I refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving day ‘lite’

OK, I’m going to have to rant for a minute here. I hate ranting this close to the holidays but feel I really have no choice in the matter.

Day after tomorrow (as I write this) is Thanksgiving; I’ll be celebrating the holiday with the kids, grandkids and sundry.

In preparation for the event, last night Lori ushered me out of the house with a “last minute things we previously forgot” shopping list; white potatoes, stuffing, flour … your basic American holiday starch fest. Unhealthy, caloric and (with Lori wearing the kitchen apron this year) sublimely delicious.

But Thanksgiving comes but once a year, so caution to the wind, right?

Wrong.

It turns out the uninvited nannies who ceaselessly monitor our collective well-being are trying to insinuate themselves between me and that extra dollop of Cool Whip on my pumpkin pie. 

While shopping at the grocery, I encountered the word “lite” a grand total of 1,237 times. It was on everything! Lite stuffing! Lite (and sodium reduced) soup stock! Even Lite Cool Whip!  Cool Whip, man!

Technically, I’m not sure Cool Whip even qualifies as food. I always thought it was created from long chain polymers at a factory in New Jersey or maybe as the by-product of the Spandex manufacturing process. I’ve never cared, because it tastes good.

I never asked it to be lite. If I want lite, I’ll eat celery. When it comes to Thanksgiving, I want yummy, not lite.

But I had to dig through an entire pile of lite Cool Whip to get to the real stuff. Why? Why why why why why?

Can’t I just, for one lousy day a year, enjoy gastronomical excess without being reminded I’m stuffing my body with the dietary equivalent of cyanide? All year long I eat healthy. I have salads for lunch and add “superfoods” like cranberries, walnuts, avocados and salmon to most every meal. I try to avoid the deep fryer. I drink lots of water. 

I eat oatmeal, for cryin’ out loud! Oatmeal! That’s, like, cattle feed! But apparently, it’ll keep me alive long enough to be a burden to my children. So I eat it.

On Thanksgiving, however, I want to forget all that. I want sugar, fat, grease, sauces, starches, and I want them all in quantities that would embarrass attendees of the John Candy/Mama Cass joint family reunion.

I want a food orgy that would make Caligula blush.

Once it’s all over, once the final piece of apple pie has been eaten, once that last turkey drumstick has been stripped to the marrow and simmered into soup, then … and only then … will I start worrying about my diet again.

But until that day (probably Monday, based on past performance) I don’t want to see the word “lite” again.

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273