Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Skinny Sweets

Today my colleague, or drain on the energy of the office as I prefer to call her, returned to the office after lunch and on offering me sweets momentarily clawed her way back my the rankings of people I can tolerate for more than 15 minutes at a time. Imagine my disgust when the sweets turned out to be a Marks and Sparks product, entitled 'Skinny Sweets' - essentially cola bottles, with no sugar, flavour, texture or hint of being a sweet or generally anything worth eating. I mean its after lunch, we're hitting the part of the day where its closer to going home than it is at any other point in the day and we are expected to celebrate this with a brown piece of gloop. This is not the first such instance of low standards when it comes to food in my office. First up, I learned that the receptionist is ordered to bring in low fat milk. This is milk which is translucent in look and in taste, if I wanted watery milk I would have some ice with my milk. If I am being disciplined to have cereal then I dam will have proper milk as God intended other than of course the pasteurisation. 'Energy drain' even goes to the trouble of warming her watery milk to add to her Special K, such practices putting me off the entire concept of breakfast. Of course the little carton of proper milk I do bring with me is frowned upon and called 'Fat Milk'. So too Diet Coke, Pepsi Max or Coke Zero are ordered as opposed to 'Fat Coke' and a Chinese is a 'Fat Chinese'.One of the other women is currently on a milk shake diet, with a special treat of chicken soup twice a week - she hopes to loose a stone in a week by living on rehydrated powder shakes.

How can this be good for a human being? Who are these people, who think this flash in a pan, no exercise dieting works. I am no one to preach, I am neither fit nor eat particularly well, but I would never con myself or others that this logic could work. Maybe I'm usually surrounded with enlightened people but isn't it supposed to be teenage girls who fall victim to this fad focus,and the fallacy of something being achieved with these pointless grasps at reforming how we eat. How can eating an entire bag of bland sweets be better than eating a third of the nice ones? Not alone are my witness to this gastronomic scam but I worry I am slowly becoming victim to it. I have always been the happy go lucky guy in the office that people feel compelled to bring sweet things to. If this ends what have I got left? What will endear me to coming to work in the morning - their personalities, their bitterness at me being younger and working at the same level as them, their culchie jokes - let me just be clear these are sarcastic suggestions - there is nothing to reel me in. If I am to be surrounded by women and their generalisations about men, their delusions about men and inherent bitchiness they had better bring me good quality sweets.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes we need god dahm better seets

Treasa said...

Personally, I bring, what is it, Lindt chocolate when I bring in chocolate. And I frown upon Hersheys.

The problem as I see it is that people - and a lot of them are women - do not eat to be healthy, they eat to promote a specific appearance. The fact that society tends to value people - and sadly enough, women in particular - based on their conformity or lack of conformity to some body ideal is the main cause of that.

I don't want to go into this in too much detail but I think people who are on fad diets would be a lot better off if they 1) cooked for themselves, from scratch using actual vegetables which they have to peel themselves, and actual meat from a butcher's counter. And exercise helps too, of course.

The whole "fat milk" and "fat" whatever I can't stomach. It's judgmental and ignorant. the point is her diet doesnt suit most people, dammit it probably doesn't suit her.

chocolate....mmmmm