Tales From The Sandbox

Wait. Is that bacon? It is.

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I’m a vegetarian.

I know, I know — the most feared words in the military.

Whatevah, meathead.

I’m perfectly fine with being an egghead.

Except in Iraq.

I’d pretty much reconciled myself to the idea of eating meat while I’m here if that was the way for me to stay healthy. I didn’t stop eating chickens and cows because I think they’re cute. I stopped eating chickens and cows for health and environmental reasons: Cows take up a lot of land and water resources, and their owners tend to shoot them up with hormones. Chickens have the same issues and eat all sorts of things I won’t eat — like cows.

Just a heads up: Chickens don’t eat cows naturally.

And I read Fast Food Nation. It wasn’t the stories of animal abuse that got me, though it’s safe to say it wasn’t a turn-on. It was seeing that meat packers who used to have good benefits and pay, as well as a little more time to clean the e coli-laced entrails from the carcasses, have been replaced by immigrants with low pay and benefits and mere seconds to clean out a cow. Or that the demands of fast-food burger joints mean that every hamburger comes from a mix that includes bits of hundreds of cows. That’s why your burgers have to be cooked all the way through: Everyone knows one bad cow spoils the herd.

I do still eat fish, for health reasons and because they put them in sushi. And I’ll even have meat occasionally if it’s grass-fed or free-range with no growth hormones and no pens enabling chickens to crap on other chickens’ heads. Ew.

As it turns out, Taji has no fresh eggs because of bird flu in Kuwait. A sign in the dining facility tells service members the chickens are, in fact, on medical hold. I wonder if they have their own special building at Walter Reed?

Before I left the States for Iraq, I heard from numerous dieticians that the food here is great for the troops — they have everything from Hooah bars to all the vegetables they can eat, though the dieticians worried the young men and women here may be adding too much sugar to their water bottles in the form of drink powder. They call it “liquid candy,” and said people don’t realize how many calories they drink as they try to hydrate.

As it turns out, getting vegetables without meat is harder here than I thought it would be. Yay, spinach salad! Wait. Is that bacon? It is.

Woo-hoo! Black bean soup! With bacon.

Greens? Bacon.

Egg burritos? Yeah. Bacon.

I’ve learned to pick it out.

Because I don’t eat meat for health reasons, I actually try to eat healthy food. That means French fries don’t fit on my pyramid. My whole family on my mom’s side is diabetic, so I obsess. A little. My world is brown rice and beans. Lentils with huge doses of garlic or ginger or cayenne. Salmon. Mounds of oatmeal with blueberries.

If it’s white, it’s probably not in my kitchen: No potatoes, white bread or sugar. Did I mention I obsess? I stay away from processed food and make up for it with processed thoughts. Over-processed.

Beer, of course, is in a special group: Like fruits and vegetables, I can have all I want. Unless I’m in Iraq.

But since I’ve gotten here, I’ve begun to wonder if General Order No. 1’s banishment of booze also includes booze ingredients: whole grains. They’re not here. It’s a meat-and-potato world in the same sense as it was in the 1950s subdivision or the fifth-grade cafeteria: meat, starch, mushy vegetable.

I’m going to starve to death. Everything’s white or processed at the dining facility. Mashed potatoes. Potatoes au gratin. Grilled cheese on white bread. Macaroni and cheese.

I thought I’d try a Hooah bar for protein and grains. First ingredient? Corn syrup.

They have wheat bread, but it’s the wheat bread that’s the same consistency as Wonder bread and can’t possibly count as a whole grain.

I’m not saying the food tastes bad. It doesn’t. And the salad bar looks lovely most days — and has a vat of tuna included. It’s easy to see that people work hard on presentation and variety, even when they run out of eggs, lettuce, fruit and tomatoes as they did at Taji. And they try to make is special. At al Taqqadum on the Fourth of July, someone created with an American eagle made of bread and a life-sized butter swan surrounded by rolls. At Easter, I’m told, they had a butter Jesus.

But the dining facility is missing one layer of the pyramid: whole grains. It’s not healthy, and avoiding meat doesn’t make it more so — though a freelance photographer we ran into in the Green Zone swears he saw a box of steaks marked for “prison or military use only.”

I’m surrounded by people who spend great amounts of time sitting in Bradleys covered in Kevlar, or at the gym, or in the PX buying supplements — that aisle is usually packed. They blow through calories, yet what they get in the mess hall are simple starches. It takes nothing to process them — the guys may as well slurp “liquid candy.” And they don’t have the same nutrients and cancer-fighting benefits as brown rice or grainy bread.

I’m only here for eight weeks, so I’ll probably suffer through it. I’ve hit the PX for whole-grain nutrition bars and I grab the bags of trail mix whenever I see them. I’ll keep picking out bacon and eating tuna every day for lunch. And when I get home, I’ll splurge on quinoa and spelt and barley.

And maybe I’ll organize a food drive.