Have you ever seen the show, “Monsters inside me” on TV? If you haven’t I will give you my cliff notes version of the plot. Basically it’s a show that reenacts true stories about people getting parasites inside their bodies either from eating something, swimming somewhere, laying somewhere filthy and so on. It’s quite frightening really.
One episode in particular haunts me to this day. A group of people traveled to Mexico and went out to eat at a local restaurant. They were all infected with a type of parasite that came from rat poop. The real kicker is HOW they got contaminated. SLUGS ate the poop, and crawled their nasty way all over the lettuce in the restaurants garden. The restaurant didn’t see the slug(S) and they were CHOPPED up with the lettuce and fed to the travelers. OH MY LORD.. if you’re a regular to my blog you’ll know slugs are my biggest fear. Keep this story in your short term memory, I’ll come back to it.
The other day I went for a hot, hilly, sweaty run. Upon my arrival home, my stomach had its mind set on one thing: A GIANT bowl of cold greens. (You know where this is going…)
Now let me just say, I had a garden last year. This garden was very successful, and one of the most successful things I planted was my Swiss chard. I didn’t harvested the chard on my own because I was always fearful of what I would find lurking in the leaves. One day I felt brave and decided to go get some chard..all by myself. MISTAKE! SMACK dab on the middle of the leaf I grabbed was a slug the size of a quarter. Needless to say I flipped shit.
I never harvested that chard again.
OK back to the other day. I had just finished mixing my bowl of spinach, chard, kale, and regular lettuce, this bowl was huge. Like bigger than my head huge.
Just as my broccoli was finished steaming I saw it. Right there on one of my kale leaves..was a slug the size of an uncooked grain of rice. Don’t ask me how I saw it, I have unbelievable slugdar (slug radar.) I froze. This bowl was too big to waste, I had to overcome this fear of mine, and eat the damn bowl of greens. I went through EVERY single leaf. Once I confirmed this was safe, I ate the entire bowl. Kale has some serious power.
Topped with mustard and nooch.
From watching that TV show, to finding slugs in my garden, I was bound to find one in the produce I purchased at the store. I never eat greens without the though crossing my mind, and the worst part is that I may have missed tiny slugs in the past because I didn’t see them. OHhhh the horror. I’m just glad I saw this one before my colon had to jump ship.
So what’s the point of this story? Kale (and other greens) aren’t only powerful inside your body to keep you healthy, they also are powerful over your mind and can help you overcome the disgust and fear from seeing your biggest phobia slime its way across your lunch. There was no way I was going to let that bowl go to waste.
20 minutes after my lunch I found this deserted snail shell. I thought it was cool..go figure.
Q: What’s your phobia? If it’s some kind of creature, would you eat food that you saw it crawling on? I think the hot run I went on fried my reasoning skills because I don’t know how I talked myself into eating that bowl…HAHA!
Blissfulbritt 