Emerald Bile

"They're like crack" said the woman in the health food shop. "Don't blame me if you get addicted".

I actually wasn't surprised by this passing reference to Class A drugs used by the scummier classes, from a vegetable-dye-wearing vegan. Lots of junkies merely change horses in midstream, one addiction replaces another. Indeed the Health Food Scene is as didactic, inclusive and substance obsessed, as that of the Serious Drug User. And it's a short leap to transfer a previous devotion to things that have been up peoples backsides, into one for things which race through people's backsides.

Anyway - the addictive thing this woman with the itchy-looking jumper was talking about, was an uneven ball of green matter, stuck with nutty bits, in a not-very-vegan looking plastic wrapper.

The reason I go to this hippy shop in the first place, is because I am allergic to milk, and health food shops make disgusting cheese out of soap, or something, which I can then put on a pizza and pretend that I am normal. So before any of you fuckers start up "you are a vegan, you love health foods" I do not. I am ill and would like nothing more than to eat a dirty, stinking, runny brie whose creation involves the sacrifice of a million Charolais calves, but instead am reduced to some fucking appalling and overpriced crap called "Sheeze".

So, I buy my strange pretend cheese, and to liven things up, each visit, I take a Russian Roulette approach to the confectionery counter in the Health Food Shop. I have previously lost in the game to "carob" (grainy turd), "fruit leather" (what it says - leathery old shite) and "Licorice sticks" (a twig. Seriously - a fucking twig, I couldn't believe my eyes). This time I spotted a misshapen ball of snot stuff - spirulina it is called - and I decided to try it. Not only was I not surprised by the shop woman's reference to crack, but was also used to her excessive, but inaccurate, gushing about products. One time, she had described carob as "better than chocolate" - she is clearly mental as well as a junkie, the hairy old slag. So I was not holding out a great deal of hope for this sphere of snot, but I was looking forward to slagging it the fuck off later, to this one I know who actually is a vegan.

I paid the woman an obscene amount of money, which again did not surprise me. They had charged me over a pound for that fucking twig,last time, the thieving goat-milking cunts. And I ate the ball, and it was, remarkably good. I looked at the list of ingredients to see if it was one of those health food things that is actually the same as normal food, just a million times as expensive - that's it "organic", is the way they describe it, but it was not an "organic" item. It was a weird combination of brown rice and this thing, the spirulina, and some almonds, and grape juice (which is vegan for sugar) and some oil, and then I saw it, on the list of ingredients. "Fo-Ti". Fucking "Fo-Ti". I know what that is from China. It's boner medicine. The Chinese take it to treat erectile dysfunction (to get wood). So although your one in the shop HAD identified that the spirulina ball had medicinal properties, she had picked the wrong street name for what sort of drug it actually contained. Fo-Ti, boys. Get some lead in your pencils. Buy yourselves a health food snot ball. You heard it here first.

Noreen