I tend not to talk about diets, largely because talking about them leads to one of two scenarios. Talking about your own always feels preachy to me, like you’re constantly pitching it to other people, and asking about somebody else’s feels like getting too much into other people’s business. Especially the more diet-of-the-week types, where people can speak out in the interest of the dieter’s health. It’s a dangerous road and therefore one I avoid.
But sometimes, though, the conversations get weird. For example, I let slip that I’m a pescetarian (I eat fish but no other meat) at work and, because of how word-of-mouth works, now it gets brought up frequently, mostly in a joking “Oh look at him. He’s a pescetarian” sort of way. The weird came in the other day, though, when more or less out of nowhere, a coworker got it in their head that I only eat fish. And that train of thought lead to that I was some sort of connoisseur.
“Have you had halibut?” they said.
“I dunno, I guess,” I said. Which would have been fine if the conversation ended there. But that only opened the floodgates.
“What about cod? Salmon? That weird Japanese fish that swims around a lot?” And so on. It felt like a reverse Cheese Shop sketch. Like Monty Python, I wasn’t even sure some of the fish I was being asked about even existed. They stopped rather quickly, but it was the barrage that stayed with me, not the amount of time it took.
I couldn’t help but think about what would have happened without the diet conversation involved. Like, would I have been able to respond with my own questions about eating Serbian pigs that waddle around all day, or French cows that walk backwards and say “Oom”? It just got me thinking is all.
-F
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