Tom Brady is launching a meal service because he wants to suck the joy out of eating for you, too

Tom Brady sells a Nutrition Manual, which is really just a cookbook with recipes for different fancy ways of preparing grass. He offers fancy pajamas that he claims will facilitate recovery after a strenuous workout. He once starred in a commercial in which he tries to sell you a $5,000 mattress.

And now, Brady is now leaning even further into the TB12 lifestyle brand: On Tuesday morning, the greatest quarterback of all time (I’m from Boston, deal with it) launched a partnership with the already existing meal service Purple Carrot. It turns out that the only requirements for naming one of these things are that you pick a color and then a cooking-related object (lookin’ at you, Blue Apron).

Look, I want to be clear that Tom Brady can do whatever Tom Brady wants. He’s clearly cultivating a wheatgrass-inspired image, and if he wants to mainline avocados and avoid carbs, alcohol, sugar, caffeine — and even tomatoes and strawberries for crying out loud — he should feel so inclined. He can also sell said image. It’s a free country. If people buy this stuff and feel that it makes them healthier and happier, then it’s a win-win for everyone involved.

I just feel like it’s on all of us who maybe don’t want to eat ice-cube cupcakes with air frosting to make fun of the things he’s offering. Especially since the CEO of Purple Carrot said this to Darren Rovell over at ESPN:

“Roughly 75 percent of those that order with us are female. We think having Tom will make it more likely that we’ll get some more men subscribing because they feel that connection to him. That being said, there’s a lot of women out there that want their significant other to be like Tom, too.”

Barf! Are you kidding me? I don’t want my significant other to eat like Tom Brady, because then it means we can never eat anything besides ground-up lentils mixed with flax seeds molded into the shape of footballs. Can you imagine not being able to go out for Italian food because your dude is like, “Nah, babe, gotta stick to my diet of wood chips and dirt.”

It seems like they’re marketing this as catnip for people who hope that eating like Tom Brady will make them as handsome as he is.

Newsflash: It won’t. Jimmy Garoppolo is the only person who could eat Tom Brady’s meal boxes and be as handsome as he is, and that’s only because Jimmy Garoppolo is already, I would argue, as handsome as Tom Brady. New England’s handsome quarterbacks are the reason New England is good at football. No one talks about that, but it’s true.

The menu items are all “gluten-free, limited in soy and refined sugars,” obviously. The first ones will ship April 3. Here’s a sample:

WHITE LENTIL RISOTTO WITH WINTER ROASTED VEGETABLE, MEYER LEMON & CASHEW GREMOLATA

RAMEN BOWL WITH CHARRED BROCCOLINI AND GINGERED AMARANTH GREENS

CRISPY TURNIP CAKES WITH QUINOA TABBOULEH AND ZA’ATAR YOGURT

I’m sorry, but I don’t know what half of these words mean, and I worked at a cooking magazine for two years.

If you’re worried about price, I guess it could be worse. His cookbook (sorry, Nutrition Manual™) was $200 dollars, but Tom Brady’s Healthy Meal Boxes for Pliable Muscles and Handsome Faces will cost you $78 a week, which comes out to $13 per plate. I’m not sure if this is a good deal, because I just keep buying loaves of bread and blocks of cheddar for dinner. It’s super cheap if you’re willing to subsist entirely on cheese and carbs, which Tom Brady isn’t.

Also, can we talk about this? It’s the most offensive blog post I’ve ever seen read in my entire life.

A HEALTHY KING CAKE RECIPE, PURPLE CARROT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I realize this isn’t a part of the TB12 meal box, but I just have to get this off my chest: If I’m eating king cake, I want it to be as unhealthy as possible. I want to feel the sugar course through my veins, the frosting seep into the crevices of my teeth, the flaky dough settle into my hips. I want it to be so bad for me it hurts, and I want it to be the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that Tom Brady seems determined to suck the joy out of not only his, but your eating experiences, too.

On the other hand, he’s also 39 and still the best quarterback on the planet. So maybe the joke is really on us gluttons.