All is quiet on the campus.  Finals are over, and 50,000 drunk students are not stumbling around when I arrive in the morning.  The number of people who think I’m sitting around pining for them is amusing, to say the least.

I went out in search of lunch, which during the intersession periods is a challenge.  A bunch of places on campus shut down because there aren’t enough potential customers to justify the expense in keeping staff on.  And so, I wound up at Taco Bell.  Normally, I wouldn’t admit this, but it bears on the rest of my story.

My other option was Wendy’s, but my stomach has been rebelling against food lately (ever since the party), and Taco Bell had this nice advertisement for a salad.  Ooh, salad.  I ordered the chicken ranch salad and took it back to my office, feeling smug about the healthy factor.

When I opened the bag, I discovered that it didn’t contain the chicken salad that I expected, but rather the beef taco salad which contains a brown crumbly item that I think is supposed to be the “beef” referred to in the name of the item, although forgive me if I decide to wait on the results of the DNA test before I commit to that description.

As I was glancing over my “healthy” choice, it dawned on me very slowly that I probably would have been much better off ordering a burrito.  After all, burritos have the exact same ingredients as a Taco Bell salad: they have some sort of alleged meat product, lettuce, cheese, beans, and rice–and, to top it all off, they’re about one-third the size.  Yes, I came to realize, there’s just not that much that was healthy or good for me in that Taco Bell salad.  Lettuce is worthless for its nutritional value, and once you take that out it was starch-n-carbs galore.

And then I started thinking about Other Salads I Have Eaten (it’s a song off of Conway Twitty’s unreleased B-sides album), or at least salads that I have looked at on the menu at such on-the-road standards as TGI Chillibee’s.  Salads, for example, that contain more fried stuff than a family sized bucket at KFC.  Salads whose dressing alone contain more than the FDA recommended intake of sodium and calories.

It’s clear that we, the American public, have been duped by the salad lobby into thinking that we’re eating healthy when we eat a salad.  It’s the Great Salad Placebo.  I, for one, blame Dick Cheney.  I don’t know how it’s his fault, but I’m sure Haliburton’s involved somehow.

And the next time I want to eat healthy in the student union, I’ll for something with half the calories and fat of a Taco Bell salad.  Like onion rings.