I never thought that ketchup could go bad. I mean, they don’t put an expiration date on it, and it consists of pretty much just water, salt and tomatoes. So needled to say when I woke up at 2:30 yesterday morning with a case of food poisoning, I was somewhat surprised. At first I thought it was part of a larger condiment conspiracy, trying to exact revenge for my taking so long to accept condiments into my life. In fact, there are still a number of condiments I still avoid that probably harbor a grudge because of it (e.g. mayo, mustard, relish) and would relish the thought of exacting vomitous revenge at 4 in the morning.
If you’ve never had food poisoning – be glad. It’s not just the sick-to-your stomach part, but how your stomach then proceeds to punish you by talking to all its friends and convincing them to also punish you for making the stomach feel bad. Mind you, the stomach knows a lot of important people: pretty much every muscle in your body, your lungs, your inner ear, you name it. And they gang up on you the whole of the next day so that you have to leave work early, go home and sleep for four hours, and then read the new Harry Potter book for another three hours (I know, they are so cruel…). The nice thing though is that the day following you feel perfectly normal, like I do today. But I know that my stomach is still looking at me warningly, and that some back corner of the refrigerator the GF’s mustard is trying to convince the salsa to switch sides. I live in fear.
On a side note, I heard a really good comment on NPR this morning on the ridiculous issue of pharmacists refusing to dispense birth-control or emergency contraception. One guy wrote in and pretty much captured how I feel about it in a very simple, yet elegant way. He wrote (to paraphrase, as I don’t remember the whole quote word-for-word) “I’m a vegetarian who happens to work in a sandwich shop. If I were to refuse to dispense beef, chicken, or any other ingredient on the menu with a sandwich ordered by a particular customer on the moral grounds that it violates my personal beliefs, my employment would be terminated. Why is this not also true for pharmacists?”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
If you’ve never had food poisoning – be glad. It’s not just the sick-to-your stomach part, but how your stomach then proceeds to punish you by talking to all its friends and convincing them to also punish you for making the stomach feel bad. Mind you, the stomach knows a lot of important people: pretty much every muscle in your body, your lungs, your inner ear, you name it. And they gang up on you the whole of the next day so that you have to leave work early, go home and sleep for four hours, and then read the new Harry Potter book for another three hours (I know, they are so cruel…). The nice thing though is that the day following you feel perfectly normal, like I do today. But I know that my stomach is still looking at me warningly, and that some back corner of the refrigerator the GF’s mustard is trying to convince the salsa to switch sides. I live in fear.
On a side note, I heard a really good comment on NPR this morning on the ridiculous issue of pharmacists refusing to dispense birth-control or emergency contraception. One guy wrote in and pretty much captured how I feel about it in a very simple, yet elegant way. He wrote (to paraphrase, as I don’t remember the whole quote word-for-word) “I’m a vegetarian who happens to work in a sandwich shop. If I were to refuse to dispense beef, chicken, or any other ingredient on the menu with a sandwich ordered by a particular customer on the moral grounds that it violates my personal beliefs, my employment would be terminated. Why is this not also true for pharmacists?”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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