Celery: The Silent Killer
By: Rafael Hedrick

“Hi Dad.  What’s up?” asked my son Wil.

“Is Phoebe here?  Oh, there she is.  Phoebe, can you come in here please?  We all need to talk.”  Here I go.

“What’s wrong?  Are we in trouble, because if we are I didn’t do it and I can explain.”  Phoebe’s eyes reminded me so much of her Aunt Gracie that it made this even harder, but I drew in a deep breath and started.

“No one is in trouble.  I know for many years you guys have seen that picture of my family – your grandparents and aunts and uncles – and have wondered what happened to them all.  For a long time, I have avoided telling you because I wasn’t sure if you were old enough to completely understand.  I also wanted to make sure you were old enough to learn from the mistakes of my family and not repeat them.  Well, I was the youngest of a large family, and I am the only survivor.  My parents were very wealthy people.  My father was extremely successful and the more money they acquired the more eccentric they became.  My sister Gracie, your aunt, was the first casualty.  Phoebe, I know that you are very cognizant of your body image and I have always watched you closely because young girls can often fall prey to false beliefs about themselves and what they should eat to make themselves prettier.  Your Aunt Gracie was no exception.  Here goes:

I loved Aunt Gracie very much.  She always read me lots of cool stories and let me tag along with her to a lot of places.  One day she heard a rumor that eating celery actually resulted in negative calories.  She even told me that she burned more calories chewing the celery than was actually in it.  The next thing I knew, she had lost a few pounds and was eating celery with everything.  At first she ate it with peanut butter, or in salads, but then she wasn’t skinny enough.  She weighed more than 100 pounds and her goal was to weigh less than 100 pounds.  I didn’t understand at the time what that meant, but soon she started making Pierre, our cook, make only chicken broth and celery.  That was all she would eat.  Pierre often griped about his culinary skills not being put to good use by making celery and chicken broth for Gracie for every meal.  But, he did it anyway.  He was at our beck and call and he had orders to obey our wishes.  He did and Gracie reached her goal.  She weighed less than 100 pounds.  Her new goal was to lose more weight.  She wanted to see how much she could lose.  It was all to her own detriment.  She lost so much weight that her heart couldn’t take it.  Her body was eating away all of its muscle and the heart is a very important muscle.  She had a heart attack and the 60 pound emaciated sister I loved so dearly DIED.  My parents had her cremated, and received a 50 percent-off discount because she was so small.  But, money savings aside, she was gone.  She was only the first victim of food fatalities that would occur in my family.”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: My storybook is about food myths and urban legends and I have heard many times before that by eating celery you actually burned more calories (from chewing it) than it had in it.  This myth is partly true (which may explain why my always dieting wife eats it so often).  There are so few calories in celery that when you eat it, the result is negative calories – this is the true part of the myth.  The reason the calories are negative though has to do with digestion and not chewing – this is the false part of the myth.  I included this in my storybook because I wondered what would happen if someone actually tried to live by eating pretty much nothing but celery.  The urban legend really just explains this and doesn’t have a plot or characters.  Everyone and everything in the above story is of my own creation.  I would like everyone who reads this to remember that “Man cannot eat by myth alone.”  I hope that no one reads and tries the celery diet.  I don’t think the final results will be pleasing.

“Stalk Marketed”
By Barbara Mikkelson, 2003
Weblink: http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/celery.asp

Please return to my Storybook.
Proceed to my other stories:
Return of the Pop Rocks
Killer Bull