Day 42

Wonka proof

“Revenge is sweet and not fattening” Alfred Hitchcock

Today was another travel day and a lot of it was spent on the sweltering New York cement. Sweating flesh, iced filled sweet drinks and suited worker ants at boiling point consumed the retinas. There is an incredible energy to the place, a constant hum like an old fridge that’s been running for years. It did make me consider the importance of sugar for people here. It’s an adrenal driven city where stopping leaves you trailing behind unable to catch up. Sugar is the perfect tonic, an artificial high to keep up with the pack. But the harmony of the human body can’t sustain it and so the medical system here is as overcrowded as many of the citizen’s jeans.

I began the day with my final bowl of bran clusters and yoghurt which left the milk at the bottom tasting like an odd pear and sultana oat milkshake (10 teaspoons).

For a mid morning heat escape I took on a blueberry POM juice. This was a new level of piercing sweetness that I imagined even Willy Wonka spitting out. It took every bit of fortitude to muscle down its 15 teaspoons. But 10 minutes later it proved to be fizzy lifting drink and I bounded down 7th Avenue to Penn station to catch a train to my next destination.

At the station I sat down at an enormous buffet cafe and heaped some honey and lemon chicken onto a cardboard plate. Once again I got to experience a chicken dessert of sorts but this time it was American style, certainly bigger and better but only if sugared meat is your thing (8 teaspoons).

On the train I extracted another 3 from a granola bar and I have now just got home from a traditional ‘local’ meal which was a delicious roast beef roll served on slightly less sugary buns than my pregnant lady (4 teaspoons).

Tomorrow I am meeting with some experts who know all there is to know about tastes and flavours. They can tell me why cats don’t like sweet things and why tests show that babies feel less pain when they have a little bit of sweetness on their lips. No matter how hard our baby cries, it ain’t getting sugar anywhere near its delicate chops (spoken proudly by a naive first time father).

42 earth rotations and another 40 white granules