Food Wars

Well, I'm about halfway to the finish line and going strong! I wish I could say it's gotten easier, that I still don't fantasize every day about ripping open a bag of Flamin' Hots even just to smell their cheesy aroma. But that would be an outright lie. I have, however, had less of a temptation to actually leave the house and walk to Meijer to buy a bag. And when I do happen to go grocery shopping for my Mom with her credit card and instructions to buy whatever I want, I can trust myself to pick up a bag of tortilla chips and then walk right by the Frito Lay section. Not that I don't think about buying a bag and never telling anyone, but my commitment to this challenge is too strong.


And this is certainly not the first food-related challenge that I've taken on. But this is the first one that involves NOT eating food. I can chug a mixture of fruit punch, Tabasco, garlic, and chow mien without hesitation or force down a cup of week-old coffee remnants, dish soap and mold, but when dared to simply not eat Cheetos, I laughed at the impossibility of the suggestion. I think I can more effectively empathize with my friend who lost one of our food challenges and had to go two weeks without eating meat of any kind. And he loves meat. I mean LOVES it. It's possible he loves meat more than I love Cheetos....Ha ha ha ha ha...oh that's funny. But seriously, he's driven over two hours on several occasions just to go to some steak place where they apparently sell really good steaks. But the steaks are raw so you still have to drive all the way home and prepare it yourself. It's like the Ikea of steak venues. That's my understanding of it anyway. So those two weeks were pure agony for him. And all I had to do was drink a little condiment cup full of cold nacho cheese mixed with pickle juice. We had spent the whole night arguing about animals rights and vegetarianism (I think it's clear who was on which side of the argument) and then he said, "Jackie, if you drink this entire cup of pickled cheese, I will go until Thanksgiving without eating meat." Unfortunately for him, we didn't know each other all that well yet and he really thought I wouldn't do it. Poor fool. I looked at him and then I picked up that cup and gulped it down like it was liquid Cheetos. Of course, I'm really not good at chugging things quickly so cheese was falling down the sides of my mouth and dropping into globs onto the table. It was not a pretty sight and I honestly think watching me drink that curdled cheese must have been worse than actually drinking it.

That was the first in a long line of food challenges between the two of us. This also happens to be the same friend who caught me with Cheeto dust all over my teeth a few months later. Fortunately for me, he always settled for the worse end of the challenge. He would challenge me to eat something, like chicken strips marinated in grape juice (which was surprisingly tasty) or a bowl of red pepper flakes and after I succeeded I would later give him a follow up challenge that was inevitably worse than the one he'd given me. I may have even taken one challenge a tad too far. But he survived and now we can laugh about it. Well, I can laugh about it. He's still bitter. This particular challenge started out fairly easy. He had to put two Alka Seltzer tablets in his mouth and then chug half a bottle of cherry coke. The intention was for the soda to fizz up so much that he wouldn't be able to drink it and he would ultimately fail the challenge. But with impressive speed, he not only swallowed both tablets but drank the entire bottle of soda. So technically, he had already completed the challenge at this point. But I was so disappointed that he had succeeded so easily that I egged him on to swallow the one remaining Alka Seltzer tablet, which he did. What I didn't tell him was that after three tablets the pressure created by its dissolving increases exponentially (thank you Mythbusters). So for about a minute he stood there bragging about how that was the easiest challenge he'd ever done and how mine would be so much worse. And then he stopped moving and got this pained looked on his face and said something along the lines of, "What...did you do to me?"


As a general rule of our food challenges, you must refrain from puking for ten minutes after completing the challenge or you still lose. So for ten minutes he stood silent and motionless with his eyes closed and one hand against a wall while I shouted, "Hey, do some jumping jacks!" and "Want me to bring you a burrito or something from the dining hall to wash down that Cherry Coke?" But I gotta give him credit, he held out for what was probably the longest ten minutes of his life. He later told me that for three hours he laid in bed wondering if he was going to die from the pain in his stomach. Sometimes I feel a little bit bad about that third tablet. But he did make me suffer for several long hours in return while I ate an entire orange. I mean the whole thing. Including the peel.


So, all that to say, I've eaten a lot of things that would make my sister gag just thinking about them, but this is still the toughest challenge I have yet to tackle. Although the orange is a close second. But my resolve it strong and I'm halfway there!