Day 1 at Hippocrates: A Sprout Extravaganza

We arrived yesterday at around noon, just in time for our first raw, vegan lunch. Mealtimes at the Hippocrates Health Institute are buffet-style, and the line-up is exactly the same no matter what day or which meal it is: first is a gigantic bowl of mesclun, then there's sprouts (clover), and sprouts (red lentil), and sprouts (adzuki), and sprouts (mung bean), and sprouts (fenugreek), and sprouts (radish), and sprouts (alfalfa), and sprouts (sunflower), and sprouts (buckwheat), and sprouts (sweet pea), and sprouts (lentil again). All the way at the end there's a much smaller spread of cucumbers, peppers, radishes, onions, scallions, carrots, olives, dulse (a type of seaweed), and dressing. Sandwiched between the grande sprout buffet and the other veggies is the "entree" -- some kind of dressed salad, or a pate, or some crackers. Tonight we had a special treat: "tacos". The taco "meat" was seasoned walnuts, accompanied by red-pepper salsa, with romaine-leaf "tortillas".

The idea is to pile your plate high with sprouts, and make everything else a tiny side item. One sprout-packed meal is novel; four, for a person like me who almost never eats sprouts, is, well, frustrating to the palate. It's particularly annoying when one of the dowdy old ladies who are veterans of the program here sticks her face in your plate or your conversation and presumptuously offers advice on how you should eat and live your life. My sister and I sat down to our first meal, and when my sister declared she was thirsty and got up to get a cup of water, one nosy old crone at the next table barked, "You CAN'T drink water with your MEAL!!" My sister glanced at me, with a puzzled look on her face. I leaned forward and said, very deliberately, "Denise, if you're thirsty, feel free to get a drink of water."

Today I was the victim of an even worse offense: after nagging me endlessly in the lunch line about how I didn't have enough sprouts on my plate, Ruth, an extremely rude woman who simply won't shut up despite the fact that everyone here probably wishes she would be struck mute, decides I simply must eat one of the flowers in the entree salad, and proceeds to pick it out of the buffet with her fingers and attempt to deposit it on my plate. "Here!" she piped, "You should eat one of these!"

"No," I parried, swiftly pulling my plate out of reach of her oily claw, "YOU should EAT IT."

After the first lunch, we were shown our accommodations, in a nice house with 5 bedrooms, each occupied by 1-2 people. We had a tour of the entire campus, introductions all around, and an explanation of our juicing regimen -- green juice (a cocktail of cucumber, celery, and, yes, sprouts) at 9am, 11am, and 4pm, and wheatgrass juice four times a day. The wheatgrass, we are told, is the most important part of the regimen. Twice a day we are to drink two ounces, and twice a day we are to take four ounces as a rectal implant.

That's right, you read correctly. I will report to you about this business of administering wheatgrass in this manner tomorrow, after I've had the joy of experiencing it firsthand.