In Which I Talk about Food for, Like, Ever

Here are some things about food.

I am always thinking about food.

Around Christmastime I had a free consultation with a fancy nutritionist who cost $300 a month, and I was all geared up to give her $300 a month because I felt like had effectively taken command of my brain and spending $300 on a nutritionist seemed like a really good way to stage a coup.

When I was in high school I spent a summer on the track team. Well, I never actually ran track or on a track, but I did get up for practice, get shin splints and obsessively monitor the color of my urine, so that’s sort of like being on the track team. Anyway that summer I gave up fast food and soda pop, and I pretty much never had them again.

Taco Bell Taco: Zinc Content 0%

In Jr. High, I spent my lunch money on ding dongs (these are apparently "ring dings" if you live in the east, and King Dons in Canada) and root beer. Every day. I added shoestring fries and personal pizzas if I particularly needed sustenance.  I was nutso depressed and had terrible acne and I remember reading an article that said you would get bad acne if you didn’t get enough zinc. I was convinced zinc was the problem.

In high school I knew people with cars who would take me to Wendy’s or Taco Bell for lunch. Every day. I liked that liquid cheese that you got on the nachos. Oh and Arby’s. We did Arby’s sometimes. Then we would go to Taco Bell after school for a snack. The zinc deficiency continued.

My parents were not into this jazz. My mother served us a meal with a white meat and two vegetables every night of our lives. She taught us to read cereal boxes and wouldn’t let us pick anything with more than 3 grams of sugar. (That’s some f’ing parenting right there, by the way.) Sweets came in a regimented time-release/reward system that I still adhere to instinctively like an animal that’s been taught a task for an experiment and then released into the wild. You get a snack in the afternoon and dessert after a meal that you have finished beyond plausible deniability. 

The other day I almost texted my mom to see if eating an avocado warranted dessert.

When Dan was a kid he was only allowed to take two cookies at a time. He still follows this rule. Even if he eats 16 cookies, they come in 8 pairs.

Traditional Canadian Mucus Pie

When we moved to Canada, and each family member’s crazy kicked into high gear, and the food rules got stretched and then broken. We were depressed and feelings were on the menu! My main engagement with Canada was culinary, which is a rare experience I’m sure. But I can remember each and every comfort food: wunderbars and Coffee Crisps, English Toffee, Timbits, Tim Horton’s Red Juice and Second Cup mochas, Crunchie, those Canadian mucus pies that look like they have mucus in them, nanaimo bars, foods we liked just because of their French names: Puffs du Guimave, Biscuits d’erable. Lots of things were d’erable.

Then there were the foods you COULDN’T get. We’d drive down to Buffalo and buy boxes of Ring Dings and Twizzlers and Little Debbie snacks and haul them back. And then one Saturday we were sitting on the couch on a Saturday watching Canadian Lawyers on the Prowl and eating as many Twizzlers as we wanted out of two massive bags (one black and one red) and it wasn’t even 2PM. I did not bring this up, not because I was afraid we’d stop eating Twizzlers if I brought it up, but because the rule was that sacred. Like I imagine people are when they commit a very foul crime out of desperation. They probably just don’t mention it. “Could you put those in the wood chipper?” They say in an even tone, referring to a sack of arms. It’s one thing to do it, and another to say so.

We were back in the states when I “joined” the track team. The coach had told the girls who were really on the team that they had to pee clear, and we were all obsessed with peeing clear and we made diligent reports to each other through stall walls. I just stopped eating fast food and I stopped drinking soda, and my zinc went right up, I guess because so did my energy and ability to ride out my violent mood swings.

I stopped because they were rules. No fast food. No soda. Once it’s a rule, it is. And then eventually, it doesn't have to be. I rarely want fast food OR soda now. The habit has changed and I don't really need it. The hardest and fastest of the no fast food rule pertains to McDonalds, though, and I have not eaten in a McDonalds since 1997. Every once in a while, it will come over me to eat a Taco Bell taco or a Wendy’s hamburger, which I always almost instantly regret both because my stomach hurts and because as soon as I’m done I want more more more. Stopping again if you do it once is the hard part. They have all those studies that say that fast food is addictive, and that is very likely true.

Vegetarian Snacks!

This is not to say that I got awesome at eating. In university, I took my zinc in largely through Cool Ranch Doritos, cold cuts and Strawberry-Orange-Banana juice (this last I sincerely believed balanced my meals, and I usually rewarded myself with Ben & Jerry’s for dessert.) Later I became a vegetarian for some reason I can’t remember now, and removed the cold cuts from the lineup. I was pretty much a Doritos vegetarian.

God bless New York, though, it has all the foods. I had never eaten spinach, brussels sprouts, asparagus, bok choy. There were a million vegetables I’d never heard of and they were all fresh. I learned about Thai food and Xua took me for Indian food, and then there was Dojo and Kelly & Ping. I remember how those restaurants felt looking back now, like they are from some bygone era of New York because they seemed so exotic and brilliant to me then. It’s probably just the wonder that’s bygone. I had never been in restaurants like this.  

Still in my mind, New York appears to me as a subway map of the city with a little red glowing light wherever something delicious is.

Slowly, slowly, I learned to cook. Chris had been bringing his own food in tupperware for years because he knew how to not have money, I tried to follow his lead. The first time I tried, I cut up three crimini mushrooms and put them in a saucepan. That didn’t seem to be working and I guessed some liquid was needed, so I put in a half a stick of butter. Then I ate them then I threw up. I started cutting vegetables and throwing them into steaming pots of Ramen. I still do that sometimes. Oriental seasoning, of course, because of vegetarianism.

Also bygone is the China I lived in, where you could not buy any kind of processed food anywhere. Oh, sure, you could walk down the road and get a hunk of meat off a fly covered slab. You could pull fresh fruits and vegetables off of farmer’s tables and blankets. But you could not walk into a supermarket and buy a box of crackers.

My first month in China I basically starved to death. I was taken with great ceremony on my first night in Yue Yang to the Man De Fu, which is the knockoff Mai Dang Lao, which is Chinese for

Shame on a Bun

McDonalds ™. It was pretty grotesque. We sat on indoor porch swings to eat whole fried chickens off of paper plates. They came with plastic gloves, which provided a strange civility to the tearing of fried flesh with teeth. After that I was left to my own devices.

I ate nightly at the place next door to where I lived, for as long as I still could eat. It seemed to me that I was going through an adjustment period digestively, and while this was true, it was also true that the proprietor of the restaurant would take the food off of the unfinished plates of previous guests and scrape it back into a bowl to serve to the next person (me.) Waste not want not, I guess, but Chinese people were in a better placed to avoid it because they both knew how to, and knew TO say “don’t give me that old food, I want new food.” A few weeks of this and I had to be carried to the hospital.

Tofu Brains

I didn’t know how to eat breakfast. The other working people where I lived started the day with a steaming bowl of noodles and a glass of hard liquor. I couldn't do it. Sometimes the old lady would come around with two buckets of “tofu brains” (why is it called this? I do not know) on her shoulders, and I’d have that. What I wanted was bread. But the Chinese outside of Shanghai were inconveniently resistant to French colonization, and as a result, their bread is totally weird. It’s, like, always kind of wet? Even when it’s dry? And the consistency is kind of like what I imagine the consistency of untrustworthiness would be, if that were made manifest? And much of it comes with terrible surprises buried inside, like half of a hot dog, or this kind of hair substance that I never figured out what it was.

Yuck, China. Why is there hair on this bread?

In the middle of that summer, which was so, so hot and in which there was not only no air conditioning but no industry to distract me during the hours upon hours that my colleagues used to sleep face down on their desks or slumped against the wall, I found a coffee shop that had a milkshake machine which actually restored my will to live. I would go there with my plastic cup to get it filled with cold milkshake. I brought my own cup because there were no disposable products in China at that time, and if you didn’t want to drink it out of a ceramic tea cup, you were SOL.

This flavor is called "ice cream"

I got better at navigating it, but Chinese food is made to be enjoyed by families, not individuals, and so every night I would get one lonely vegetable dish and eat it my lonely self. Over time I built a weird network of walks and bus trips that brought me to coveted just-for-one foods. My Saturday ritual was to sneak away from the family (who were very suspicious of my wanting to go places by myself) take the bus to the Wan De Fu (the knockoff Man De Fu) and eat a "chicken meat hamburger" on weird Chinese bread, a thing of fries and a Future Cola in a hunched over posture that was feral and defensive. I found a store that had O-li-o cookies.

When I think about how much of my time in China that I spent plotting to get food, hoarding and hiding food, waiting for food and purchasing food it kind of blows my mind. Not because it was so much time, my food program is usually running at at least 75% CPU, but because it was so wholly resistant to the abundance of natural, healthy food available. If I could have slightly altered my behavior to eat with others, if I could have eased out of my sugar addiction I would have saved so much time and felt so much better. But my habits were just way too strong.

It’s pretty much always like this. And the food stuff and the feelings stuff are twisted tightly together. If I’m eating donuts, I know that my life is seriously fucked. Donuts for breakfast? That is my equivalent of giving away prized possessions. The amount of processed food going into my body is directly proportional to the amount of depressed I am. The food doesn’t make me depressed, it more like reveals it. When I think of the lowest moments in my life, they all have a scene where I eat and eat and eat. Like that montage in a biopic about an addict, where you think I might get it together but instead I just eat a whole bag of cheeze curlz paired with a whole bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups then fall asleep crying and eating brown sugar out of the bag with a spoon. .

Also, there is no limit to the QUANTITY of food that I will eat if there is nothing to stop me such as needing my mouth to teach or limited availability of edible items. I can be sick to my stomach and it can be pushing up against the edge of my jeans, but I will keep right on packing food in.

I can’t have feelings and not eat at the same time. It takes too much bandwith. To be removed from my brain and heart, each feeling needs a specific vehicle. Sugar, salt and bread are the fastest ones I know. Vroom! Cake! Mostly I snack on free floating anxiety, and that really needs to attach itself to something that is in smaller pieces that I can pick up with two fingers, preferably without looking at the item as they are conveyed to my mouth. The busy transit of bite sized food items from their packaging to my feelings-hole is an excellent way to burn up unexamined worry. Tip: It’s good to have the next piece en route even as you begin to chew the previous. Like a conveyor belt or a ski lift.

The Buddha, seen here not eating Cheez-its

Every ten weeks we listen to the listening passage about how different spiritual traditions fast, and like all listening passages for my class, I have it memorized. The Harvard Professor of Comparative Religions explains that fasting symbolizes a breaking of attachment to material things which we enact every day through our desire for food. The Episcopal priest lays out how fasting is a way to build discipline, to sharpen the heart’s capacity by going through a limited amount of stress that is not completely undoing. I am always moved by these descriptions. Break the attachment! Yes! Capacity! Woo!

But there’s that and there’s cheese popcorn.

And that is why I am on the elimination diet right now, that lovely Sarah Sheen set up for me.

When MK heard that I was going to give the nutritionist $300, she asked why. And I told her the thing about feelings and eating. And she said maybe I should figure out the feelings instead of changing the eating. But I don't know how to do that so much. So for now, I'll eat this pile of kale and see what the feelings do.