The Summer Issue

Something's on my tongue. Stuck. I'm scraping it on my teeth, not unlike the way you scrape your shoe against the curb to get something off the sole. It's some kind of flimsy, sheath-like substance, suction-cupped to my middle tongue. I believe it may be a soy-nut skin. Feels like fly wings. Tastes like nothing, with a touch of sea salt, which I feel good about because table salt would be less natural, ergo less right, less good, than sea salt. Table salt is produced by humans or machines or corporate chemists, is served up in containers with an illustration of a girl carrying an umbrella and pouring salt on the ground—think that doesn't represent the wastefulness of an era?—and is wrong. Table salt, like sugar and bread and barbecued pig flesh, is wrong.

I tell myself this, too: Beyond hypertension and bloating, way beyond that, table salt is not of the sea. It is not at one with earth and body. It is yet another food substance that evolved incorrectly, and by incorrectly I mean vaguely immorally; evolved in a manner that indicates stupidity and ethical inferiority, so that those who shake plain salt out of a shaker should, if they're not suburban, and by suburban I mean plebeian and foolish, absorb a sophisticated dose of shame with their sodium. They should be informed that we're wrapping up an era of egregious food abuses, that we're lucky to be alive, that a good number of us actually didn't make it out alive, and that the time has come to eat healthy—for life, for quality of life, for a way to measure our worth as inhabitants of earth and body, measure our goodness. Even McDonald's is changing its ways. You should, too. Look at that flabby ass.

Or look at mine. It's summer and I'm anticipating wearing one of those one-piece swimsuits with the ruffled skirts to hide my mushy backside. I'm thin—I don't sweat extra pounds but lament their distribution. I'm aging at mach speed and my thighs say life-long lover of french fries. So for the 600th time this season, I decide once and for all to eat healthier. Thankfully, all good decisions involve shopping, so I head for a store called Health Express (sounds quick, painless).

On the way, I stop for a Dairy Queen blue raspberry Mr. Misty—it's hot out, stop judging me—and then fight some woman for the closest parking spot in the strip mall because the others are about 15 long walking yards away. Health Express' glass storefront is adorned with a huge scarlet A, presumably for Atkins, but I am immediately reminded of Hester Prynne's struggle with puritanism. I walk in, DQ cup in hand and food-color-blue lips announcing my sins. I'm a food slut.

Inside, in front of racks of pill bottles, there's a woman in a lawn chair reading from a burlap-jacketed book, listening to an Enya/rainstick/folk mix and burning incense. The pill bottles comfort me, because mmmm, pills. But shortly I find that actual food items are in small offering here. I do find calorie-free ketchup made with triple-filtered water and red cabbage food coloring, and something called Not Starch Thickener made from vegetable gums (who knew they even had mouths?), but there's hardly a ham sandwich in sight. Almost everything is in a capsule or an opaque jar, or in an opaque jar full of capsules, and some bad part of me starts jonesing for manic pill-popping and a night on the town that ends with 4 a.m. waffles and butter. All roads lead to butter.

The best way to improve one's diet and swimsuit-readiness, after shopping, is reading. I spend four nights slumped on the sofa learning about the nightmares of food processing in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

I become a vegetarian for life. Combined with Atkins-inspired carb-starch avoidance, this whittles down my consumption choices to soy nuts and/or soy nuts.

Fortunately, it appears that won't be a problem, because soy is a wonder food, if by wonder food you mean a malleable, bland rabbit dropping. No matter. It wears many coats. I dive into the world of soy right away: soy chips, soy-dusted soy nuts, frozen soy cream, fried gelatinous soy chunks, soy nuts baked with sea salt, soy milk, soy eye cream, soy lip balm. I eat it; I rub it on my face; I am overcome with the joy of soy. When I discover soy French fries, I'm content that I've wrapped up this whole quandary about healthy living.

In six days, I'm starving to death. Woman cannot live by soy alone. My taste buds grow old and die. The mere thought of soy anything makes me gag. So I go to Wild Oats Natural Foods to forage. It takes three times as long to drive there and the food seems way more expensive than at other stores, but I believe it's worth it. Somehow, I'm loosely absorbing the notion that eating this way isn't just about my summer vanity. And it's not even limited to saving animals and food workers and fat kids. It's about something even bigger. Maybe it's my brain's unfortunate reaction to a brief foray into dietary asceticism, but now it seems like this has become the right thing to do.

Therefore, I feel somewhat superior to my former self as I shop at Wild Oats, because these foods aren't made on the backs of boxed calves or armless factory workers. They are, as the store's name states, made of oatlike substances. And while buying somber packages of grain, I also pick up cues from check-out-stand magazines about what else is right: earth tones and colonics; astrology and chiropractic. Slowly, my afternoon snacks begin prescribing a plateful of agendas. Yesterday, it was simply soy instead of milk or meat or fun; tomorrow, I may be boycotting plastic baggies or picketing at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. My life might take on meaning.

More likely, though, than getting off of my ass, I will spend ever more time looking at it, or trying to pull my head out of it. I will quote the Atkins bible and heap praise on the movie Super Size Me, all the while drinking water bottled by Coke and popping unregulated vitamin caplets that might well contain cigar ashes. I've thwarted the corporate food industry. And I'll look passable in a bikini.

There was a time when I thought I knew everything I needed to know about food: Doughnuts are what you eat when you're lucky, and bites of baked fish can be slyly squished into your napkin and thrown away. The U.S. government messed all of that up by introducing me, in public school, to serving recommendations for the four food groups and the food pyramid. (Small servings of sugar, oils and meat at the top, increasing amounts of fruits and veggies in the middle, anchored in a bed of carbohydrates at the foundation.)

Looking back, it should have been obvious even to me—a second-grader made to apply the pyramid's dictates to peanut butter sandwiches and Twinkies—that it was a specious declaration. A) the government made it; and B) it involved geometry.

But logical flaws rarely stop an idea from becoming king. Whether it's a food pyramid or margarine instead of butter or fried eggs are bad or fried eggs are good, the dogma of diet tends to reign tyrannically, and science and reason and moderation adjust accordingly. Recall that the government's food rules suggested eating four servings of bread a day.

The South Beach Diet calls for avoiding all fruits and fruit juices for two weeks; but veal cutlets are OK. Atkins calls for eating anything with legs and suggests using a laxative for the first few weeks to help the body adjust. The High Protein Vegetarian Quick Weight Loss Diet™ eliminates sugar, white rice, white bread and crackers. And meat. And food.

On the way home from a Wild Oats hunt, I notice my neighbors and their great big butts at our suburban community pool. Swimsuits are less of a problem, I see, when they disappear between the folds of one's flesh. I hop out of the car across the street and begin unloading a payday's worth of one sack of bark chips and, yes, soy nuts—I was desperate, stop judging me—when I smell it.

The sweet fragrance of barbecued something animal, fatty and filling, is painting my neighborhood; something that no doubt will be served with two giant smushy white buns. The thought of my own smushy white buns cannot stop me from heading toward the smell of barbecue, toward the scene, the jiggling fat and laughter and splashing and sun, the summer, the fun.

I don't have my pool key. I watch through the gate. Across the pool, large, happy people are eating. Smoke is coming out of the grill; there's a bag of potato chips bigger than my shopping bag. They're just plunging their paws into it whenever they please. I smack my lips a little, and I think I can taste those chips; thin, crispy, greasy, over-salty potato slices.

That's when I notice the thing on my tongue.

I try to tell myself the shtick about au naturel sea salt; but I think about soy the wonder food having deposited its insect-like shell on my dead taste buds and leaving me with nothing but a slumping rump that hasn't shown signs of rising. I consider the international labor and political implications of the food-processing industry, I hear Enya in my head. I wonder how many cows and how many potatoes have been led to slaughter. I think about the scourge of obesity. Should I grow my own oats? Start a compost pile? Or throw myself over this gate and stick my head in that barbecue, bobbing for pork ribs?

Something about moderation pops into my head, then slips right out, disquieted. The soy wing comes off of my tongue—now it's stuck to my front tooth. The neighbors are ear-to-ass in barbecue sauce, the sun is setting, and my appetite for chips and pig is passing. Instead, I feel a small yearning for a Dairy Queen blue raspberry Mr. Misty. Blue—that's got to be healthy, if by healthy you mean a perfectly concocted blend of corn syrup and food dyes. I indulge.