DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The company nondemoninational holiday event ended up at a thoroughly demoninational restaurant: TGI Friday’s, home-away-from-home to poultry farmers and cattlemen and probably those ranch hands with tall boots and fat belt buckles who electrocute cows at the front door to the slaughterhouse. The menu even has an Atkins page.

Five of the six “salads” contain chicken, and in the sixth, it’s an option. At Friday’s you can probably get chicken in the ketchup, in the Coke, in the paper towel dispenser by the sink. It’s a chicken assembly line. Or maybe “disassembly.”

Someone ordered appetizers, cognizant that several at the table profess some degree of intolerance for the hormone and antibiotic-soaked mass-meat product typical of the modern American diet. Therefore one of the two platters contained no overt flesh. You might think I’d be pleased. In the effort, yes… in the execution, not so much.

I’d already picked out the celery garnish from the first platter (which aside from the token greenery contained five kinds of chicken). A glance at the second platter revealed a traditional Greek treat, something I ate and enjoyed several times on Santorini: fried zucchini. OK, so, not the healthiest food on the planet, but probably the healthiest food at TGI Friday’s.

I speared one, dunked it in the least-offensive of the available sauces, and then watched in horror as the breaded slab split to reveal not a tender slice of squash, but… you guessed it… cheese!

And then, the dilemma. On my plate lay a broken piece of fried cheese, which I didn’t want to eat. But to leave it on the plate would be to waste food. To return it to the appetizer platter, broken, drooping, and sauce-soggy, was unthinkable. I considered waiting for someone to reach for one of the other cheese slab things, and quietly offering mine, but dismissed the idea as unworkable. (“Hey, you want my food? No, I didn’t ‘do anything to it!’”)

One of the worst things about being a picky eater is explaining the logic behind every decision. It can be amusing sometimes, but other times I just don’t want to explain why I think cows are poisonous, any more than I want to hear some Atkins-diet nutball tell me he lost five pounds eating bacon three times a day.

Back and forth I went, not wanting to waste food, not wanting to eat this particular food, not wanting to make a scene, not wanting to invite questions of “hey, I thought you didn’t eat dairy?!” when in fact I generally do not…

In the end, the cheese won out. I choked it down, pretending it was zucchini after all.