Ants don't like bananas. I have come to this conclusion. We have occasional visits from "moisture ants" or "sugar ants" or whatever their technical name is. ("Odorous house ant," according to at least one webpage. They do smell weird when crushed.) When we leave bread crumbs around, the ants get interested. When we leave a smudge of jam, they go nuts. But several times now I have left a half-eaten banana lying on the counter, and not once have the ants touched it. It's like bananas are ant repellant. Must be chemically similar to the ant poison bait we have tried, which also elicits zero interest from the ants. A can of Raid, now, that seems to work.

Speaking of produce: if you are fretful that you aren't getting enough vegetables in your diet, because you don't like enough vegetables well enough to eat them, fret no longer. I am almost 30 and I am still learning to like new vegetables. Over the past several years I have picked up quite a few new healthy tastes. Before age 20, the vegetables I would eat were:
peas
corn (which barely counts)
green beans
carrots
lettuce (sometimes)
celery (maybe)

In my early to mid 20s I revised it to include:
broccoli (sometimes)
salad greens
lettuce (definitely)
celery (definitely)
bell peppers
zucchini
garlic
tomatoes (cooked)
cucumber
avocado
spinach
cauliflower (sometimes)
asparagus (sometimes)
fennel
pretty much all herbs and edible flowers

And in the last year alone I have added:
tomatoes (raw, sun-dried, cooked, whatever)
chard
olives
artichokes

If you had asked me about that list ten years ago, I'd have sworn to you I would never, ever like avocados, spinach, raw tomatoes, artichokes, or olives; and the others I would be deeply suspicious about. Olives are my most recent acquisition. A few months ago I cautiously spooned tapenade onto a piece of bread, took a bite, and thought, "Wow, this is really good, even though I don't like olives!" Well, hel-LO, McFly, tapenade IS olives. (And some garlic and capers. I have no official opinion on capers.) And by last week I was fishing the little green salad olives out of the jar and eating them by themselves.

So there you have it. Progress toward healthy eating IS possible, even if you're out of adolescence.

By the way, if you need tasty recipes to help adjust to these foods, I cannot recommend this cookbook highly enough. Everything I've tried from it has totally rocked so far. They know what they're doing over there at America's Test Kitchen, and they tell you WHY you have to follow the recipe the way they wrote it. Very useful.

P.S. Argh. Am I the only one getting heavily spammed tonight with emails containing some .zip attachment? Or is there a new virus going around?