Food and the Atkins Diet

First day at work! It’s interesting, exciting, unnerving - even scary. Sort of like the first day at school. After getting past the usual paperwork, I get to my new desk. At 9:00 AM in the morning, I see the first of many perks of a job in India. The morning coffee dude walks past, hollering to see if anyone is interested. Of course I am! As I said, there is a guy for everything. The coffee machine is right at my desk! He usually returns at 2:30 PM for the afternoon tea session, and at 5:00 PM for the evening coffee. My colleagues usually roll in between 8:30 and 9:30 in the morning, and the morning coffee is a good way to catch up on yesterday.

Since there is also an assembly shop here, the canteen (cafeteria) is pretty big. "Wet Lunch" times are at 11:15, 12:00 and 12:45; while "Dry Lunch" is at 1:15. Now there’s an interesting concept – wet and dry lunches. Wet lunches consist of the usual South Indian grub – Rice, Sambhar or Dal (lentil soup), Rasam (mulligatawny soup), Sabzi or Palya (dry curry), papad, pickles (not the sissy American ones, it’s the real spicy Desi variety), buttermilk or yogurt and a fruit. Dry lunches, on the other hand, are composed of some interesting variations – Roti/Naan, Sabzi, Korma, Pulao, sometimes a sandwich or a "desi veggie burger". I dare you to eat the burger! – it’s an oil soaked patty on a wimpy half-bread with an onion on it – guaranteed cardiac arrest, and bad breath to go with it. All vegetarian of course.

Burgers bring me to an interesting topic. What the heck is a "veggie burger" supposed to be? A hamburger doesn’t have ham in it, but it is named so because it was first made in Hamburg. A cheeseburger does have cheese in it though. I found the concept of "imitation meat" burgers in the US to be hilarious. So, you want to be a vegetarian really bad, but love meat too much to stop eating it. Wallah! Here’s a burger that smells like meat, tastes like (crappy) meat, gives you all the heartburn that goes with it, but is completely vegetarian! On the other hand, I remember a vegetarian friend of mine ordering a Big Mac without the meat. I asked her why she paid $4.25 for it, instead of getting a 99 cent cheeseburger (or two)? She said she liked the sesame bread that came with the Big Mac, the cheeseburger bread was just ‘ordinary bread". Now I am thinking she should marry a dude on the Atkins diet, he will only be too happy to eat the meat and leave the Big Mac sesame bread for her!