That picture is actually a fair representation of my Saturday. My wife Vespertine had to work and I was home alone with little Photinus, who had mostly cleared through the feverish part of being sick and moved on to runny nose, coughing and pint-sized peevishness. In order to gird myself for sick baby wrangling, I drove to Wendy's for lunch en route to the grocery store for supplies. That evening, once Vespertine and I had gotten Photinus to bed, we realized nothing in the house appealed to us for dinner, so we ordered a pizza and opened a bottle of wine. Either one of those would normally be a treat for me; both on the same day was downright decadent.
But some days you just have to be decadent. I was reading an interview with Alton Brown last week and he talked about recently losing something like 50 pounds, and how he's basically said goodbye forever to certain unhealthy foods. He plans to never eat another bite of ice cream or chili cheese fries for the rest of his life. Which to me sounds like excessive self-mortification, and quite possibly missing the point. I get that if you overindulge every day, either in the volume or richness or fast-food-crappiness of your dietary intake, you're going to slowly but surely gain more and more weight and become more and more unhealthy and that could very well end up being your direct cause of death. Very few people can own being at peace with "poor health and death" being their endgame. (I'm big into looking at things in terms of endgame lately. I blame the media coverage of the healthcare debate.) On the other hand, if you are overweight and unhealthy but you can find the willpower to underindulge, eat healthier food in smaller amounts, you will slowly but surely lose some excess weight and you might actually live longer. And living as long as possible is an excellent endgame, but is endlessly counting calories and eating nothing but tofu and green leafy vegetables forever equally excellent? (No.)
So there has to be a happy medium. Eating fast food every day might be convenient and delicious but it's not sustainable. Eating ultra-health-conscious every day is sustainable but I personally have never found it either particularly convenient or delicious. But living lean most of the time and occasionally ordering the Blooming Onion at Outback, that's the sweet spot. I'm not saying I'm perfect at hitting that sweet spot, and I probably (definitely) err more on the side of overindulgence, but I know what I'm aiming for. And I think it's achievable, as opposed to when I wrote a couple weeks ago about smoking, and how I can't be an occasional smoker in some kind of idealized middle-of-the-road way. Unlike the diabolical cigarette, one Blooming Onion does not lead inexorably to "Fuck it, Big Mac, Large Fries and chocolate shake every day for lunch this month."
Just to clarify, when I do order the Blooming Onion it is always to share with at least one other person. The Wendy's solo excursion this past weekend was a bit of defensive self-medicating with food, which I'll cop to even though I'm not terribly proud of it. But the vast majority of the time, most of the fun of eating extravagantly is eating extravagantly with others. One of my favorite things about going to Las Vegas is hitting the all-you-can-eat breakfast at the Paradise Buffet, which is one of those experiences that make all kinds of dieting and working out worthwhile so that my body is healthy enough to take a massive hit. I've been known to make four or five trips from my table to the food stations and leave not because I'm done eating (full, yes, but not finished) but because my companions are getting bored. (Or possibly horrified, but they hide it well.) Still, even with all my unbridled enthusiasm, I'm perfectly happy to sit at the table and wait, watching my friend's camera or Vespertine's purse, while other people take their turn filling their plates. I know my turn will come, but sharing a meal together with someone, and seeing what they selected out of all the options, possibly even sampling something they found that I might have missed, is just as enjoyable (and maybe more important) than gathering up my round of scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage and nachos and roast beef with horseradish and tomato mozzarella salad and a couple of bagels. Which might sound even more obscene than the Happy Meal Pizza but man oh MAN losing money all day at roulette and black jack takes some calorie-fueled stamina. Do not knock it 'til you've tried it.
Anyway, my love of sharing food experiences may very well be inheritable. Yesterday I was feeding Photinus his lunch and although his appetite's been off for a few days he was doing well with his sliced banana and diced chicken nugget. Then he gestured towards some of his blocks and I handed him one. The block had a number 7 on the top, seven little shapes on the bottom, and seven bas-relief butterflies around the four sides. Usually Photinus doesn't want toys while he's eating, but I wasn't arguing. I was amused, though, when Photinus held the block in one hand, a tiny piece of chicken nugget in the other, and very delicately tried to feed one of the little butterflies. I'm not 100% convinced that sharing food with inanimate objects indicates a true communal culinary spirit just yet, but I'd like to think it’s in the works.
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