(Remember a few weeks ago when I said I was going to write for a hundred days in a row? Oops. Beginning again.)

(Remember when I misspelled the TITLE OF THIS POST. It’s fixed.)

I’ve been thinking about eating during my childhood. Outside of summertime, the only fruits were bananas, apples (only two varieties – Macintosh and Granny Smith), those blocks of frozen sugary raspberries, and fruit cocktail in a can. Sometimes a friend would have something exotic like a Golden Delicious in their lunch. There were two kinds of grapes: Green and red. Yes, they had seeds. Spinach was always frozen, mushrooms often came in tins, and bags of baby carrots did not exist. You wanted your kid to have carrots? You had to cut up those giant tough ones that came in the 3lb bag, y’all. Romaine lettuce was exotic as hell, nachos were not an at-home food yet (hell, getting salsa at the grocery store was kind of a big deal), lasagna featured no vegetables beyond the tomato in the sauce.* Oatmeal (quick oats, of course) was never flavoured beyond a dollop of brown sugar on the top. Popcorn was revolutionised IN MY LIFETIME with the invention of the air popper. When my grandfather went hunting and gifted us with venison, my mother would have to hide it in Ragu to get us to eat it. Coffee was coffee-flavoured, unless it was this shit.

My friends’ tiny children eat avocado on a regular basis. I don’t think I saw an avocado in person until I was a teenager.

I put chia seeds and spirulina in a smoothie this morning. My grandma lived until her mid-90s on a diet that seemingly consisted primarily of McNuggets, Ritz crackers, Jell-o with Dream Whip, port, and tea. She wouldn’t have understood three of the words in the first sentence of this paragraph.

My lunch today included raw beets. I don’t think I knew that beets could be eaten not-pickled until the 90s.

There are literally dozens of varieties of almond milk in the grocery store. Dozens of dozens of kinds of yogurt. And the cereal aisle might as well be Hangar 51.

I’m not 100% sure of what my point in writing this is, aside from a bit of reminiscing from a less baffling time and musing about globalisation on a very superficial level. Spoiled for choice and being judged like fuq at every turn about food choices, even before factoring in quack ‘experts’ and shitty news articles trying to convince us that everything we’re eating is wrong. (Not that my mother’s friends weren’t passing around mimeographed copies of the Cabbage Soup Diet in the early 1980s, obviously, but that scale of information-sharing was a speck of dust compared to the Milky Way of the Internet.)

I am increasingly finding having more choice stressful.

That having been said, supper is a vegetarian(!!) chili more spicy, and less tomato-y than Chef Boyardee, something I wouldn’t have had (or necessarily enjoyed) as a young child. I will eat it with (readily-available) nacho chips. Futuristicness I can deal with.

Maybe Cheerios for breakfast tomorrow, though.

*(Sure, I had friends with more health-conscious parents. And my father had a vegetable garden. And my mother did attempt to take us for Japanese food in, like, 1987, but it didn’t go over well. Gross generaliser, thy name is Megan.)