absurdities of the kidney diet

As Julie's kidney function remains in decline and her diet gets stricter in order to compensate, many people have asked me an unwittingly vague and complicated question: "What can Julie eat?" I appreciate the question, but unfortunately the answer is somewhere between "almost everything" and "almost nothing." Here it is: she can eat a portion of anything that would not throw her strict daily regulation of sodium, protein, potassium, and phosphorus out of balance.

Not that helpful, right?

Unless you studied medicine (or chemistry?) or know someone with serious health issues, you probably know next to nothing about potassium and phosphorus. That's okay—we hardly knew anything either! They aren't required to show up on nutrition labels, but let me give you an idea of what this whole deal looks like. Julie has to be careful about (or even avoid altogether) the following:

anything from a can anything from a jar

Some observations on food names

I have decided that I'm a bit unsatisfied with the naming process of foods. Or more specifically, I have decided that I hate the word loaf when it doesn't apply to bread.

Loaf is a unique measure word. You can't say, "I bought one bread;" you have to say, "I bought one loaf of bread." It's just the way it works. Similarly, you can't say, "Pick me up a pound/jar/bottle of bread," because all bread begins its life as a loaf. A loaf is not made of bread; it is bread. All other forms are variations on or derivations from the loaf (e.g. crumbs, sticks, bowls). If it didn't come in a loaf, it's not bread, but it may be bready (e.g. biscotti, pie crusts, tortillas, cake).

This is why it's inappropriate to pretend that loaf is an acceptable word for any other food, because you're drawing attention to the fact that you took that food and squished it all around until it became a pulpy or gooey mass, and then you pressed it into a mold. The name meatloaf just screams, "Yeah, it's shaped like a lumpy box just like bread—but most of it is meat!" I like meatloaf and all, but every time I hear I'm having it, I expect to hate it.