If I go out to eat, they hand me a 30-page menu. It includes foods I’ve known about for the better part of my life, like steak, shrimp, pasta and fish, but now there are subcategories. There’s petite filet, steak tips, rib eye, venison, ostrich and alligator. Pasta used to be linguine and angel hair. Now it’s pappadelle, fafalle, rigatoni, tortellini and who knows what.

Fish can be tilapia, orange roughy, sturgeon, mahi mahi, catfish. Doesn’t tilapia sound like a Mayan temple? And how about orange roughy? It could be a fabric.

Shrimp can be cooked in a variety of ways, but it still seems to retain the look of shrimp.

Then there are the combinations of foods that must come from some remote region of the world that no one ever heard of, like Mongolian russet potatoes mixed with baby eggplant from the Hungarian hinterlands.

You think you may have reached a decision until the waiter appears with the specials.
A trip to the supermarket isn’t any better. It took me two hours to figure out what kind of deodorant, eggs and orange juice I wanted to buy.

The deodorant now comes in so many configurations that you have to have a physical before you can decide which one might be OK. I finally chose one that slid on without a fragrance.

The eggs used to be small, medium and large. Not anymore. There are organic, cage-free fed with omega-3, light brown, dark brown and white. I honestly didn’t have a clue. What if I chose eggs that are organic, but they put them in cages. Won’t that affect the chicken’s stress levels? How is that going to be good for me? And don’t eggs contain omega-3 fatty acids? What’s the point of feeding them what they already have?

The orange juice was the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was a time when one orange juice existed. Original Minute Maid. They started by adding the one with pulp. Now we have varieties with some pulp, vitamin C added, no acid, calcium-fortified, and pulp with calcium. And there are mixed flavors: banana and orange, raspberry and orange, mango and orange roughy. Just kidding. But believe me, it’s coming.

In fact, I think there’s no end to what may be down the road. We could be looking at spending an entire day a week making choices. Then we’ll have to choose which day we want to do it.

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