Francesca

I've just returned from a trip to the north woods of Wisconsin, where I spent some time visiting my niece at her college on the shores of Lake Superior.
While there, I ate a delicious grilled Superior whitefish dinner.Mmmm. Most excellent. Fresh off the boat (not this boat, but something like it.)
My niece is attending an environmental studies college, which seems to attract two different types of people: 1) deerhunting hockey players; and 2) animal rights vegetarians. She's in the second camp, as is her friend Francesca.

This is a story about Francesca, a college freshman who tried hard to be a good girl as she defined it, but failed. Before arriving on the shores of Lake Superior, Francesca lived in California and ate a raw food diet. I'm pretty sure a raw food diet involves chopping, pureeing and mixing uncooked fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains into a creative variety of dishes. I'll have to look it up some time. Anyway, it's labor-intensive and supposed to be very good for you.

Winter came to the north woods, and Francesca tried to be faithful to her raw food diet--a raw food diet to which she had added the extra requirement of being made strictly with locally grown produce. That was no problem in California, where Francesca had access to tropical foods such as bananas and other yummy things like carob powder and crushed macadamia nuts, which take easily to a raw food diet.

But in the north woods of Wisconsin in the middle of winter, when the snow drifts up to your waist? M'eh...not so much. Francesca found herself gnawing on a lot of raw tubers. According to The Cook's Thesaurus, "Tubers...are swollen underground plant stems, but it's easier to think of them as the 'family of potato-like vegetables.' They're used worldwide as a source of carbohydrates, often taking a back seat to more flavorful and colorful ingredients."

So what do you think happened? Did Francesca make a deal with the devil by giving up her vegetarian ways and dating a deerhunting hockey player who supplemented her raw food diet with venison sushi? Did she spend a looooong north woods winter eating nothing but raw potatoes? Did she choose starvation?

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., online student edition.

Nah, she cooked. And I really hope she doesn't feel like a bad girl because she did.