I am trying to eat healthy.
As a relatively educated adult I understand all sorts of things about nutrition and fitness. I totally get that foods like alfalfa and asparagus are good for you and milkshakes and potato chips are bad.
In all fairness, I don't have all that much difficulty avoiding milkshakes and potato chips.
Why?
Because I can't smell milkshakes and potato chips at thirty paces.
Those foods are what I like to call "aroma neutral".
Which means they cannot take the initiative but must wait for me to happen upon them.
Not so with the two major assassins of every diet I have ever tried to stick with.
Two foods that, instead of waiting for me to find them, can come and find me.
Bacon.
And French Fries.
If you have ever tried to embrace vegetarianism, chances are your resolve was broken as soon as you smelled the unmistakable aroma of frying bacon.
Although, honestly, the odds that you will encounter bacon being fried randomly as you wander the streets are slim. So you can avoid bacon, to some degree, simply by not bringing it into your house. (This, however, relies on the cooperation of your family members - generally it is my husband who opens the Pandora's Box that is "Sunday Morning Bacon House".)
But French Fries.
French Fries are the devil.
French Fries are the Sirens of all Fast Food. Sitting over there in their little cooling rack sending out their seductive call.
Ulysses may have been able to plug the ears of his men as he sailed past the singing Sirens of lore, but if there had been French Fries on those rocks, their seductive aroma wafting across the water, I'll lay you good money every man jack of his crew would have jumped overboard before he could say "Big Mac".
It's bad enough when you are walking down the street and pass a fast food joint (I am positive every one of these places has industrial fans blowing the smell of french fries out into the surrounding neighborhood to enslave the weak willed potato-holics) but it's worse when you are ambushed.
There I was the other day, happily minding my own business, and making my way to my office when there they were. Four people sitting in the lobby with their lunches from the golden arches.
Let me say here what we all know. McDonalds french fries are the gold standard. If french fries in general have the seductive powers equal to those of the average good looking woman, then McDonalds french fries are the Marilyn Monroe of the french fry world.
So powerful is their call that I could still feel the lure three hours later as I left for the day.
And drove by a McDonalds.
And went through the drive through, ordering nothing more than a large fry.
The evidence of which I then concealed from my husband by driving with the windows down all the way home and pitching the garbage into a can at the local park when I was finished.
Because we're both trying to eat healthy and get our blood pressure and weight under control. And the smell of those french fries sticking to the interior of the car would be as much of a dead giveaway as lipstick on a collar.
And succumbing to the siren call of the french fries felt an awful lot like adultery.
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