My wife loves bruschetta. I mean she really loves it. Like, if it came down to sex or bruschetta, well, I’d be a very lonely guy every time. The problem with bruschetta, besides its being more popular than sex with me, is that it goes on bread. It turns out bread has something inside it called gluten, and after living my entire life eating peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread, I’m now being told gluten, and thus bread, is the most dangerous element on the planet.
I am having a difficult time with this whole gluten is evil concept since I got this far along in my life eating a sandwich made with dangerous bread EVERY SINGLE DAY! That’s right, every day I eat a sandwich. In fact, most days I eat two sandwiches, and for dinner with my wife, well, we gotta have bruschetta, which means more of that deadly substance: bread. So why now in the two thousand and teens has everyone finally decided that bread is the worst thing you can eat?
The answer is: because we are all fat. Yup, we’re all fat pigs. Myself included. In fact, I am the poster boy for bread belly. I thought it was a beer belly but it turns out, inside every beer, which is made with yeast, is a loaf of bread.
Confused? Yeah, I was too, until I watched a documentary that explained it to me like this: Your big fat mouth takes a big fat sandwich and it shoves that big fat sandwich made with delicious white bread into your stomach. Your ill-informed brain says, “That was just a sandwich, not a hot fudge sundae, not a candy bar, so we shouldn’t get fat. Very healthy things coming down the throat, nothing to worry about here, just a sandwich.” Your body says, “Hello sandwich, what do have for me? White bread! Awesome, we are going to convert that bread to glucose for energy exactly like we would pure sugar.” If you can’t follow along I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. It means go ahead and eat three of your favorite candy bars for lunch because your foot-long sandwich will put the same amount of glucose into your body.
What is glucose, you ask? That is the stuff that you don’t burn after lunch while sitting at your desk, checking emails, and updating your Facebook status with pictures of the sandwich you just ate. Glucose is the stuff that is stored as fat. That is why we are all totally fat. Bruschetta is why we are all fat. So what is the answer? Stop eating bruschetta? That can’t be an actual option, right? How will I live without bread and bruschetta?
The more important question is, how long will I live sucking down sandwiches every day? Or how fat can I actually get? It turns out pretty damn fat. I decided to test these quack doctor theories about white bread/gluten/glucose and I ate as much bread as I could and gobbled up as much bruschetta as possible. It was the best experiment of my life because I love sandwiches. I don’t prefer them more than my wife, whom I love, but I love them enough to tip the scales at over 200 pounds (I’m a short dude, so 200 makes me a square shape with no neck). I found that pizza washed down with beer four nights a week helped me push my experiment along, and I quickly added pound after pound, thus becoming quite the fat guy.
Then the party had to stop. I got to a point where I was out of breath just trying to tie my shoes, which is pretty embarrassing. I couldn’t tell if my fly was up, because I couldn’t see that part of my body due to my big bread belly. Damn bruschetta was trying to kill me. That meant I had to go on a no-bread diet. This was difficult for two reasons. The first reason is because bread/wheat/gluten is in everything at the store except for beef jerky and tofu. I ain’t eatin’ no tofu.
The second reason quitting bread was hard was because my wife wanted to go out to an Italian restaurant twice a week and order her favorite appetizer, bruschetta. So I have to go to really nice Italian restaurants where they put bread and butter on the table, then bring out bruschetta for an appetizer, and then only offer pasta for a meal (which is bread for those of you who don’t know—I didn’t know, it doesn’t look like Wonder Bread to me). The only thing I can order at an Italian restaurant is salad, and then it comes covered in croutons (which again, is bread—I actually knew this one).
Trying not to eat bread is very difficult for me. I feel as if I am addicted to bread. I need bread to live. I dream about pizza. I love the smell of fresh baked French bread. I look at crackers and begin to salivate.
From this process, I have more compassion for drug addicts. If it is this hard to give up Wonder Bread, I can only imagine how hard it is to give up cocaine. Although cocaine isn’t served in a round shape, covered in marinara sauce, pepperoni, and cheese. Cocaine isn’t in the cereal aisle disguised as Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries. They don’t put three pieces of cocaine in a Big Mac at McDonald’s, but they do give you three buns. You actually have to go find a drug dealer and break the law to do cocaine. I only have to look in my pantry to do bread. You know what? I take this all back. Bruschetta is way harder to quit than cocaine.
Rob was seen buying a black market loaf of bread in a dark alley. You can read more from Rob Krider or contact him at robkrider.com.
