Grown Ass Woman?

The facebook status of a friend of mine recently read:

You are what you eat. That's funny, I don't remember eating a fucking legend.

Hilarious, right? But also, this reminded me of my deeply held opinion that you are what you eat. Not quite as literally as my friend, but just that what you eat says a lot about you. But what it says about you may be just as irrational as the literal "I am spicy lentil soup."

Illustration: I am of the opinion that grown ass women should eat salad. Well, more accurately, I think that society expects grown women to eat salad. Ok, ok, lets refine this even more: society holds that grown women should want to eat salad.

I don't know that on any criteria - external to the eating of salad - that I qualify as much more than a conspicuously old, large child. I spilled lunch all over myself today, for instance. Pure toddler move. However, if I did, on some narrowly defined and strictly age-based definition of "grown," qualify as a "grown woman," on the matter of salad I would undoubtedly fail. I occasionally eat salad, yes. And I want me to want to eat salad. But do I get out of a stressful class and think "I really just need a kick-ass salad right now"? No. "I really need a muffin," maybe, or, more likely, "I really need a drink" sooner come to mind. I need mashed potatoes or peanut butter cookies. I do not psychologically need romaine.

I see girls bring sliced, raw vegetables - the to-go salad, if you will - to class as a snack, and it makes me feel ashamed that not only do I not have sliced veggies of my own with which to flaunt my mature femininity with, but I don't even want to eat sliced veggies. I want sliced veggies only insofar as I want to give the entirely false impression that I enjoy eating barren cucumber slices and carrot sticks. I want the status of vegetables.

Furthermore, when I do try to eat salad the delicate grace expected of, not just grown women, but functional adults, eludes me, and I end up with obscene mouthfuls that my lips can't quite entirely conceal. Or I end up wearing it, as per my lunch today. Trying to ensure the proper ratio of delicious salad elements in a manageable bite is quite outside my wheelhouse, it would seem.

So I add this to the ever growing list of reasons I am not a grown up. Salad.