Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
There is a specific kind of morning that begins with coffee and ends with you eating cold pudding directly from a baking dish at 11 p.m., questioning every decision you have ever made regarding food, proximity to livestock, and the fundamental trustworthiness of your own sinuses.
This was, in every measurable sense, a biologically implausible breakfast.
It started, as most of my bad decisions do, with the internet.
In Which the Toast Tries to Kill Me
I was standing at the counter, waiting for the toaster, scrolling through the news on my phone with the particular optimism of a man who has not yet been informed of anything. The coffee was good. The morning was quiet. Trouble McFussbucket, my pig, was doing whatever it is pigs do at dawn, which I have come to understand involves grievances I am not equipped to process before 8 a.m.
The toast popped up. Golden brown. Slightly darker on one corner, the way I like it.
This is when I learned that I had been, for my entire adult life, slowly poisoning myself with toast.
According to scientists at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, the browning and crisping that makes toast delicious is produced by the same chemical process that generates acrylamide, a compound classified as a probable carcinogen. The darker the toast, the more acrylamide. Which means that for forty-some years, I have been optimizing my breakfast directly toward cancer, and doing it with real enthusiasm.
The scientists, bless them, have a solution. They used CRISPR gene editing to knock out the asparagine gene in wheat, which is the precursor that converts to acrylamide during baking. The result is a bread that, even after toasting, produces acrylamide levels so low they are, in some samples, below detectable limits. Safe toast. Scientifically absolved toast. Toast that will not, in theory, murder you.
I stared at my CRISPR wheat toast. My CRISPR wheat toast stared back. It had no idea what it had done.
In Which Things Get Significantly Worse
I ate the toast anyway, because I am a man of principle and also because I was hungry, and then I made the catastrophic mistake of continuing to read the news.
A 58-year-old woman in Greece, who worked outdoors on an island near a field of grazing sheep, developed pain in the center of her face over the course of several weeks. Then came a severe cough. Then, one day, she sneezed, and worms came out of her nose.
Not metaphorical worms. Not “worms” as a colorful regional expression. Larvae. Specifically, the larvae of the sheep bot fly, Oestrus ovis, a parasite that typically colonizes the nasal passages of sheep and goats and had, in this case, apparently decided the woman’s maxillary sinuses were an acceptable alternative. Doctors surgically removed ten larvae and a pupa.
A pupa. Inside a human face.
I set down my coffee.
I live on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Technically, I do not have shee. I have a pig, a chihuahua, two dogs of varying visual capacity, and a cat named Vinny Van Meow who I am increasingly convinced operates according to a private moral code. But I am adjacent to sheep country. This is Virginia. There are fields and there are flies. There are, I now understand, flies with ambitions. Farm life, it turns out, comes with a threat radius I had not fully mapped.
In Which I Consider My Sinuses Personally
The woman in Greece had, the doctors noted, a severely deviated nasal septum, which may have contributed to the larvae being unable to exit normally and therefore progressing through multiple developmental stages inside her skull. I do not know the precise geometry of my own nasal septum. I have never had reason to consider it as a variable.
Now, I am considering .
The medical report described the infection as “biologically implausible” not once but essentially throughout, as if the authors kept stopping to remind themselves and their colleagues that this should not have been possible. The larvae were not supposed to develop past the first stage in a human host. They made it to the third stage. One achieved pupation. The scientists concluded that either some unknown anatomic factor was responsible, or the species may be evolutionarily adapting to complete its life cycle in humans.
Evolutionary adaptation. The flies are learning.
I looked out the window at the field, thinking about the CRISPR wheat. I thought about how the scientists had spent two years and the resources of six European research institutions to make toast marginally safer, and somewhere on a Greek island, a sheep fly had looked at a woman’s face and thought: close enough.
In Which I Complete the Biologically Implausible Breakfast, Thereby Solving Nothing
There are moments in a person’s life when the correct response to the news is to bake something. Not to process. Not to discuss. To put flour and butter and eggs into a bowl and make something warm and sweet and humble, because the world is full of carcinogens and larvae and outcomes that should not be possible, and you need something that makes sense.
Poor Man’s Pudding, or Pouding Chômeur, is a French Canadian dessert from the Great Depression. The name tells you everything about who invented it and why. It is what the unemployed made when they had almost nothing: plain cake batter poured into a pan of hot maple syrup and brown sugar, baked until the cake floats to the top and the sauce sinks into a warm, pooled sweetness underneath.
It is worth noting that virtually all puddings are Poor Man’s Puddings. Bread pudding is stale bread you couldn’t afford to throw away. Rice pudding is leftover rice. Spotted dick is, well, spotted dick is its own conversation. The “Poor Man’s” qualifier exists not to distinguish this pudding from some wealthier pudding, but apparently to reassure you that whoever made it was doing their best. The Rich Man’s Pudding is not a thing. The rich man is eating something with a Spanish name and a garnish. He is not making a pudding.
Pudding is, at its core, humble food with something going on underneath. The cake floats. The sauce hides. This is what pudding does. It presents a pleasant surface and keeps its complications to itself, which perhaps explains why the most famous pudding spokesman in American history, now 88 years old and still very much among us, seemed like such a natural fit for the job. Given everything that was going on underneath, “biologically implausible” seems, in retrospect, about right.
I made the pudding that afternoon. Trouble McFussbucket watched from outside the window with what I can only describe as professional interest. The kitchen smelled like maple syrup and better decisions. The pudding came out golden.
It was only later, eating it warm from the dish, that I did the math.
The pudding is baked. In an oven. Hot. From regular wheat flour, not CRISPR wheat, not low-asparagine wheat, not the product of two years of field trials and six German universities. Just flour. From a bag. Poured into a 350-degree oven and left there for forty minutes until it browns.
The asparagine is right there.
I had fled the toast and baked my way directly back to the same problem, except now I was also eating it in a maple syrup puddle, which arguably makes the whole thing worse. I had outsmarted nothing. The acrylamide, the larvae, the deviated septum risk, the flies with their evolutionary ambitions, none of it cared that I had made something from scratch. The universe does not award points for effort. It awards worms, and cancer, and pudding that is technically also trying to kill you, floating golden and warm in its own sauce while you stand in your farmhouse kitchen feeling like an idiot.
I ate the rest of it cold at 11 p.m., directly from the pan.
It was delicious. The flies were quiet. My sinuses, as far as I know, remain my own.
I’m not ruling anything out.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
