Flax Seed Meal
My FSM Department

For going on twenty years now, I’ve been adding flax seed meal along with raw wheat germ to my salads, and recently, after I started to blend my salad ingredients into a drinkable green smoothie instead, to this blend as well.

Then, trimming my budget (the price of flax seed meal rising a little faster and further than I was comfortable with) and simplifying things (something I enjoy, just on principle) I recently decided to drop the flax seed meal and add a little extra, less expensive, wheat germ instead. Dollars to be saved. Ingredients to be simplified.

How-ever, came to discover after a few months of this, that my step was losing a little spring, my mornings some of their bounce, my days some of their alertness.

I rarely get sick, so that was not my go-to explanation, but after a week or two of fruitless “What on Earths?” I had to go there. I checked my temperature, irritatingly normal. I scoured for other illness symptoms, nary a one. I put in a little extra sleep, perhaps that was it—I am getting on in years after all; made no difference.

What on Earth?, indeed.

Then my stomach cleared its gastric throat and spoke up. This is what it told me. And I quote:

“We’re a team down here and we pride ourselves on a job well done. For quite a while now, years in fact, we’re been so accustomed and adapted to flax seed meal that a while back we established a separate flax seed meal department—FMS Department for short—that did nothing each day aside from breaking down and metabolizing this omega-three-rich supplement.

“This turned out to be a good arrangement and the grounds for much gastric harmony.

“Suddenly and very much dismayingly,” my stomach went on to say, “you ditched flax seed meal, and just like that, the FSM department was out of a job.”

My stomach then went on to informed me that there had been much gastric mumbling and rumbling about this change and about what should be done about it.

When no solution was found, the now idle, unhappy, and increasingly impatient FSM Department decided to take matters into its own hands.

Enlisting body-wide sympathizers to join them on the picket line as it were, they set out to teach me a lesson, and a lesson was indeed taught for I soon, as I mentioned, began to feel a little run down, a little out of sorts, a little incomplete nutritionally. Not quite right. Not quite sure how they did it but did it they did.

Then the FSM Department itself spoke up, complainingly, chantingly, and loudly: “FSM, FSM, FSM, FSM…!”

Okay, okay, okay, I get it. I’ll put you guys back to work.

And I did.

And all is now well with the back to work FSM Department, as with the rest of my stomach and with my health in general.

Gastric harmony restored.

Funny the turns things can take. And so nice when things return to feeling well again.

(This short essay has been brought to you by Flax Seed Meal, “Good for you in so many ways.”)

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