I hate my wife’s cousin Deb, whom I love.

Deb is the sort of person you would describe as “neat,” if “neat” were still a word that is used to describe a person, which it is not.

She is an old, unrepentant hippie, complete with a stint in a commune on her resumé. Although she lives in a small town in the middle of Ohio, that small town is Yellow Springs, which is essentially an enclave of her fellow old, unrepentant hippies.

(The last time we visited her, incidentally, we stayed in Springfield, Ohio, where we did not see a single immigrant eat a dog or a cat. I only mention it because this is a food column.)

Deb is a carpenter by trade, but she has held many jobs. At the moment, she concentrates her efforts on a nonprofit organization she founded that tries to get the government to give money to the families of people whose relatives died young after working, unprotected, in the early years of the country’s nuclear program.

Her own father died at 36 after working in atomic weapons research at the Mound Laboratory in Ohio in the days before they knew about the dangers of radiation.

Deb’s oldest son is a very popular writer of dark and violent novels, but he is only popular in France. That is the only country that now publishes his books, and they have to be translated because he does not speak the language. He was recently featured in the French version of Rolling Stone magazine. None of this is relevant to this column, but I think it’s interesting.

Deb recently visited us on her way back from a trip to New Mexico. Along the way, she picked up several boxes of information about how beryllium was used in early atomic research.

“I brought beryllium material,” she said, and we laughed because prolonged exposure to the metal can be harmful.

But she also brought food, and this is why I hate her. She brought lots and lots of food. When she travels, she brings a veritable pantry with her, and then she shares it with the people she stays with along the way.

Deb is thin. But she brought more calories than any other human should ever eat.

She brought chocolate-covered malt balls, which I swear I heard my wife call “chocolate-covered moth balls.” She brought chocolate mint cremes, which are basically chocolate-covered mint balls.

“I like chocolate,” she said, by way of explanation.

“That’s why you brought chocolate-covered beryllium,” I said.

She brought dried tangerine slices, which are almost as good as I wanted them to be, and also some kind of cracker which I guess did not make much of an impression.

We got pizza for dinner, and pizza is not exactly the healthiest of meals. We intentionally got too much pizza, too, so we could introduce Deb to the best breakfast of all time, a fried egg on top of reheated leftover pizza.

I also got us each a large chocolate chip cookie for dessert.

Meanwhile, my wife also bought a loaf of bread, which we needed, and a large pretzel, which we did not. For Deb’s visit, the house was crammed full with carbohydrates, and soon we were, too.

You say I didn’t have to eat it all?

I’ve been writing this column all these years, and you still don’t know me.

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