The Upstory

“Is that all you’re going to eat?”

“You’re going to eat that?”

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me this, I would be on the Forbes 400 rich people list.

Usually people ask these questions after I’ve ordered something off the menu that they don’t think I should’ve. Like a caramel-fudge sundae instead of the lunch special. I would order the lunch special but it’s soup and a sandwich which I’m sure is filling and delicious but won’t have the fabulous taste sensation of the caramel-fudge sundae. Also the pumpkin cheesecake ice cream looks good. Maybe I’ll have that for dessert. (Just kidding. But you should have seen my friend’s face! Bwhahahaha.)

I’m here to tell you that I don’t think bread is the staff of life. I think it’s ice cream, which, by the way, is a breakfast food if you can get away with it. It’s tough to pull this off if your children are present and eating the balanced meal you insisted on. You’ll have to wait until lunch and consider your options: You can dine solo so nobody bugs you. You can go with the crowd and ignore the comments. Or you can get Cheryl to go with you.

Cheryl and I discovered Cold Stone Creamery together and I’m convinced that we alone are the reason for its spectacular success. We made friends with the scoopers, tipped well, and lived large. Cold Stone lunches got us through many a tough afternoon of meetings and deadlines. And now Cold Stone is a billion-dollar business in 16 countries.

Anyway, I don’t want you to think my food pyramid consists only of dairy. No indeed. It also includes caffeine and sugar. “How that’s working for you?” is the other question I get, so here are some answers:

Choose Dessert First. I’m not typically high-maintenance, but when I’m in Food Outlaw Mode I can make Kim Kardashian’s lifestyle look effortless. Like the time the restaurant was serving a prix fixe meal. Appetizer. Entrée. Dessert. Problem was that the dessert was glorious scoops of ice cream on a hot cookie. My choice was either to struggle to get to the dessert after filling up on what people like to call “real food” or try to figure out how to make the ice cream “to go” and get it home before it melted. Or do what I did which was skip right to the dessert. And “to-go-box” the rest of the stuff.

Drive Your Waiter Bananas. I don’t know why anyone besides my mother cares what I eat or when I eat it, but I suspect it has to do with nutrition and tribal grazing behavior. Sometimes even the server gets in on the action, like the waiter on the cruise who kept trying to help the clueless American who was screwing up her dinner order.

Me: Tonight I will not have the fig appetizer with the herbed crème fraiche spread or the duck whatever-whatever but I would like the bananas foster.
Waiter: Very good madame, and what will you be having for the appetizer?
Me: I’m going to skip the appetizer. I just want the dessert.
Waiter: It is very good, the chef has made it special with some freshly caught anise and fennel.
Me: I’ll have to try that sometime. But now, just the bananas.
Waiter: Very good madame. And for your entrée?
Me: I’m going to skip the entrée. Ba-na-nas only, please.
Waiter: Our selections tonight are the confit de canard or lamb loin en persillade.
Me: I’m begging you, puh-leeze bring me the caramelized sugar.
Waiter: But of course, madame.

So that’s how I ended up with a fig and duck dinner. And by the time each course had been served and cleared I had lost interest in food and was mentally putting the finishing touches on a individualized customer service dessert training program. Finally the bananas foster arrived and I thanked my waiter and said (Are you ready? Consequences be comin’): “This looks delicious but I didn’t order dessert.”

My Mom’s Fridge. During her days as a wildlife rehabilitator my Mom stored things in the fridge that were meant for owls and bobcats, not humans. I was away at college so I often forgot this in between visits. Which explains the time I pulled out what I thought was a container of granola. I really like granola and I thought I had scored big when I spotted the glass jar. Then something in it moved and I shrieked at Mom, “What IS this?” Turns out it was meal worms squirming around in some kind of grain mix. But wait, it gets worse. I slammed the fridge door shut and yanked open the freezer door, looking for ice cream. Mom always kept Peanut Butter Fudge or Chocolate Mint on hand. Not this time, though. Instead, there were clear, sealed packages of deceased white mice and trust me, there’s nothing that kills a craving faster than that.

Pregnancy and Ice Cream. Before he made his debut into the outside world, Cody usually slept all day while I was getting things done in CorporateVille. (Of course, at night while I was asleep he’d wake up and do yoga.) As he got older Cody did start waking up during the day. Right after I’d powered down one of my ice cream lunches he would wake up and try to jump out of the way.

Grand Canyon Sugar Hike. I once organized my backpack for a three-day hike to the Grand Canyon with food supplies that included a full-sized carton of Whopper malt balls. Actually that was the only food I packed. Mind you this is a killer hike and I wanted to take something that would be a treat and satisfy any craving I got once we reached the campground at the bottom. The other NAU coeds had packed camper food that had to be heated and they’d brought pots and pans for cooking. On the way down I got lectured about protein and nutrition and survival. Also, I got the “I’m not sharing my food with you” warning, because they didn’t understand that I’d need to be gone longer than three days to want to eat what they had packed. Coming back I heard nothing because we needed every breath to climb out of the canyon. And yes, the malt balls hit the spot and the sugar kept me going.

Ice Cream & Mental Advantage. I love scientific research when it validates my point of view. So hat’s off to the scientific researchers at Japan’s Kyorin University who reported that “eating ice cream for breakfast may be beneficial for brain function.” They further concluded, “The resulting data showed the ice cream eaters to have the mental advantage. They were able to process information more quickly and effectively than those who had not indulged, and demonstrated better reaction times as well.”

So while I was having earlybird Blue Bunny/Bunny Tracks with my coffee, my brain was experiencing an increase in high-frequency alpha waves. But wait, there’s more. These brain waves are “associated with high levels of alertness, as well as imagination, visualization, memory, learning, and concentration.” Yessss! I rest my case. 

The results of this study were released July 2019, so this is up-to-date research (thank you to everyone who alerted me to this groundbreaking news). So far neither the New England Journal of Medicine nor the AMA has publicly disagreed with these findings. Someone who believes in eating fruits and vegetables for breakfast did a buzz kill and made the researchers add this line at the bottom of their findings: This, however, does not condone eating dessert for breakfast.

Anyway, there you have it: Why ice cream is the most important meal of the day. And why and where Cheryl and I are having lunch today.