By Noah Masterson

MAY 17, 1999:  I hate food. Not just certain kinds of food but all food and the notion behind it. I resent the pestilent cravings and pains of my slobbering flesh handcar. I hate cooking, waiting and chewing. Most of all, I hate being hungry.

Accept for the moment that the human body is nothing but a tacky van that putters around aimlessly until it runs out of gas. The van doesn't know what kind of gas it needs. In fact, the van tells you to fill it up with exactly the kind of fuel it doesn't need: burgers, chips, nachos and sometimes cookies. We have no "vegetables only" decal.

Food makes you feel sleepy, too. You'd figure that a chicken-fried steak could keep you going until the Special Operations Force comes on. Instead you park your fat ass in a chair, stare at the wall and bitch about how tired you are to everyone within earshot. And they really, really care.

Sure, it's just another of one of life's cruel jokes, but let's face it: If the body is a temple, the priests have turned mine into an all-you-can-eat buffet. My willpower is a brown rag hanging around my ankles. I'll eat a gob of purple frosting if you tell me it tastes like blueberries, and I don't even like blueberries. I've spent half my life chewing food and the other half swallowing it. Food is a waste of time, and I'm ready to quit.

I think we would all be happier if there were some quicker, more convenient alternative to traditional nutrition. Intravenous feeding is probably out of the question, though, and food pills exist only in science fiction. A turkey dinner pill would be nice, but all we get is a pill that makes you think the cops are bugging your phone.

Beyond that, Slim Fast and breakfast bars are our only hope. I don't want to go too far into my breakfast bar seminar right now because there's just too much to cover, but I will say that I've never met a breakfast bar that didn't leave me wanting to meet another breakfast bar. They are small and cannot fill me up. End of story.

Slim Fast, on the other hand, can almost make a meal. You can down a can of it in 10 seconds flat, and it doesn't wipe you out like those four chili dogs would have. After drinking one, I often say, "Right away, Mike," then roll up my sleeves and rifle through a filing cabinet. Vanilla Slim Fast is scrumptious enough that I often prefer it to real food. Its sweet, milky, malty flavor is gone long before any complaint can hatch.

Not so for the many misnamed varieties of chocolate Slim Fast, whose true flavors range from mud to crayfish. Strawberry Slim Fast is passable, but the overpowering, fakey flavor is a bit like a visit from the Yeast Fairy. Delicious and dimly remembered Coffee Slim Fast is a vanishing rarity available to collectors only on eBay. The various juice-based Slim Fast flavors are undrinkable toilet water. Don't bother with them.

But who cares, really, what food tastes like when it's just coal for the furnace? Chew up some wood and get back to those files before Mike gets pissed. Sleep on a board, wear a hair shirt and slice your arms up with broken glass. Better yet, get a big bag of fast food hamburgers and stuff them all in your mouth at once like a stupid, fat pig. The food goes in and the jokes come out. The van drives forward and the van drives back.

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