ALPHABETIC DIETING IN THE AGE OF JET TRAVEL

BY ALEX EICHLER AND CHELSEA RUDMAN

ILLUSTRATION BY SUSANNA VAGT

The obvious choice for breakfast is oatmeal (an omelet is substantial enough for lunch). But Monday morning I sleep through my alarm as usual and wake up at 8:53 for my 9 AM seminar, which means I have to take the oatmeal on the road. I am subsequently forced to explain my week of wacky eating to bemused classmates as I spoon breakfast out of a Tupperware. “So... are you trying to get into a fraternity?” one of them asks.

For lunch, the omelet. Such multi-ingredient foods will be the key to staving off malnutrition; I slip peppers, cheese and onions—another O!—into the envelope of egg guilt-free.

Hungry at 4, I poke around the Internet for ideas. No dice—“once-a-year cherry pie” won’t qualify, and “ox tail soup,” even if I were not vegetarian, would still be out of the question on grounds of impracticality. So I invent an oatmeal cookie recipe, flinging butter, sugar and oats into a bowl willy-nilly. I try to decide, while hungrily shoveling the raw dough into my mouth as the oven preheats, if I feel primeval or pathetic.

Dinner is a dish of olive oil over orecchiette, a pasta that bizarrely resembles, true to its Italian name, little ears.

I never do get around to orange juice, but I squeeze in a cup of orange tea, which I figure is good enough.

Alex Eichler

Chelsea  Rudman

A startlingly nice day today, perfect for sashaying up Hope Street, two-dollar egg cream in hand (Ben & Jerry’s girl: “Not a lot of people ask for these”), to collect a series of mildly priced indulgences—egg roll, English toffee, espresso. Breakfast was edamame. “Hey, you know what would make these soybeans even better? If they were slimy and chilled, and you had to peel them out of little hairy amniotic sacs. Call the boys in Marketing and tell them to get started on a font for the logo.” Evian and an everything bagel turn out to be strategic missteps, both discounted by the day’s judge, though the egg salad is jake, and a softgel tablet of Vitamin E imparts not only creativity points but a warm, inviting tone to my complexion.

The university meal plan I’m on gives you so many flex points in a semester, and I spend half of what I’ve got left on an enchilada and a frozen blastocyst-looking thing that soon resolves itself into eggplant parmesan. The combination, I know, will congeal within hours into a permanent crust on the lining of my stomach, the kind of thing that breaks keratin when encountered on dirty dishes. Whatever. In It to Win It. An elephant ear—flaky, crunchy, shot through with unnamable brown granules, perfect—rounds out the day.

Wrong, Rudman, terribly wrong. Monday’s results are dismaying—it’s a slam dunk for Eichler, who has eaten everything I have, as well as Oreos, olives, octopus and oshinko rolls. (In typical d-bag fashion, he calls to let me know that he’d considered taking the field-leveling handicap of voluntary vegetarianism, then meanders around to saying that he’s not going to.) I have misunderstood my goal—it’s not merely a matter of enduring the restriction, but of enjoying it creatively.

I attack E with renewed vigor, starting the day with Eggos and making a lunchtime trip to Whole Foods for endive, escarole, emmanthal cheese and a box of elbow pasta. Later I feast on an enchilada, espresso, Earl Grey tea and some freakishly hard candies called “Easter eggs,” found at the candy shop on Thayer.

I cap off the evening at 11:45 PM with an electric lemonade, a cocktail the color of Scope whose main ingredient, judging by the taste and effect, is Bacardi 151.

SHAWN BAN:

The Far East (manifest in the form of Haruki Express) would prove to be a rich source of inspiration for Eichler throughout the competition. Here he parlayed octopus and oshinko rolls into an early 14-10 advantage over Rudman.

RUDMAN: 10    EICHLER:14

Catechism: French fries. Fanta. Fig Newton. French toast. Fruit salad. Fritos. Fudge. Falafel. Frappuccino (I was unaware that this drink does not exist without the Starbucks logo on it). Feta. Frosting. Float, ordered off-menu again from Ben & Jerry’s and prepared by the same longsuffering employee. One flower, more bitter than expected, and half a flyer from a bulletin board. Fried fish. Fruit smoothie. By midnight I am immobile in front of Reno 911!, indistinguishable to myself from somebody’s out-of-work session-guitarist uncle. I am eating like it’s my birthday, though it isn’t. It’s Dennis Quaid’s birthday. I am eating like I’m Dennis Quaid.

Not much of a yield today, though after yesterday’s caloric State Fair, sparseness agrees with me. It turns out I didn’t really need to eat the flower, since I’ve got a healthy margin over Rudman that I didn’t totally earn: Tuesday’s judge docked her a point for a triple-E salad that should have put us more or less neck and neck. An Uncrustables sandwich—the good name of which you’d better believe Smucker’s will go to court to defend—sees me through the morning, and some light sushi supplements of unagi and unaju (these may be the same thing) carry the afternoon.

All week long I’ve been trying to avoid Whole Foods, primarily because it was a favorite haunt of a girl I used to date, but by the late afternoon I become worried that Rudman is pulling some kind of vegetarian jujitsu behind my back and I brave the heartache that a cooler full of kombucha might precipitate. I actually do track down an ugli fruit but can’t bold it here because I fail to get down on it before the midnight rollover. It is ugli, though, rest assured; almost comically so.

I also obtain some udon, which will ultimately go uneaten, and shout through static for a while to try and draw Rudman out to the Edible Food Race, sponsored by the Brown Engineering Department. The race, while delightful to behold, has nothing to do with the competition I’m engaged in, but it would be nice to compare notes with the one other person in Providence who I can be reasonably sure has blood-sugar levels as low as mine. Later that evening, notes of contemplation and regret are offered by a nibble at some unsweetened chocolate, which I basically get away with because Dan is the judge for today.

My notes become less detailed at this point, because the handwriting muscles are in protein shock, and because my sister and some old friends are in town, and also because of that girl who was dancing at the Lupe concert—you know the one, with the shirt, and she knew all the lyrics. It seems that my diet has much to do with legumes in one form or another: nuts, Nutella, Nutrageous bars and Nutter Butters all figure to some extent. The formula for Nutter Butters has evidently changed since I was eight years old, when they didn’t taste like crap. At an off-Thayer restaurant I am served a quantity of nachos that would make an excellent cover photo for an al-Qaeda circular about the evils of American excess, and later I drink a Nantucket Nectar, my first in a year, that cuts bowling-lane gutters in my enamel.

Dinner is a nonpareil and a slice of pizza, about which I feel no compunctions. The week has sung with the kind of endorphic highs that I normally associate only with songs from a very specific period in Timbaland’s career, but it has also been a campaign of frustration and deprivation, of doubt and solitude. Nobody really wants to have dinner with you when the preamble to a meal is the 90-second vetting of every menu visible from the sidewalk, and when you hear dinner suggestions of offal, entrails and urine enough times that you become sort of disinclined from telling many people what you’re up to. It has not been an easy week. Yet at no time did I question what I was doing or ask myself whether my time wouldn’t be better spent doing something else, and that kind of integrity of purpose is something I rarely experience. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being about winning a contest and became a challenge to myself, from myself—could I excel? Could I be Kanye West and touch the sky? In this narrow, super-contrived, mega-arbitrary, just-barely-a-sport field, exactly what was the upper limit of performance, and was it shatterable? I’m no more an athlete now than I was before my first spoonful of oatmeal, but I can sort of see why a person might become one. Excelsior.

______________________________________

ABCDEFALEXEICHLERB’08HIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

I am still at the GCB when the clock turns to Day F, so I order a shot of Frangelico on the rocks and then stagger the block to Jo’s for some French fries. I wake up feeling smug—two Fs under my belt before breakfast. Lunch is focaccia, dinner is fajita.

I walk into Wednesday night’s Indy copyedit meeting holding Fig Newtons, Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops. I’m feeling good. Then Eichler shows up, holding a jar of frosting and feta crumbles, and threatens to eat an entire fork. I look bad, bad, bad.
“What about ‘fungi?’” offers Audrey von Maluski. “Mushrooms are a fungus.”

This is decidedly M.

“Well, you could leave your fridge open for a while...”

Eichler walks by slurping a chocolate-colored drink he is trying to pass off as a ‘float.’

“You could also eat ‘film,’ Audrey says brightly. “You know, leave some syrup out or something.”

Since we are all in the same place, the letter-drawing tonight is a public ceremony. Aaron Cutler scratches the remaining letters on paper slips and holds the hat out to Dan Denorch, Thursday’s judge. “U!” they announce, barely able to suppress their sadistic glee. I look helplessly at Eichler, who is staring into his ‘float’ and looking grim.

More bad news comes an hour later, when I check my email to find that my carefully planned E day has been demolished by the judge. “Endives are gross,” she comments, docking me a point for the endive, escarole and edamame salad that I had hoped would add three or four to my score. The elbows are out, too. Eichler’s lead climbs: 30.5 to my 18.5.

My enthusiasm for the contest is waning. There is no way I can come back from Eichler’s arbitrary five-point bonus.

The letter of the day is no help. I cannot coax the Internet to produce U foods other than “upside-down cake” and “udon” that I will be able to acquire on this continent. I try to take advantage of the liquids loophole by drinking Unibroue beer and UFO Hefeweizen. Lunch is a measly cup of udon soup; in terms of calories, my alcohol intake for the day now exceeds my food intake by about two to one. Fortunately, I discover Uncrustables just a half hour later.

Eichler, clearly also suffering, calls around 4 PM offering to share his udon. Due to technical difficulties, this doesn’t pan out, so I make my own batch of the fat noodles, then dump them into a salad laden with veggies and fake meat and add ‘udon salad’ to the list.

I contemplate eating foods starting with the 25 non-N letters of the alphabet—or, better, a list of foods whose first letters spell out “FUCK YOU, EICHLER.”

But I’ve stuck this out too long to quit. The day unfurls chock full of legumes: Nut (and fruit) Nutrigrain. Nougat. Nutrageous. Nutter Butter. For dinner, Navrattan curry and naan. I also have Palak Paneer, which I ‘fess up to. It’s Spring Weekend.

As the final scores are tallied, I think back to a comment Eichler made at the start of the week when I suggested we set up a competition that was somehow tied to current events, to make it more, say, relevant. “All sporting events are contrived,” he countered. “It’s not like baseball games are tied to congressional hearings.”

True. Still, they are tied to something more broadly significant than the competitive urges of two twentysomething writers. There are baseball leagues. There are rules that all baseball games must follow. And, perhaps most important, there are fans who care deeply, even zealously, about the outcome of those games. It’s unclear—our friends and foes who cheered or booed us notwithstanding—to what degree our contest met these basic criteria of relevance.

And yet. While it’s doubtful that alphabetic eating will become a national pastime, perhaps it’s our contest, stripped of all the capitalist trappings that adorn American sports, that is competition at its purest. There is no inherent value in being able to procure a list of 15 foods that start with F. But if you are competing against someone who can get a hold of only 14, you’re no longer a weirdo—you’re a champion.

Tip of the hat to you, Eichler. That glory is yours.

______________________________________

C is for CHELSEA RUDMAN B’08, that’s good enough for me.

EMILY SEGAL:

The contestants showed a remarkable ability to consume variety, from mineral to vegetable and everything in between (see, marshmallows). This pumped the score up to 18.5 for Rudman, 30.5 for Eichler.

RUDMAN: 18.5    EICHLER:30.5

AARON CUTLER:

Their drive and passion were evident.  At one point Eichler took me aside, pulled a flower out of his pocket and bit the top off.  It was the craziest thing I had ever seen.

RUDMAN: 36.5    EICHLER:51

DAN DENORCH:

Extensive and handsome use of the Eastern culinary canon by both contestants which, at points, bordered on abusive. Also, one of our more nutritionally sound days. Chelsea pulls in just ahead of Eichler with her ingenious use of foreign brews.

RUDMAN: 40.5    EICHLER:54

KAT STOEFFEL:

Endurance was the name of Friday’s game, as both athletes, exhausted from a working week of alphabetic eating, attempted to combat Spring Weekend munchies with peanut butter flavored sandwich cookies. Ultimately, it was Eichler who prevailed, for his clutch consumption of pure and powdery nutmeg.

RUDMAN: 40.5    EICHLER:54