I am an extremely crazy eater these days.
And I know it.
Everything has to be traceable. Really organic. Line-caught. Grass-fed. Pasture-raised. No mystery chemicals. No ingredients that require a chemistry degree or a hazmat suit.
At this point, ordering dinner with me is less like going to a restaurant and more like conducting due diligence on a private-equity acquisition.
"Where exactly was the salmon caught?"
"What did the cow eat?"
"Did the chicken know the farmer personally?"
I'm surprised nobody has handed me a nondisclosure agreement before showing me a menu.
So when I heard there was a meal-prep, grab-and-go place close by called Fitlife Foods that supposedly shared many of these standards, I was excited.
Finally.
Maybe someone else had lost their fucking mind too.
I walked in and met the manager and their nutrition person. They were nice. They showed me their vendors. We talked about sourcing.
I was generally impressed.
Then they showed me the food.
I didn't even make it to the ingredients.
Because sitting in front of me was one of the biggest WTFs I have ever experienced in the clean-food universe.
EVERYTHING WAS IN BLACK PLASTIC.
Black.
Fucking.
Plastic.
It was like walking into Whole Foods and discovering the organic produce department sprays Roundup on the kale because it makes the leaves shiny.
For those of you who don't follow this stuff, black plastic has attracted plenty of scrutiny over chemicals that can be present in some recycled black plastics, including concerns around flame retardants and endocrine-disrupting compounds.
And one of the theories for how some of those chemicals can wind up there is particularly comforting:
Recycled electronics.
Old TVs.
Computers.
Radios.
Nothing says clean eating quite like wondering whether your chicken teriyaki is being served in the reincarnated remains of a 2003 Toshiba television.
"Today's special is organic grass-fed beef with roasted vegetables and just a hint of Sony Trinitron."
Now, if this were somebody's first store, I could almost understand it.
"Oh shit. We didn't know."
Change the containers. Problem solved.
But according to the company's website, this isn't somebody selling six chicken breasts out of the back of a CrossFit gym.
They have a bunch of locations.
So I'm standing there trying to reconcile the entire experience.
Beautiful sourcing story.
Nutrition.
Wellness.
Transparency.
Clean ingredients.
And then:
WELCOME TO FITLIFE. PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HEALTHY MEAL FROM WHAT APPEARS TO BE THE DASHBOARD OF A 1987 PONTIAC FIERO.
Eventually the manager was checking out another customer and asked what I thought.
I said:
"I'll tell you after she leaves."
I was actually trying to behave.
The customer turned around.
"No, I want to hear what you don't like too."
Ohhhhhhh.
Lady.
You have absolutely no idea what you just authorized.
And off I went.
"How can you claim to be clean when you're putting everything in black plastic?"
The manager immediately countered:
"We have to use it for shipping purposes. Nothing else works."
Nothing?
Human civilization has developed reusable rockets.
We can land a fucking booster vertically on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
We can FaceTime somebody standing on the Great Wall of China.
AI can write a sonnet about a Labradoodle in the style of Shakespeare in four seconds.
But apparently we have reached the technological frontier of human civilization when attempting to transport grilled chicken without putting it in black plastic.
I asked whether they knew about the concerns around black plastic, particularly when food is heated in it.
Before the manager could respond, the CUSTOMER looked straight at me, chuckled, and said:
"I would never put anything hot into black plastic."
Thank you!
Now we're having a fucking focus group.
I then started wondering about something else.
What temperature is the food when it originally goes into these containers?
Because I'm standing there worrying about customers microwaving the plastic while suddenly thinking:
Wait a minute. Are we putting the hot food in the shit before we even sell it to them?
At this point I asked whether they were considering changing to something better.
And that's when the conversation reached its glorious conclusion.
The manager stared at me and loudly exclaimed:
"WELL, I GUESS WE AREN'T FOR EVERYBODY!"
Complete with the two-arm shrug.
🤷
And she was absolutely right.
They're not for everybody.
Specifically, they're apparently not for the guy who walked in because he actually believed all the stuff about health and clean food.
That's the part I can't get over.
If you're selling cheeseburgers, fries and cigarettes out of a gas station, I'm not going to interrogate you about endocrine disruptors.
I understand the transaction.
But if your entire proposition is essentially:
WE CARE ABOUT WHAT GOES INTO YOUR BODY
then I'm probably going to ask some questions about…
WHAT GOES INTO MY BODY.
You don't get to sell me the provenance of the chicken and then act like I'm a pain in the ass because I noticed the chicken is sitting in something I don't want anywhere near my food.
That's like a wellness retreat bragging about its organic mattresses while everybody sleeps underneath asbestos blankets.
So now I'm writing this.
And perhaps somewhere, some lawyer is already warming up his laptop.
Fine.
Maybe I'll get sued over black plastic.
That would actually be a fitting conclusion to my life.
CAUSE OF FINANCIAL DEATH: ASKED TOO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT A CHICKEN CONTAINER.
And to be clear, I'm not claiming that eating one meal from a black plastic container is going to kill anyone. I'm saying there are enough legitimate questions around certain black plastics and chemical migration that a company positioning itself around health should be asking those questions before its customers have to.
Maybe there's a perfectly good answer.
Great.
Publish it.
Test the packaging.
Show the results.
Or better yet:
Find another fucking container.
Because if you're going to build a brand around health, transparency and nutrition, the packaging isn't some irrelevant detail.
The packaging is touching the fucking food.
I guess this isn't really a blog.
It's not even much of a story.
It's a rant.
But increasingly, these are simply the ridiculous little things I encounter almost every day.
And maybe that's what this blog is actually becoming:
One man's ongoing attempt to understand how we became technologically advanced enough to create artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and reusable spacecraft—
but somehow putting healthy chicken into a healthy fucking container remains an unsolved problem.