#162-Pasta Salad as the Russian Roulette of church...

Oh the joys of a post-church service fellowship! All the more joy if it's a BYODFMC (Bring your own dish for Mass Consumption)!

And ultimately 60% of these BYODFMC's will be various specimens of Pasta Salad. Some people may claim some vestiges of racism within our movement, but such accusations are foolishness, when one considers are open-armed acceptance of all forms of pasta salad. Color, kind of pasta used, and stench of the salad matter not to us. We love them all!

But as we make our way down the buffet of the entrees at the fellowship, the most important decision is that of which pasta salad we will choose to consume. While we welcome all races of pasta salad to the buffet line, it does not mean we will equally consider each pasta salad for consumption. I for instance am a sucker for a pasta salad with bacon in it.

But it is the decision of which pasta salad we choose that is integral to our health and well-being. In Let's Make a Deal, an old 70's gameshow, contestants were asked to choose one of three doors to determine the contestants prize (or lack thereof). While we have more of an opportunity to visually see which pasta salad we will choose, it makes no difference because all pasta salads look absolutely revolting. The dilemma is trying to decipher which pasta salad is the least revolting of the bunch. The only more revolting looking dish I can think of (and also a greater risk to our health) is that of coleslaw.

(WARNING: This will be the most vulgar paragraph you will read in SAL. Nor for the faint of heart):Because let's face it, roughly 40% of all pasta salads will make you sick in one way or another. The dressing that serves as the hydrating force behind the pasta is usually what makes or break a good salad pasta. It is also this same dressing which has been sitting out in a warm open air environment for hours, which will most likely throw your bowels into a tumultuous crisis whereby the goal of your digestive system is simply to regain control of that which has been lost to the poisonous dressing. And as a result of this struggle, your bowels will toss down the gauntlet of your intestines various unwanted textures of food that once was but will soon be not.

And it is inevitably the pasta salad that is to blame. We know it, but yet we can't stop eating it. Yes, along with Jesus-name baptism and various other essentials of our faith tradition, eating a pasta salad at a church social is obligatory for salvation. Of course we could avoid the threat of sickness from one of the pasta salads, but when we are scrambling through the line to discern which foods are to be chosen for our palette, we find ourselves under a strange dark shadow of persuasion and obligation to manually loft one of the pasta salads on our plate either via tongs or plastic fork.

And just like a game of Russian Roulette, we each choose our destiny and risk the possibility of sickness and death with this selection of pasta salad. There is usually something in the back of our head which says, "don't do it. you'll be sorry." But just like any other vice that makes it's way into our system, we ignore this voice of wisdom. And thus under the guise of obligation and peer pressure we pull the trigger and hope for the best, but expecting the worse.