For some time, I’ve been a person who is always buying giant armloads of organic/local veggies, sticking to less processed foods, ferreting out fun new things to cook with, having frequent dinner parties, etc. My shopping cart at Rainbow Grocery generally looks like a mobile hill of vibrant greens, reds, yellows and browns when I’m done. I LOVE FRESH FOOD! It’s the centerpiece of my life.

While raw foodism is seen by some as almost ascetic by many, and obviously no fun at all, I normally eat raw food constantly (along with plenty of cooked stuff). My work lunches often used to consist of a box of vegetables, raw as the day they were picked, some miso, and maybe some hummus and some other kind of protein. My contented munching on undressed spinach used to elicit smug titters from my co-workers.

There are also a few competent taquerias and a halfway-decent noodle house about a 10-minute walk away from work, so there was always something decent to eat.

Lately, the pace of my life and work has picked up. The giant shopping trips, the weekend research kibbutzes with co-obsessives, the nice breakfasts and packed lunches on weekdays, and even the safety valve of decent restaurants a short jaunt away have been compromised. Thus springs the trap of immediately available food around the corporate workplace, which generally means: CRAP. Subway sandwiches and Round Table Pizza salads just seem like pale, cruel jokes.

Worse than all of that chain-store garbage, though, is the robot-like entity that recently descended, to much fanfare, in my company’s cafeteria.

Cold Food, indeed. Embalmed sandwiches, interred pizzas, lonely-looking yogurt, bags of tuna salad, toxic muffins. Each week, we’re told “The Machine’s been restocked! This week we’ve got…” as though the makeup of the Costco by-the-pallet astronaut food would change in some compelling way over time.

For god and Grant Achatz’s sake! We’ve invited a robot into our midst that will happily serve us dorm food, forever. Its name is “COLD FOOD”, and it’s here to save us from the drudgery of that one-minute walk. I can hear its wheels and gears clicking together in calm, collected malice, dreaming of fattening us all up for the eventual harvest by its alien creators. “Yes, my pretties. Enjoy your lunch of corn syrup fried in trans fats. The Overlings will be pleased with your girth in short order.”

I’ll never be able to bring myself to support the death-bot, but I’m still being lazy. Every time I find myself biting into another cardboard Subway sandwich when I could have walked a little further and had a really nice torta at Lisa’s, or a bowl of spicy chow fun at TK Noodle, a tiny black cloud forms in my heart, and gray raindrops stream out of it, a cartoon frown forming on its translucent face. A frown that says, “Look how the mighty have fallen.”

Consider this my official resolution, my online point of accountability (hold me to it!) that I will no longer eat crap. That I will take the wheel of my own epicurian 18-wheeler and steer it away from the oncoming ravine. Today I’m taking a couple of co-workers to Lisa’s, so we can all marvel at the rare sidewalk flower that is a great mexican joint in the wilds of Daly City. Next week, the boxes of living, breathing vegetables will be my lunchtime companions again. It’s GO TIME.

Now it’s time to create a map of good local restaurants and stick it on the robot, perhaps with a subtle warning, like this:

Filed under: Random, Philosophy

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