and there’s only one, and if you want to go there, you have to fight your way through a crowd of thousands and wait online for upwards of 45 minutes. Wouldn’t you think, every other retailer in Manhattan, that, given the immense popularity of TJ’s, there might just be a market there that could stand to be capitalized on???
Single-servings of portable, precooked food items for $5-$6.50 a pop!! And single-serve snacks for under $2!!! Available at a great number of convenient locations throughout the five boroughs!!!!
Somebody cater to my specific need, damn it!
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Oh, and also, if you don’t already read Fafblog, this Sarah Palin post is a great time to start:
As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. . . . Sarah Palin may not know if global warming is man-made. She may not know if global warming is real. She may not know what global warming is. But if global warming is caused by abortions, Sarah Palin will fight it – by banning abortion, just in case the first couple times didn’t take.
Go, read all of it, and then read the entire rest of Fafblog, because it never fails to kick ass.
