a nutritionist, a rabbi anld a monk walk into a bar....

I've often told people that at parties I feel like a priest - once people hear that I'm a nutritionist they stop talking, look down at their plate, and then start to confess all of their diet-related "sins". More recently I've discovered that being a nutritionist also makes for interesting conversations on airplanes.

Yesterday when I was flying from Chicago to Miami, I got drawn into two nutritional counseling sessions with total strangers. The first was with a woman sitting across from me in the O'Hare food court. Not quite sure how it happened but we started talking about local food and buying organic. Our talk ended with me "referring" her to this helpful guide to the 12 best and 12 worst fruits and veggies in regard to pesticide load to help her prioritize her organic shopping. A couple hours later, as my plane was landing, the women next to me heard about my work in Haiti and asked if I had any advice about feeding her autistic son. Unfortunately that's an area I really know nothing about.

The most interesting on-board discussion I've ever had about my work was on another flight to Miami two years ago. I could feel the eyes of the man seated next to me looking over my shoulder at the proposal about nutrition and HIV/AIDS that I was writing on my laptop. Soon he started making some very specific comments about nutrition and HIV that made me wonder whether he had any personal experience with the disease. By the end of the flight he had shared the full story of his HIV diagnosis, of watching his closest friends die terrible deaths, of riding the ups and downs of new drugs and their side-effects, and about how being HIV-positive continues to affect his self-perceptions and overall health. He offered me the gift of a small glimpse of the realities of living with HIV/AIDS - something I see every day but don't even begin to understand.