I just dumped into the garbage can two apples, some carrots, a carton of cottage cheese and a mélange of chicken and vegetables that I paid $10.99 a pound for at Whole Foods. Why? Because in the last seven days I flew from L.A. to San Francisco, then flew from San Francisco back to L.A., then flew from L.A. to Seattle, then flew from Seattle back to L.A. During that dull yet tedious jaunt, most of the healthy groceries I had purchased grew mold, went sour or otherwise disintegrated in my kitchen.
Even more disgusting than the shriveled, blackened bananas on the counter are the memories of what I did consume this past week while bouncing from various hotels and airports.
For those of you who manage to work out consistently and eat virtuously while traveling for business, let me say now that I admire you and also hate your guts. My typical business trip is an exercise in starvation followed by gorging, mini-bar lunches and late-night Mexican eaten with one hand while re-writing a speech with the other.
Let us begin with the gorging: The morning I left for Seattle, I realized that I had bought way too many strawberries and that they would certainly rot by the time I returned home. And because I was raised by people who hectored you about all the starving children in Africa when you didn’t want to eat your zucchini, I felt compelled to eat the entire lot. The jolt of Vitamin C provided by 37 large, organic strawberries was probably beneficial. However, the problem with that kind of meal is that you are hungry two hours later and since Alaska Airlines has decided that humans don’t need anything in the way of food while in their airplanes, by the time I got to the hotel in Seattle I was starving.
Desperate, I peered into the mini-bar and found my favorite hunger management solution: A bag of popcorn and a Diet Pepsi. I think most of you know this recipe, but in case you’ve never had to stay at work until 2 a.m. with vending machines as your only source of sustenance, I’ll share it. (It works equally well if you substitute pretzels for the popcorn.) Eat some popcorn and wash down with a few swigs of Diet Pepsi. Repeat until both popcorn and Diet Pepsi are gone. The carbonation in the Diet Pepsi will combine with the fluffiness of the popcorn, causing the entire mess to expand to 12 times its original volume in your gut. You’ll feel bloated as well as vaguely sick from the sudden influx of chemicals and 
preservatives, and within minutes your stomach will have pooched out alarmingly and unattractively over your belt. But you won’t be hungry again for at least three or four hours and the caffeine will help keep you awake.
It certainly kept my hunger at bay until dinner was served for us working stiffs doomed to work late into the night getting executives prepared for their public speaking duties. In this case, dinner was pepperoni pizza and buffalo wings and a giant bowl of lettuce next to which sat an equally large bowl of Caesar dressing. It’s hard to describe the aroma, but the sight of the pizza cheese congealing under the heat lamp was too much even for me and so I fled to the hotel bar in search of slightly better fare.
It just proves how low one has sunk when he or she heads to a bar in search of higher quality food. I pondered the menu of fried calamari, fried oysters and fried cheese and 
picked the only item not dunked in canola oil: Seared tuna on a bit of salad for $15. I finished the 1.5 ounces of tuna in approximately 1.5 minutes and, still hungry, looked around the bar. I spied a bowl of Chex Mix and dug my paw into it, washing it down with a so-so syrah.
If that grosses you out, you are an innocent babe when it comes to business travel cuisine. Last winter I had to get from New York City to Washington, D.C. on the train the morning after a blizzard had dumped two feet of snow along the eastern seaboard in less than a day. Miraculously, my train was still running, though due to power outages and fallen trees, what should have 
been a three hour trip stretched to almost nine hours. At hour seven, when I was so hungry I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to the café car and asked what was left in the kitchen. “A pastrami sandwich and some Cocoa Puffs,” the guy said. “Great,” I answered. “I’ll take it.” And I did, paying $10 for the privilege and washing it down with Diet Pepsi.
While waiting in the Seattle airport for my delayed flight back home, I cruised through the food court, which had an inordinate number of sushi and fish restaurants. Seattle may be on the water, but IMHO only an idiot or someone with a death wish eats raw fish at an airport. I settled for the generic-looking bistro, ordering a salad, a chocolate chip cookie the size of a hubcap and a double espresso, thus ensuring that the trip would be a 100% nutritional disaster.
It isn’t all Cocoa Puffs and quesadillas when I travel, however. For those of you who have road-tripped with me on business, you know that I’ll risk the wrath of any accounting department geek in order to visit a fine dining establishment. Ah, the memories of Craft, Esca, Lever House, Gramercy Tavern and Babbo in New York. Remember dinner at Regoulade in Paris, when I tried to order in French and told the waiter you’d like the “chest of frying pan?” So much cholesterol, so many trans-fats, so many laughs, so many expense reports sent back to us with red exclamation points in the margins.
