The other day this calendar reminder came up on my phone. “Oatmeal instead of ham?” it read. I’m talking about breakfast. My sister had told me I should maybe stop eating ham so much, especially since it’s the kind that comes in a package. She might be right. I like ham, but I eat so much of it that I’m thinking I should chill out on the ham for awhile. I already eat a ham sandwich for lunch just about every day. Why eat it for breakfast every day as well? “Maybe I should eat more oatmeal for breakfast,” I thought.
Oatmeal is a food I have not eaten in a long time. In fact it’s been so long since I’ve had oatmeal that they’ve probably come up with all kinds of new flavors, kind of like when it’s been so long since you went to Disney World that they’ve got all those new rides the next time you go back. Transformers Land. Fast and Furious World. All the new Harry Potter versions of stuff. I made up those first two, but you know what I mean. Those new flavors.
Unfortunately, oatmeal is not as exciting as Disney World. The most exciting thing about oatmeal back in the day was my grandmother telling me it sticks to your bones. I think the saying is “sticks to your ribs,” but I like bones better anyway. My grandmother was very good at making “sticks to your bones” sound like a good thing. For a long time I believed her. I don’t know when I stopped believing her, but discovering the truth about that whole thing really took the coolness out of oatmeal. After I lost my belief that oatmeal literally sticks to your bones, I lost interest in oatmeal entirely and opted for cool cereals like Cocoa Puffs and Honey Nut Cheerios and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Cocoa Puffs were the coolest. Honey Nut Cheerios were the least cool. Cinnamon Toast Crunch was my favorite. But I can’t eat stuff like that anymore because it is laden with sugar and I will crash before I even get to work.
This year I started eating a daily breakfast religiously. This was out of necessity. On one of the last days of 2020, I fell, hit my head hard on some ice and probably had a concussion. Now I need an early morning breakfast to make my body work. I don’t know what it is about concussions that make me need to eat breakfast, but that’s the deal. I have eaten ham and cheese for breakfast just about every morning since I hit my head. It is less cool than all of the cereals I mentioned earlier, but it is a little bit cooler than oatmeal. On the other hand, I just skimmed an article called “Ham: The Good, The Bad, And The Better Choices.” The pro-ham paragraphs included words like “protein” and “delicious.” The anti-ham paragraphs contained much talk of “sodium,” “heart disease” and “carcinogens.” Like most things, it seems that ham has both pros and cons.
When you take the sticking-to-your-bones thing out of the equation, it’s hard to nail down the pros of oatmeal. A few years back I gave oatmeal an honest try for the first time since childhood but found it intolerable unless I drowned it in brown sugar. The doctors online are saying that is bad. They are saying that in order for the oatmeal to be healthy, I would need to replace the brown sugar with lentils or tofu or sliced avocado. I will pass on all of those. I was hoping that Trader Joe’s would have some intriguing oatmeal flavors, maybe even something Fast and Furious-themed. They did not. They do have some oatmeal recipes on their website for “grain aficionados.” As a packaged ham aficionado, I found this alienating and did not dive any deeper into that subculture.
I did just eat a ham sandwich for lunch, though. Bought the ham from Trader Joe’s. Two packs. The ham itself has no theme, but the Ziploc bags I currently have are adorned with four unique designs from Disney’s Frozen II, which is chill. I’ll probably spend the next couple weeks reading pro-ham articles online and mostly ignoring the other side of the argument. I was being very thoughtful about my health when I created that calendar notification, but when it alerted me the next day I dismissed it almost immediately. Seems like that's how it usually goes with those little reminders in general. If anyone feels compelled to reach out to me about “The Better Choices,” please do not hesitate. Hit me with those new flavors.