Sodastream, R.I.P.

I'm done with Sodastream.

The Christmas ads are going to start up again soon. Unless you live right in a major city -- and only 31% of Americans live in a city at all -- do not be tempted to buy the Sodastream for yourself or anyone else. Regret will follow.

I say all this with pain because Santa gave it to me as a present, and I really enjoyed it. I would hate to make Santa think I did not appreciate it. In the four years plus since I first blogged about it, and the six months before that, I really did.

But, no more.

Because you can't use your Sodastream to make soda without the gas cartridge.

When I got the machine, you could get refills on the gas cartridge at Staples, Walmart, and Best Buy, all pretty close to me in one of those big retail complexes that are taking the place of shopping malls. (Sodastream's site at the time said our Target also had the refills, but if that had been the case it was not by the time I got mine. They only sold soda flavors and bottles.) In a year or so Walmart decided not to stock the cartridges for exchange anymore, as I was informed by a cranky woman at the customer service desk. Then last year Best Buy's geniuses decided they too were getting out of the refill game. Both these outfits were happy to sell the supplies, but didn't want to be bothered with the cartridge exchange program.

Staples was the only one left. They're still the only one left. Or so they say. But in the last six weeks I've been there with my empty cartridge three times and they amazingly never have replacements. "They'll be here in a couple of weeks," the store manager said. "That's what I heard two weeks ago," I replied. So yesterday, when I called it quits, I handed my empty cartridge to the Staples manager and said, "Thanks, I'm going home to throw my machine away." And I did.

Canned soda. Ha ha. Never mind.

I think it's clear that Sodastream is not able to make the incentives strong enough to keep retailers in the game. They don't dare. As it is, you don't save a dime on soda by using Sodastream; even assuming the startup costs are amortized to virtually nothing over the life of the machine, the cost of the gas and the cost of the soda flavors easily equal what you'd spend buying soda in the store. The pitch they make is the convenience of not having to lug bottles around. If they raised the price of the gas to make the exchange program more lucrative to retailers, their soda would be way more expensive than store-bought soda. Nothing is cheap as it is -- flavor bottles are $6, refilled cartridges are $15 (25 cents per liter, if you get all the gas out of the cartridge, which you don't), and if you want extra bottles to make the stuff in, those are $20 (regular plastic bottles will explode). DigitalTrends did the math and it doesn't look good. And it's not like Sodastream sells artisanal soda, worth the extra money.

By the way, you can't use store-bought seltzer or club soda to make Sodastream soda. I mean, you can, and I've been trying to use up my last bottle of Diet Lemon-Lime flavor this way, but it has inadequate fizz and it goes flat very quickly.

I wrote to the company in the middle of August to complain about the lack of retailers participating in the exchange program. "We apologize for the inconvenience you have experienced," was the reply. "We understand your frustration of not being able to obtain CO2 exchanges at your local store. Unfortunately, SodaStream does not have the ability to maintain retailer inventory levels as our retailers select and manage their own inventory. We appreciate your letting us know about this incident and we will be sure to contact the store on your behalf to assist with ordering more inventory if possible" (emphasis added). I did, and you see how well it went.

It would appear that other stores farther from me are also getting away from the game; the Bed Bath &  Beyond 16 miles away also no longer does the refills. As near as I can tell, I would have to drive more than fifty miles to get a refill on the cartridge now. That is not going to happen.

If you live in Manhattan, you can have gas cartridges delivered to your door on the exchange program. I guess other cities might offer that as well. If you're anywhere from the outer boroughs on out, don't get the Sodastream. If you're among the 69% of us in the suburbs or the country, forget it.

I can't see how the company is going to continue in the United States with this business model. The company stock has been doing well in the last few years, but I can't be the only person to whom this is happening. If I had Sodastream stock I'd dump it.

I heard that!

So, if you were here yesterday, and thanks for stopping by, you know that I have suffered from mild hearing loss that I have been trying to address. It's not caused by obstruction, so what could it be? Infection, like Lyme? Autoimmune disease? Benign growth? CANCER? 😲💀

Of course, you all want to know how Batman got out of being buried alive in that 1981 comic book I mentioned on Friday, contrasting such a fate with the MRI. It's amazing that I remembered this many years later, and think of it whenever the topic of being buried alive comes up, as it does when getting an MRI. I credit Gerry Conway, who wrote it, and went on to write and produce for TV.

Meanwhile, back at the doctor's office:

It was more than two weeks since the previous appointment and I had been through all the tests and taken all the prednisone. The lab was supposed to send the bloodwork results to the doctor, and the radiology clinic the MRI results. All the same I had a CD with me that contained the MRI scans. Naturally I looked at them on my laptop at home, but of course it was just scannery Greek to me. All I can say is what Dizzy Dean told reporters after he got hit in the head in the 1934 World Series: "They X-rayed my head and found nothing." And that's among everyone's favorite baseball quotes in the non-Yogi division.

But seriously, there's stuff up in my head, but I had no idea what it was. Stuff. So, leave it to the doctor.

First, I had another hearing test, which showed some improvement over the previous one. Yay me! But not much. Boo me! Then it was time to wait and wait and wait for the doctor. And then wait some more. Now, at this point I still didn't know what the results of my tests were and, being of a pessimistic bent, was inclined to assume the worst. So while looking at the above illustration, I was planning how to get rid of my books and clothes and other things that are of no use to my wife so she wouldn't have to get rid of them at the funeral.

Then the doctor joined me. I might have thought that the doctor would have done doctor homework, my test results having arrived at some point in the previous two weeks. Or perhaps he'd kept me waiting now because he was examining them and wanted to break it to me gently. But no, not only hadn't he looked at anything ahead of time, it turned out that the clinic hadn't even gotten the MRI results. Oh, sure, I had a disc, but what good is that? What am I, a crazy person to think that would help? No, they wanted to have the scans e-mailed from the radiologist. Exact same scans, mind you, that I held in my hand. So that kept us waiting. And it proved to be the case that, as far as the doctor was concerned, I had not existed between the time I'd last left his office weeks earlier and the time he finally got to me that day. He looked at the test results as I sat there. I'm sure he was able to read the results accurately in little time -- but hell, if I were him I would have wanted to see what they were before seeing the patient. What if the patient had a giant tumor? I wouldn't want to see that for the first time while the patient was sitting right in front of me. ("Well, Mr. Key, let's just look at this HOLY CRAP THAT THING IS HUGE!")

Okay, enough with the krexing. Was it a tumor?

Sorry, what'd you say? "Was it a tuba?"

No, it was not a tuba. Or a tumor. The fact is, they still couldn't figure out what was causing my hearing problem.

Oh, and he did not want to try to give me another round of prednisone pills. Why do that, when you can inject it right into the eardrum?

Yup.

Okay, so, I know peer pressure can be tough, but if your cool friends ever say one night, "Hey, let's all go downtown have someone stick a needle in our eardrums!" please take it from your old Uncle Fred and just say no. This is one of those things that can happen to your ear that you would not wish to have happen to it. The very act of putting a so-called topical anesthetic on the eardrum was more painful than anything the dentist has ever done to me. It did help keep the needle from being as horrible as it would have been, I suppose, but that was a fully bizarre feeling, of fluid being injected into the ear and seemingly along the inside of the jaw. Then I had to sit back with the head tilted just so for fifteen minutes and reflect on the many sins that had led me to this place and time.

The well-known God-hating novelist Kingsley Amis was a big fan of James Bond; it is not generally known that he was the first writer commissioned to write a Bond novel after the death of Ian Fleming. Colonel Sun was published in 1968, and I read it decades ago. In the book Bond is captured by the titular villain, and apparently Colonel Sun's theory on the importance of torturing through the human head was good enough to be used in the film Spectre (which I haven't seen). It made quite an impression on me.

I wish I could find my copy of Colonel Sun to quote it, but I think it was stored someplace for safekeeping and vanished in the wind. The scene came to mind during this doctor's visit.

Anyway: It was not a lot of fun. Afterward, my ear was so clogged, it felt like I had a Thanksgiving turkey stuffed in it. I was allowed to drive home on the highway under the influence of this stuff. My ear hurt for a few days and didn't stop feeling clogged for almost a week.

Did it help? Oh, I don't know or even care now. I have to go back again in a little over a week and find out. I think it did, a little. But I've dropped over a grand out of my own pocket on all this so far for something that wasn't that bad before and isn't much better now. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Frankly, if the doctor says the hearing won't get worse but might get better with another shot, I'm going to say, No thanks, Doc! I think I'll just keep it as it is. I don't have a big ol' tumor and I don't need hearing aids. I can still listen to music and my wife doesn't think I have selective anti-wife hearing problems. So I'm counting it as a win and getting the heck out.

I'll let you know if there are any further complications. And remember: No tattooing of the eardrums. It's not cool.

What?

So they gave me an MRI.

Because they only wanted to zap my head, I only had to go in up to my elbows.

It wasn't bad, really. They played the Classic Rawk station from SiriusXM -- first song up, "Starship Trooper" by Yes, which kind of fit the sci-fi MRI feel. And I had a little mirror attached to my face that reflected toward my feet, so I could see the guy at the control panel. It gave me the illusion of looking straight ahead and to the outside, so it wasn't so much like being buried alive as it was like being in a rocket tube.

But I did think about a comic book I read in my misspent youth, an issue of World's Finest where Batman is buried alive. I knew if he was stuffed in an MRI machine he'd find a way out of that too.

The MRI was not the first stop in my journey, of course. You don't just show up at the radiologist and say, "I'm feeling a bit peakish, old boy; think you could slap me in your magnetic whatsis and give it a spin?" No, first you go to the GP, who sends you to the specialist, who sends you to get your head examined.

What? Why did this happen? Speak up, sonny!

One day I was sitting on the porch and I noticed that everything sounded a little weird -- tinny, actually. Human voices were sounding like robots. So either everyone on earth had been kidnapped and replaced by robot duplicates, or something was off with my hearing. I decided that I'd give y'all the benefit of the doubt and go to the doctor. I've had ear infections as an adult, and that nasty wax buildup isn't just for old-fashioned floors, and I had read that the tinny sound can be caused by such things. If something is blocking one ear, the sound is moving slower through the obstruction than it does through the clear ear, causing the sound effect.

Or, option B.

My wife, who thinks I don't listen well as it is, nudged me to get to the doctor, so I did. And he found nothing. He gave it the old college try, zapping my ear with water, but told me he didn't think it would help. Off to the ENT!

First at the ENT: Into the booth for a test.

The booth controls.

As I have never been on any kind of game show, I have not been in a soundproof booth since the standard hearing tests of childhood. But the hearing tests have not changed much. Press the button when you hear a beep. Repeat these words as I say them. Etc. Must be boring for the tester to have to run down the same litany all day, but I found everyone at the clinic cheerful and friendly. And the results showed that I had lost a bit of hearing range in one ear, not caused by obstruction. I asked the doctor running the test, what else could it be if not caused by obstruction? She told me that was an interesting question.

Every step of the way people asked me what I did for a living. Hearing loss at my age is often caused by exposure to loud noises, like sirens or heavy machinery or jet engines. I told them I was an editor and worked from home, and the the only loud noise I generally heard all day was baby dog Nipper threatening to tear the UPS man a new one. No one asked me if I had ever gone to see KISS (yes, once) or been to L'Amour in Brooklyn (yes, once). I would have thought those would be the first questions they'd ask. ("Have you ever seen a concert by KISS?" "Yes, many years ago." "Well, there's your problem.")

The hearing doc thought it could be a number of things, so I went sent home with several prescriptions: a blood test for Lyme disease (the second one I had this year), rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases that can cause hearing loss; an MRI for my head to see if it held anything (hyuk hyuk); and prednisone. Apparently prednisone has been shown to be useful for idiopathic hearing loss, and as I'm the idiopath that had it, they gave me the pills.

I'd never had prednisone before, but people warned me about oral steroids. It was a ten-day series that started with a massive dose and trended down. So the morning after the visit to the ENT I took the massive dose, expecting to collapse and freak out. I felt fine. No problem. Until six hours later in the supermarket, when I had to clutch the cart to keep myself from collapsing on the floor. It's a nice clean supermarket, but still. People talk.

Mostly the drug made me jumpy and light-headed, but as the doses diminished so did the side-effects. Unfortunately, it didn't magically fix my hearing. So I waited for my next appointment with the ear doc, and in the meanwhile got the blood test and the MRI. And tried not to look online. Because if you look online, you find out that it could be something benign and rarely fatal but hard to treat, like acoustic neuroma. Or, you find out it could be a malign tumor that's fixin' to kill you.

Tomorrow: The test results arrive... or do they? And: Yogi! Batman escapes! Return to the soundproof room! Doctors' homework! Things that can happen to your ear! Driving under the influence! Kingsley Amis and James Bond! And more!

Ex-mas.

I was walking the dog again -- I know, right? And I'd just walked him the day before! -- when we passed the various piles of garbage set out for our indefatigable trash men. And yes, I said trash men, because I've never seen a woman on the truck, and I've never met a woman who really wanted that job. I'm sure there are some, but I await their arrival.

Anyway, it looks like lots of you were busy over the Labor Day weekend! Being nosy as I am about other people's trash, I had to give it a casual-not-so-casual once-over as I went by each house. Seems like a lot of folks were cleaning out the garage, or cellar, or even attic. And good for you!

But I was sad that Christmas had come to an end.

I've had the sad duty of turning Christmas decorations over to the garbageman many times. But it always comes at the start of or after the end of the Christmas season. Either something breaks during Advent or Christmas, or I find that something mysteriously got broken in the cellar or attic in the intervening year, or I manage to break it while putting it up. But for me to toss something after Labor Day weekend would indicate that I was cleaning out the cellar or attic on Labor Day weekend. Which would mean work. Puh. Leez.

The Santa above was outside the house of a family that is getting ready to move. They had already filled a dumpster. Santa seems to have been one of the last things to go. Oh, jolly old elf, how sorry the parting must be. I could not tell if he was broken, but from little I know of their circumstances I think they're downsizing -- empty nest and all. There may just have been no room for St. Nick in the new place. It's so sad.

Below, the snowman is utterly shamed, or miserable, or was just dumped here face-down. He, at least, was definitely damaged. This family recently got a second dog, and the ripped up leg of this stuffie snowman may have been a testament to how deep in the possessions one small dog is able to get.

I know I should not get sentimental about objects, but there's hardly any other reason to have such things as these. I do think it's less sad to see them tossed outside of the Christmas season than during it or directly afterward. When it comes during or after they look like an old retainer who's been tossed into the streets. Here they look like what they are -- damaged goods getting a long-deserved rest. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.

Doomsday.

AIEEEEEE!!😱

I kid. It's been many a long year since I feared the first day of school, which is what we have today in the Hudson Valley. As I write this, it was twenty minutes ago I saw the high school bus go by. I think I've seen happier faces on the bus to Rikers.

I alluded to my own school experiences a little last week: the first day of school was usually fraught with both anxiety and excitement. New teacher(s)! New classmates! New subjects! New school supplies! All of these could make me happy or miserable in the months ahead.

To be honest, I was almost always more anxious than anything. I clearly remember my first day of kindergarten -- I had attended preschool, which was mostly a place to stick me while my parents worked, but then we moved and I had a year off. TV all day! Just me and Mom! Yeah, a fella could get used to this soft living. But the fateful day arrived, and I had to go to kindergarten. Not one kid who lived near me went to my public school. I was being thrown to the wolves. All I'd seen of the school to that point were those hulking, monstrous fifth graders sneering from the basketball court when Mom took me in to sign me up.

Many years later, I heard a woman say, "I didn't have a drink the day I started kindergarten, but I could have used one." And I thought, Yep.

Funny -- as it turned out I liked that school and made some friends I kept for decades.

Six years after that fateful first day I started intermediate school, and was so excited I thought I would explode. I was going to different classes all day like a grown-up! That was unbelievably thrilling, to have different classes and different teachers to break up the day. I did have some friends going to this school, so that would be excellent. I was so worked up that I memorized the Welcome! pamphlet, including the map and the location of all my classes. Sixth grade was going to be AWESOME.

Oh, no. No, it was not awesome.

The school was across town, near a very rough neighborhood. Beatings were distributed to the dumb middle-class kids pretty much as soon as we arrived and occasionally thereafter. We thought we could hold our own because of our occasional fistfights in elementary school, but these kids would keep coming at you and upping the stakes until you were bleeding, and they had no compunctions against sneak attacks. Smoking, alcohol, drugs, weaponry, and pubescent pregnancy were not the kinds of things that we had been led to expect by our school experiences prior to this.

Eventually we found the good teachers, and we survived, or most of us did. Some kids managed to get their parents to get them into private schools and out of that nightmare. The rest of us managed to learn something. No one I know died, at least not in the three years at that school.

High school sucked, but for mostly different reasons.

Thoughts of my own first school days are thus always colored with the many weird circumstances of attending public school in New York City. I don't miss it at all. I wouldn't go back for a million dollars.

📏📕📓📐📎📒📖📚🏆🏫

P.S.: I will say I was stunned to discover that kids in other places in America actually had lockers. In my junior high you couldn't even keep your gym shorts at school; the lock on your gym locker would be busted the next day. In my schools they didn't even bother assigning full-size lockers, as I see kids using in any TV show or book set in a junior or senior high. They knew everything would be raided and trashed the second the hallway was empty. My junior high had a row of lockers outside the principal's office and no one could use them, because the Future Inmates of America would bust them open. The administrators took off the locker doors. There was no point.

P.P.S.: Future Inmates of America gag stolen by me from Michael Fry. From his locker.

Pi r square, Oreo are round.

As I promised yesterday, we're reviewing another strange, mutant strain of Oreo cookie today. Last week's Rocky Road Trip came out all right, at least by my reckoning, but what the galloping gourmet is this?

In time for America's favorite pie season -- roughly June to Thanksgiving -- we have Apple Pie Oreos, courtesy of Nabisco and its parent company, Mondelēz. The Apple Pie Oreo has artificially flavored apple pie filling with a graham flavored cookie. The cookie is also presumably artificially flavored; it does not actually taste like health-promoting minister Sylvester Graham, who was too busy spinning in his grave to comment.

Has Oreo finally gone a bridge too far with this one? The defining characteristics of the Oreo are the chocolate cookie and the vanilla-ish cream filling. Other Oreos of various incarnations generally have chocolate or vanilla in there somewhere -- chocolate cookie, chocolate filling, vanilla cookie, or vanilla filling -- but I think this may be the first I've tried that completely eschews both vanilla and chocolate. The question then is, is this really an Oreo?

Think about it: If it was a peanut-butter flavored cookie with peanut butter filling, and round, it could call itself an Oreo but we would know it was really just a round Nutter Butter. If it were an open-faced Oreo with a blob of marshmallow covered in fudge it would not be an Oreo, it would be a Mallomar. And yet this, and the Blueberry Pie Oreo, and the Strawberry Shortcake Oreo, and the possible-grounds-for-investigation-by-child-services-breakfast-police Waffles & Syrup Oreo, all pass for Oreos. Shouldn't Nabisco just have introduced these insane products as new cookies?

I'm sure there are sound marketing reasons for it -- shelf space, brand recognition, whatever. Slap "Oreo" on it and you don't even have to advertise; people will be looking in the Oreo section of the cookie aisle and wham! Red Velvet Oreos! But how far away from the original Oreo can you get and still be an Oreo?

Who knows? It's like one of those how-many-licks on the Tootsie Pop conundrums. The world may never know.

I brought this package to an informal meeting that was attended by a dozen people. I had one cookie before the meeting started. It tasted like apple pie. The graham cookie was less convincing, but definitely had hints of graham cracker, enough to make me think: Who uses a graham cracker crust for apple pie? No one.

At the end of the meeting I went to see if I could snag another and they were gone. This was not the only snack on the table, but it was the only one that had been consumed. These Oreos had been scoffed down with alacrity. The package was in the trash.

If we're going to keep behaving like that, Nabisco has every motivation to keep cranking the wacky Oreo flavors out. Look for New York Cheesecake Oreos, Saltwater Taffy Oreos, Alabama Slammer Oreos, Circus Peanut Oreos, Pizza Oreos, Hot Pockets Oreos (and Oreo Hot Pockets), Pop-Tart Oreos (and Oreo Pop-Tarts -- oops, too late), Green Bean Casserole Oreos, BBQ Oreos, and White Castle Oreos. There's no stopping them now.

Religion of food.

Yesterday I ranted about the evangelization of weight loss as a means for achieving weight loss, and I haven't changed my mind in the last 24 hours. Everyone I know who loses weight goes back to the old set point or worse when they go off the diet, and they all go off the diet. I don't know if it's biology or psychology or some combination, but that's what happens. Good grief, haven't we watched Oprah struggle with this long enough to know? And yet Oprah would seem to have the one attribute I identified that makes it possible for an overweight person to achieve a continuous healthy weight, in that she always promoted weight loss and healthy eating. But then, she didn't have a particular plan of her own to tout in those days, and perhaps that made the difference.

Anyway, she may be largely to blame for the way diet books are written now, and as an editor I have to read a bunch of them. I can't stand modern diet books, especially ones that go into some weird kind of spiritual aspect to food. Let me explain.

My problem is not that the struggle against weight can lead you to religion -- faith can be crucial for for many people to get control of unhealthy behavior. Overeaters Anonymous, for example, like Alcoholics Anonymous, is essentially a higher-power-based program, although very open to interpretation and even agnosticism. I have no problem with any of that. But that's not what's being pushed by modern diet writers. The problem is not that they bring food is brought into the spiritual realm -- hey, we Catholics call that the Eucharist. It's that to them food is the spiritual realm.

I don't want to name names or point to particular books, as I would like to continue to work, so please accept that these are generalizations. You could easily find examples at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookseller. They're the books that like to use terms like soulful and spiritual and zen and clean in books that are essentially about how to force down kale.

But there are some not-so-spiritual aspects to the books I've seen.

They claim to not be into shaming, but they are so very much into shaming. Shamey shamey shamey. They will explain that everything bad that happens to you -- everything -- can be blamed on the fact that you eat like a pig. Bad relationships? Bad diet. Depressed? Bad diet. Lack of control over your life? Bad diet. Bad career? Who'd hire you, fatso? Even genetic diseases won't get you a pass. You know why you got multiple sclerosis, Huntington's, sickle cell anemia? Our foodies are happy to tell you that you may have inherited your genes from Mom or Dad, but your Pop-Tart sucking ways activated the genes. There is nothing that cannot be blamed on your bad diet, and nothing that cannot be saved by this better diet.

And guess what? Not only will your body be healed of all that inflammation -- we're all so full of inflammation it's a wonder we don't burst into flame -- but your very soul shall be nourished. Isn't that great? You thought a religious experience might involve long journeys, church attendance, study of philosophy and theology, meditation and prayer, but it turns out you just needed to eat this organic broccoli rabe taco.

On a more prosaic concern, the words that these writers try to conjure with are fingernails on the blackboard to me. It's not their fault that "nourish" is as ugly a word as "moist," but its sprinkled like Himalayan salt all over the place. Nourish your soul -- bleah. My soul just puked.

Other words they love to throw around include transform (because "lose your cheese butt" is pedestrian), sultry, and sexy. They throw in sex a lot more than you might think a book about food would. But every time I see sexy, I think of Phil Hartman as the editor of Sassy. Everyone should.

And let me just say, the terminology of foodism does its proponents no favors. "Larb" may sound find in Laos, but in English it's the sound you make just before you throw up. Other terms like "evoo" (thanks, Rachel Ray) are just baby talk, and perhaps you know how I feel about that. "Forbidden rice" is cultural chauvinism, making China sound mystic and dreadful ("forbidden" rice is black, is a genetic outlier, and so is expensive; "expensive rice" wouldn't attract the rubes). Vegans love lentils, and "beluga lentils" look like caviar -- so let's name them after meat! "Seitan" is likely a phony foreignism from Hippieville c. 1968, a fake term for fake meat that sounds like that which must get behind me.

And why, if it's so important that we eat local, are we all supposed to get our salt from the Himalayas? This ain't Nepal.

I think I might even be talked into vegetarianism if these people weren't so annoying. But not veganism; you'll get my ice cream from me when you pry it from my very cold, dead fingers.

Now, that may sound like I also have some food issues, and I'll agree that I use it for comfort -- but I don't expect it to solve my problems beyond a moment's enjoyment. Besides, I know I have a problem. The only problem they'd consider is that the books aren't selling and Dr. Oz hasn't returned their calls.

What it comes down to is, these writers are putting way more on food than food can handle, because it suits their purposes. I say, if you need particular foods to nourish (ugh) your soul, your soul is going to be in big trouble when real trouble hits. War, famine, accident, or just illness -- and illness will hit, because you're not getting out of here alive -- any of these could disrupt the ability to eat this soul-nourishing food. At some point you won't get to eat your organic beluga lentil and forbidden rice salad; will your soul just wither within you? Food does not make for a very good religion.

Of course, you could snipe back that food will get you through times of no faith better than faith will get you through times of no food. Could be -- but that just demonstrates that food and faith are poles apart.

That's enough on health food. Come back tomorrow for another Oreo review!