Chocolicious Allegory

It started with chocolate: a bar of chocolat au lait et noix de pecan, to be precise, which she had bought in a duty-free shop with the last of her euros. On the verge of breaking off a second square, she suddenly decided to give up chocolate altogether, and the whole bar went into the garbage. Later in the afternoon, she felt guilty about the waste and wondered if perhaps it wouldn’t have been better to break it up and distribute it amongst her co-workers. She eyed the basket in the corner of her cubicle and debated: she had told no one about throwing it away; she was fairly certain the other garbage was just paper scraps and a few pieces of the tape she was in the habit of rolling up into tight little cylinders which she squashed between her thumb and index finger until they lost all their stick; and even supposing there were a used kleenex she had forgotten about, the chocolate was still in its box, doubly protected and snugly hygienic thanks to the inner wrap of gold foil. However, this moment of weakness passed, and she spent the remainder of the work day illuminated by a gleaming halo of resolve. Had the man from the next cubicle looked around the partition, he would have seen the fine hair on her arms glittering as she deleted each of the three hundred and twenty-nine emails that had accrued in her absence.

When she arrived at the office the next day, she was pleased to note that the trash had, as usual, been emptied by the janitorial staff. There was no way for her to know that the bar of chocolate had been discovered and eaten, that in fact everything she was to throw away over the next few weeks, beginning with each item she had carefully culled from her pantry and discarded the night before because cocoa powder had been included in the list of ingredients, was fated to be consumed by someone or, in the case of her nearly-empty jar of body frosting, something. This particular irony, however, does not concern us.

What concerns us is the health of our heroine: after cutting out chocolate and sugar and alcoholic beverages and meat, first red then white, and wheat flour and peanuts and products processed in factories in which peanuts had also been processed, she was beginning to have trouble at the grocery store. She decided that it was enough to select one very specific thing to eliminate from her diet each day; in this way, she could move at a more leisurely pace toward starvation. But no sooner had she hit upon this method of prolonging the inevitable than a new problem arose: about three quarters of the way through the beans and legumes category, she realized that she had never tried black-eyed peas. There's no point in wondering how this woman could have lived through the thirty-seven years that had passed since her birth without ever having so much as tasted what is, after all, a traditional food in the southern United States. We must confront the same question that confronted her: How could she give up something she had never had? The obvious solution might occur to us, but it did not occur to her. She was still a novice at renunciation, and did not yet understand that all those abstract nouns -- possibility, sensation, novelty, experience -- can be jettisoned along with the lemons when your ship is sinking.

So began a different era, with a kind of exotic itemization: after taking care of the black eyed peas, there was still fried lotus root, acacia honey, escargot, toasted grasshoppers, and bird nest soup to try. Not even the specialty stores in her urban neighborhood carried all of these delicacies, so she was forced to quit her job and spend her entire savings traveling though other countries in search of the exotic foods she needed to taste before they could be plausibly given up. Being on the whole a concrete thinker, she never gave up stupidity or caprice or stubbornness, and thus could perhaps have gone on almost indefinitely, reaching extreme old age, if not sainthood, nourished in this haphazard way, but, to make a long story short, she acquired amoebic dysentery while sampling holy water from the Ganges, and, given her gaunt condition, her quick demise should not surprise us.