Scrounger, 1996 - present

This week in my office there were some arduous all-day meetings (which fortunately had nothing to do with me), the most visible evidence of which were the cast-off foodstuffs. Apparently the meeting organizers went way overboard, buying huge bulk-store tubs of donut holes and mini-muffins and chocolate chip cookies and whatnot, only to see very few of those baked goods actually eaten by the meeting participants. So they eventually showed up in the cubicle farm for everyone to help themselves to. Which of course I did. And this, furthermore, really is just the beginning of the grazing free-for-all which unfailingly coincides with the holiday season as manifested within the Big Gray. I find myself powerless to resist, and can only console myself with the thought that it only lasts for a month. (Five weeks. Six, tops.)

I may very well have locked in my permanent behavior patterns back when I first entered the white-collar working world as a recent grad. Less than six months after I departed from my college, English degree in hand, I was splitting the rent on a townhouse with some friends and working as a temp (see earlier re: B.A. in English). The townhouse was a nice enough place to lay my head (also more often than not a rip-roaring place to avoid laying my head down in favor of more debaucherous shenanigans) and temping paid the bills, but only just. My roommates and I would also split the grocery bill, which seemed like a good idea on paper but often resulted in going shopping once a month or so, right before we were about to throw a party, and buying a few staple food items in addition to the festive munchies and beer, and said staples were always depleted way more quickly than they were restocked. So that meant eating out a lot when the bank account balance was high, or not eating much at all when it was low.

Or the third option – eating for free, on the company tab! Indeed, it has not been so long that I can’t remember when free food at work was not just a treat but an important part of my (wildly im)balanced diet. And not much caused me greater anguish than ducking out of the office for an early lunch consisting of whatever could be had at Taco Bell for under $4, only to come back to my desk and get word a little later that there were leftover sandwiches from a board meeting available if anyone wanted them. $4 wasted! Unless the sandwiches in question were pinwheels, because I never quite managed to overcome my aversion to extra-soggy lunchmeat-and-cheese wraps.

But other than that, I’d be generally inclined to double-up on lunch all the same, on the principle that there probably wasn’t going to be much at home for dinner, either. Whenever I read anything about nutrition and human evolution and how we’re all basically hardwired to eat as much as we can at any given moment in anticipation of the famine and deprivation that would be right around the corner in the state of nature, it feels pretty resonant. It’s nice to have matured in my career and my lifestyle habits such that I can afford to stock a fridge and pantry and manage to do so the vast majority of the time, but man, those late 90’s scrounging days. Crazy times.