Make It Taste Bad

It started as a joke when I was shelving books in the health section of the secondhand bookstore. As I alphabetized vintage diet books with titles like Christ’s Guide to Thinness, Watermelon for a Slimmer Waistline and The ABCs of Ayurvedic Health, the idea hit me: a joke diet book, full of terrible advice that no one in their right mind would follow. 

After I clocked out that night, I went home and stayed up until 2 a.m. writing it. I sat in my living room with my laptop propped up on a plastic crate. The TV was on with the volume muted, playing old episodes of M*A*S*H. In the apartment downstairs, bass from shitty pop music throbbed. I finished a draft in just three hours. A week later, I started sending it around to publishers. 

Now, as I sat on a soundstage with a tiny microphone clipped to my collar, I sweated, waiting for the producer to tell us when we were live on the air. The book had sold millions of copies in just a few weeks and was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Every day, I received emails from people telling me how much weight they’d lost, along with before-and-after photos. The ‘after’ photos always showed big grins, as if the smaller thighs and slightly flatter stomachs came with giant novelty checks and tickets to Disney World. 

I couldn’t believe it at first. Make it Taste Bad didn’t come from Johns Hopkins or Yale or wherever they feed people almonds and put them on treadmills and then write down what happens to them. I just sat down that night and came up with the dumbest ideas I could think of:

Add Carolina Reaper peppers to everything. Make it so hot that every bite hurts. You’ll have no choice but to take fewer bites. Plus, sniffling burns 1.5 calories per hour, so make it hot enough to make your eyes and nose run.

Undercook potatoes. We all love starch, but when your mash has a big, cold hard chunk in it, you won’t enjoy it as much. 

Burn everything. Remember 9th-grade science when you burned a peanut and then held a test tube full of water over it to see how many calories were in it? Every burnt molecule is a calorie that’s gone before it gets to your mouth. Blacken, blacken, blacken!

Let the dog lick the plate before your meal. 

The editor at the tiny press, which operated out of a leaky basement in Topeka, totally got Make it Taste Bad. 

“It’s hilarious,” she told me on the phone a few days after I submitted it. As I spoke to her, I could hear drops of water hitting a metal bucket in the background. “It’s the perfect send-up of diet culture. I heard some ‘expert’ on NPR the other day going on about how botanists have made fruit taste too good, which of course means it’s unhealthy. Can you imagine? Those evil botanists and their tasty tangerines!”

We both laughed about how absurd it all was. 

I said: “I hope nobody takes this seriously.”

She said: “What are the chances of that happening? I mean, it’s all so ridiculous. No one in their right mind will try these things.” 

But a week after the launch, she called me back with some news: “It seems people think your book is real diet advice.”

A cold bolt of fear made the muscles in my back tense. I was sure she was going to say she had to pull the book from publication. Instead, she said: “There’s a publishing house in New York that wants to buy the rights and send you on a big book tour, so let’s just go with it, okay?”

“Go with it?”

“We’ll just pretend it was never a joke, and that this is a real diet. It will be a big windfall for both of us.”

I sat in my kitchen, a sparkling water fizzing in a sweaty, bright-yellow can on the table in front of me. I could hear my downstairs neighbors arguing about an empty hamster cage. 

“I don’t know,” I said to my editor, “What if they want me to explain the science behind it? You know there isn’t any. No peer-reviewed anything.”

“That part is easy. It’s just calorie reduction, right? Besides, since when are diet books peer-reviewed? Remember Chew in the Face? The guy who wrote it was the same guy who made those insoles he claimed helped NBA players jump higher.”

I bit the inside of my lip and looked out my window at a cardinal sitting in a maple tree. “That’s just it. I don’t want to be that guy. The chew-til-your-jaw-hurts, fake-NBA-insoles guy.”

She tried to convince me that I wouldn’t be that guy, but I knew that if I let people think I’d invented a real diet, I would be that guy. But then, she told me how much the New York publisher was willing to pay, and I decided that maybe I could. I could be that guy.

The next thing I knew, I was on a seven-city book tour, sitting at folding tables and signing autographs while listening to people gush about how my book had changed their lives. 

“I just love the part about bringing pepper spray to spritz on your food when you go out to dinner or to a dinner party,” said a middle-aged blond woman in Dayton, Ohio. “It works great!” (The heading for that section read, Mace: It’s Not Just for Your Date’s Eyes Anymore)

The tour was scheduled to wrap up in L.A., which meant I would sit through several TV interviews before flying home again. 

The producer gave the signal and the interviewer turned to the camera, flashing her Crest-White-Strip-day-seven smile at the viewing audience. She introduced me as the author of a diet book that was “sweeping the nation” and held up a copy of the paperback version. The original cover featured a hand-drawn comic strip of a woman emptying her trash into a mixing bowl in one panel and weighing herself in the next. The paperback version -- the New York version -- was a white cover with a full-color photo of a pile of hot peppers, a blackened chicken breast and a single raw potato. 

“What I love about this book,” the interviewer said, “is your sense of humor. There’s a hilarious line on almost every page! Most diet books are dry. What made you decide to inject humor into yours?”

“Well, I just thought if it was funny, then people would be more likely to keep reading. No need to be boring, right?” I cleared my throat and hoped the mic wouldn’t pick up the sound. 

“That’s great,” she said, her teeth beaming. “Let’s talk more about the science behind Make it Taste Bad. Most diets say that you can lose weight and not give up the foods you love, but it seems like you disagree.”

“Lonnie,” I said, using her name as the New York publicist had coached me to do, “the food industry spends billions each year on research -- and they’re not looking for ways to make it healthier. They’re constantly finding ways to make their product more addictive so that we buy more of it and they make more money. Take potato chips. They not only taste so good you can’t stop eating them, they dissolve in your mouth, so you feel like you haven’t even eaten them at all. You’re never satisfied. So you keep eating until you’ve had a thousand calories that feel like ten. They’re not going to stop making food that both enthralls and hoodwinks us -- they make too much money from it. So we’ve got to take matters into our own hands. This book is simply a guide for doing that.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Well, I can tell you that I’ve been following your advice for about a week and I’ve lost nine pounds already!”

“Oh, that’s great,” I said, even though I could see her collarbone through the tweed blazer she had on. 

After the segment was over, she shook my hand and walked off the set. I unclipped my little microphone and waited for an intern to walk me out. 

Once I’d left the studio, I took a very expensive Uber from Burbank back in the direction of downtown L.A. and asked the driver to recommend a good lunch spot. He dropped me off at a tiny trattoria tucked on a side street in Los Feliz. 

A hostess guided me to a table in the corner. It was draped with a white tablecloth and had an unlit candle sitting next to glass shakers full of parmesan, oregano and crushed red peppers. A waitress brought me a basket of bread and told me that the special was bolognese over house-made, fresh linguine. 

“Sounds great,” I said, “and can I have some calamari too?”

As she took my order back to the kitchen, I slumped backward in my seat. I had a bookstore signing that afternoon, another TV interview the next day, and then finally I could fly home. 

I’d take a few days off, and then I would start packing. With all of the money coming in from book sales, I had enough to leave my apartment. I’d found a house -- a 1929 mock Tudor with mahogany wainscoting all throughout the first floor. It was smallish but had a big yard with a trickling waterfall and koi pond in the back. 

The waitress brought me a plate of calamari rings coated in golden breading and steaming from the heat of the fryer. I picked up a lemon wedge and squeezed it over the plate of squid. Just as I stabbed one of the rings with a fork, I sensed someone standing close to me. 

When I looked up, a young woman with muscular arms smiled at me, revealing a set of front teeth that twisted away from each other like bitter frenemies. 

“Hi!” she said. “Aren’t you the guy who wrote Make it Taste Bad?”

I nodded. 

“I love that book! If I had my copy with me, I’d ask you to sign it.”

“Glad you liked it,” I said, hoping she’d go so I could eat my lunch. 

She started to say something, but then her gaze shifted to the table. She looked at my plate of fried calamari, raised her eyebrows, and then looked at me. 

“No pepper spray?” she asked. 

“Oh,” I said, “Well, I --”

Her eyes narrowed. She put her hand on her hip and I noticed the way her diamond engagement ring slumped forward toward her knuckle. 

“I have blisters in my throat from the pepper spray. They’ve been there for days and I can’t figure out how to get rid of them. I can’t eat anything other than almond-milk smoothies.”

She thrust her torso into my personal space, and I backed away until my chair scraped the wall. 

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. 

“I called my doctor, and he said as long as I was losing weight, I should just deal with it and enjoy the results. He said they’d go away on their own and when they do, I shouldn’t use that as an excuse to eat more.”

“Really sorry…”  squeaked. Her shadow fell across the table, engulfing my fried squid in darkness. 

“I thought at least there would be solidarity, you know? Like, we’d be in this together?”

This time, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Solidarity? It never occurred to me that writing a hit diet book would mean that I would have to be on the diet. 

Abruptly, she turned around and walked away. My calamari reemerged from the shadow: Round. Golden. Crispy. Happy. 

I brought my fork up to my watering mouth, but suddenly, I set my fork down and pushed my plate away. I rested my chin on my hands and stared at the pile of calamari, watching as the steam that rose from it dissipated. 

Moments later, the waitress returned with my plate of linguine bolognese.

She asked: “Is everything ok?”

I asked for the check and when she brought it, I left enough cash to cover it, plus a ten-dollar tip, and I left the food there, uneaten.