Most likely, if you are old enough, you have had the dire experience of discovering a hornet's nest or bee hive while happily poking around in your garden or painting your porch; under the eaves is a common area for them to homestead. Finding a world of activity that poses a threat, yet is treacherous to remove so you just leave it there, knowing it's there, steering clear and trying not to bother them, is always a shock, and a bad one at that. It's best to just look away, go about your business and try to forget what you've seen.
I had this experience recently, only it wasn't bees or wasps or a nest of carpenter ants that I found, it was people. My accidental foray into the land of smiley faces and !!!!! and Mouthwatering Mondays occurred while I was stupidly wandering the Internet without a map and fell upon a recipe for Frito Salad. I couldn't believe that grown adults eat that way. Delving further, I found that it was actually among the healthiest recipes out there, and truly the tip of an iceberg. America isn't the fattest nation for lack of trying. There are hundreds of food blogs celebrating things like Chunky Chicken Enchilada Dip ("I use canned chicken and nobody can tell!") and Taco Surprise and Creamy Potato Soup. Many of the recipes feature copious amounts of cream cheese, sour cream, mayonnaise, cheddar cheese, bacon, butter, flour, tacos, chips and tortillas. They receive accolades from scads of people in the comments section, who write things like "Yum!" and "this sounds so yummy delicious!!" and "fabulous!!!!" Scariest are things like "My two-year old can't get enough of this! :-)"
I was stunned, literally. Somehow I thought that everyone was, if not already on the healthy eating bus at least buying a ticket and trying to board. After all, the First Lady is all over this, what with the revamping of school lunches and the whole "get moving an hour a day" business. Plus, I live with a rabid health nut who steers clear of all processed foods, and our visiting son has been known to call a bowl of steamed spinach and alfalfa sprouts "breakfast." I grew up never having a sip of soda in a household managed by a skinny mother who was a vegetarian and possible anorexic, alongside my fat sister who got that way by sneaking food on the outside. So to discover a world where people happily eat bad stuff and unabashedly call it good is a shock from which I am still recovering.
Don't get me wrong: I've been known to eat whipped cream straight from the aerosol can, and chocolate chip cookies are not long for this world if I'm alone with them. But I always feel guilty about it, and I assumed everyone else did too. Apparently not. Now that I know how to find it, I keep going back to that hornet's nest under the eaves. I've got to look away. It's fascinating, but hideous.
I was stunned, literally. Somehow I thought that everyone was, if not already on the healthy eating bus at least buying a ticket and trying to board. After all, the First Lady is all over this, what with the revamping of school lunches and the whole "get moving an hour a day" business. Plus, I live with a rabid health nut who steers clear of all processed foods, and our visiting son has been known to call a bowl of steamed spinach and alfalfa sprouts "breakfast." I grew up never having a sip of soda in a household managed by a skinny mother who was a vegetarian and possible anorexic, alongside my fat sister who got that way by sneaking food on the outside. So to discover a world where people happily eat bad stuff and unabashedly call it good is a shock from which I am still recovering.
Don't get me wrong: I've been known to eat whipped cream straight from the aerosol can, and chocolate chip cookies are not long for this world if I'm alone with them. But I always feel guilty about it, and I assumed everyone else did too. Apparently not. Now that I know how to find it, I keep going back to that hornet's nest under the eaves. I've got to look away. It's fascinating, but hideous.
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