Am I the only one who feels like every trip to Costco is somewhere between scoring a ticket to Oprah's annual Christmas show and wandering through a foreign country?
The optimist in me thinks of Costco as a corporate version of Zingermans, a seeker of delights and treasures that might otherwise get overlooked. Every free sample I put in my mouth is always so delicious! Oh, Costco, how could I have judged you so harshly? Your tomato bisque is so yummy! Your dulce con leche cheese cake is so ... waxy? What the hell...
That's the Costco Sample Paradox in a nutshell. The first bite is great, the second bite is fantastic, and then, a few seconds after you've finished it off... you feel like you ate a crayon.
Technically, if you help yourself to a sample of the Cheesecake Factory's Gourmet Sampler, you pretty much have eaten a crayon. It says right on the box that the "Snow Cap Topping" (the creamy stuff posing as whipped cream) is made from palm oil, one of those awesome solid-at-room temperature fats that leaves a slick coating on the inside of your mouth after you eat it.
My inner pessimist surfaces after my third or fourth unpleasant free sample -- I can't quite grasp that I belong to a people who buy gallon tubs of tomato bisque -- bisque that contains 40% of your daily sodium requirement in every 8 oz serving. That's when I start to stare at the shelves as if I am strolling through a Tesco in Tehran.
It doesn't help matters that I have fallen off the carbohydrate wagon with a vengeance. It started with the suspicion that that my migraine meds were making me gain weight. (Chiefly because I had to stop taking it for a week, and in that week, lost three pounds. Hmmm.) Eff that, I thought. I'll just keep a running tally, and when I have definitive proof, I'll go to my doctor and tell her that I need to try something else.
Except that I didn't want to falsely accuse my meds if the real problem was the half pound of lasagna I ate the day before. So I stopped eating lasagna. And bread. And rice. In fact, pretty much all grain-based foods have vanished from my diet lately.
And now I've lost another four pounds. Kinda literally. Like, I don't know where they went. I'm not hungry and I'm not hitting the gym for hours every day. I did eat four ounces of duck liver pate with a fork the other day (b/c, you know, no bread), but other than that, there's really nothing bizarre about my diet. (For example, my macaroon habit alive and well, no fucking thanks to those crack dealers at Vanilla Bakery. You people are dead to me! You hear? DEAD! Which reminds me, I need to pick up a couple for Thursday's dessert.)
Seriously, the macaroon is the French Oreo, only made from butter and ... more butter. You know why French women don't get fat? Because their national pastry is so rich, nobody can eat more than two.
Clearly bread, pasta and rice are all secretly made out of ice cream. I mean, what other explanation is there? In fact, NYT science writer Gary Taubes thinks that humans were never meant to eat significant quantities of bready carbs and that the current low fat mania is scientific bunk. (Which, ironically, means that ice cream might be better for you than bread. I think I just broke my brain.)
Granted, I am not going eat a couple slices of ice cream every night, but at this point, I'm having trouble looking at bread, et al as if they were legitimate food items. (It helps that, having migraines, I am used to writing off foods as inedible because eating them gives me a whanging headache.)
Then you walk past shopping carts stacked with *multiple* trays of muffins. Not just muffins, but muffins with some kind of sugary buttery crumble topping. And it starts to feel like you're in Amsterdam, standing in line at one of those coffee houses that have a separate menu boards for coffee, tea and pot.
Yes, this crazy decadent nation of ours! When will we learn to make better food choices? And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy a whipped cream gun.
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