The Yucky Taste Of Good Health

I was feeling a bit meh yesterday when a friend dropped by. Seeing my drooping soul, she suggested a salad bar which had an amazing vegetable juice. She swore it was better than whiskey. I must have been really quite unwell for I agreed to go with her.

 

There, we had a strange murky juice which in its ingredients listed small chilli, with seeds and placenta skin removed. It felt quite gross to think of a chilli with placenta. The other notables of that concoction were coconut oil, carrot, dandelion leaves, kale, cucumber.

 

I took one sip and almost puked. I convinced myself  "it’s good for me" and gulped the entire glass down in one go. That whole day, I went around with the feeling that I had swallowed a bar of soap. It was the worst drink I had ever had.

 

Why are things that are healthy so terrible tasting? Brown bread feels like I am chewing cardboard and never ever matches up to the soft, moist, rich sweetness of white. Unlike chocolate, you’ll never crave for spinach or fight over the last leaf. And have you ever met a carrot that’s as yum as a chip?

 

A friend of mine had a health scare recently and was put on a diet. Over a week, I saw her get more and more morose. When I went to visit her, I saw the reason for this ennui. She was listlessly stirring a bowl of boiled vegetables, seasoned only with a pinch of salt. The doctor had told her this was "good" for her.

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Being a fellow foodie, I immediately understood. For people like us, good food is linked to the joy of life. We will walk miles to get the better spaghetti, catch trains and planes to eat in a particular restaurant, and we’d rather starve than put badly cooked food into our mouths.

 

Unfortunately, the way this world is wired, good food also stands for unhealthy food. Strawberries taste better with cream, the perfect biryani is made with ghee, and a good steak needs the deliciousness of marbled fat.

 

Why does healthy food have to compromise on yumminess? On any packaging, if I see the words "low fat, sugar-free, fat-free, slim, 7-or-any-number-grain, lite,"  I steer clear. Experience has taught me the product will taste like the ghost of its original. A limp apology for a food.

 

Perhaps one day I will eat healthy, but only when an arugula-kale-radicchio salad with fat-free dressing tastes as good as a Colombian bean-to-bar bitter chocolate with buttered salted caramel.

 

 

'Still Figuring It Out’ a funny, sad, questioning take on adulthood will appear every Saturday on Asianet Newsable. Arathi Menon is the author of Leaving Home With Half a Fridge, a memoir published by Pan Macmillan. She tweets at here. The views expressed here are her own.