Confessions of a Full-Figured Gal

Give Us This Day Our Daily Fiber

Give Us This Day Our daily Fiber

 I happen to share a home with someone who feels it is necessary to eat a high-fiber diet.

 Now, I have nothing against fiber.  Personally, I love prunes.  When I was a kid, my mom kept a package of prunes in the fridge and told me not to touch them, so of course I ate as many as I could sneak.  I never noticed the smirk on Mom's face.  I like prune juice, too (which is why I love Dr. Pepper), but I don't dare even taste it.  If I were any more regular, it would be an inconvenience. 

 Speaking of prune juice, did you ever notice that the bottle says, “Shake gently”?  What do they put in there that's going to break?

 It's not like we're not getting enough fiber at my house. I'm a big fan of fruits and vegetables, and I serve them at every meal. We eat nuts in the form of Turkey Hill Tin Roof ice cream almost every night.  Potato chips have fiber, too, don't they? My Dear One, however, believes that 100% of our daily fiber should come in the form of a slice of bread.  Nine grain bread, twelve grain bread, forty-seven grain bread, five thousand grain bread, the higher the number in front of the word 'grain', the better.

 Whole wheat bread with the consistency of a Scotchbrite scrubbie pad was bad enough. Some of the bread we eat looks (and tastes) like a cake of bird seed.  I don't like crunching down on unexpected objects in my bread. It reminds me of the bad old days when I lived  in an apartment with many small, unwelcome visitors. And if I wanted sunflower seeds with my tuna salad, I'd put them in there.

 I happen to make the world's best tuna salad, chicken salad, and egg salad.  When I make a sandwich, I want the softest, sweetest, unhealthiest bread available. As a kid, I loved, as all kids do, to bite my Wonder Bread slice into various shapes before eating it.  My table manners may have improved, but my taste sure hasn't.

 So, you say, just buy two loaves of bread and quit the griping, already.  The problem is, there's just the two of us.  We're thrifty, so when we have two loaves of bread, we have to pig out on bread so it doesn't get moldy. It's bad enough eating bread that looks and tastes like a scrubbie pad, without having it be as green as a scrubbie pad, too. Why is it always the three-foot long family size loaves that are on sale?  Those little Pepperidge Farm loaves are too expensive for us.  I know you can freeze bread, but there are only so many uses for frozen bread (it makes for really soggy tuna sandwiches).  Plus it takes up a heck of a lot of space in the freezer, leaving hardly enough room for our assortment of ice cream cartons.

 These days, you can buy a quarter of a cake, one slice of cheesecake, single packages of cookies, and single-serving cans of things like vegetables and chili.  When will they start selling half loaves of bread?  Or how about selling it by the slice?

 With today's smaller families, we can start a new old saying: Half a loaf is way better than two moldy loaves.