A Carrot is Not a Cracker!

For the first time ever, I ate this diet lunch that I have been watching people (and the people are almost always women and gay males, not to stereotype, but this is my personal observation) eat for years. It's a lunch of hummus and raw vegetables. Now hummus is great, and vegetables are great, but this sounds more like a side salad to me, or at best a snack that your mom will allow you to eat an hour before dinner because she knows it won't ruin your appetite than a proper "lunch".  The first person I observed regularly eating this lunch was a coworker several years back. Some of us used to make microwave popcorn but then we were suddenly forbidden from doing so because, our department manager told us it triggered her. That's all we were told, that it "...is triggering to someone in our department." I observed this person carefully stacking her little containers of raw vegetables and her hummus in the mini fridge one day and I asked her if those were her salads for the week. She got kind of mad and said it was her food for the day. "I eat a lot," she said, defensively. "That's cool... me too," I said, not quite knowing what to say. I had another coworker at a later job who ate the same thing every day. She just ate raw vegetables all the time, often with hummus. When I asked her why, she said she was a vegetarian but she didn't know how to cook very many foods, so raw vegetables and hummus were pretty much all she ate, except for on the weekends when she'd go to restaurants.  Today I had a salad and some carrots and mini sweet peppers with me for part of my lunch (I also had  a yogurt and a homemade blueberry muffin for breakfast and a string cheese for later).  I got yelled at for not taking my  lunch break in a timely fashion, thereby inconveniencing others who have to deign answer the phone in my absence, so doing penance for being such a horrid employee, I did a work errand during lunch and picked up a carton of homemade hummus from the local deli and hustled back to work in 15 minutes.  I figured I'd dip my cucumbers and sweet peppers. I was supposed to have some cut up chicken that was left over from last night, but I guess my sweetie Jake and I forgot to pack the chicken. I also forgot my dressing. My salad suddenly got pretty depressing without chicken or dressing, so I started dipping forkfuls of salad into the hummus, thereby joining the raw-vegetables-and-hummus diet lunch club.  I mean, it was okay. The hummus was delicious but I just feel it's too self-punishing to eat it without crackers or pita or tortilla chips. A carrot is not a cracker. A cucumber slice is not a cracker. So much for me and the hummus-and-vegetables diet...\ xo Dani Wendy