Whirl

In recent weeks, I’ve been working to understand my relationship with food. Everyone has a relationship with food, but many of us are painfully unaware.  And to be honest I’d be happily unaware had a couple of realities not intruded.

Reality numbero uno is my weight.  Since leaving the Air Force in 1994, I’ve seen my weight yo-yo up and down more times than the stock market (unfortunately, it’s a negative correlation).  The biggest part of this issue is my taste for food.  Notice my choice of words here, I didn’t say “taste in food” because when it comes to all things culinary, I have no taste.    

What gets me into trouble is my food philosophy. I fought for months to find the right way of expressing it.  But finally I found inspiration from my dog—a simple teaching which can be expressed in four tenets: 

1. Eat it now.
2. Eat it fast
3. Eat it all.
4. Experience it later.

The evolution of this practice is pretty easy to explain.  Tenets one and two come from childhood. Evening meals in our household were rarely relaxed or joyous.  They were hair trigger-encounters which could easily go from peaceful silence to verbal assault over the tiniest of infraction.  I learned as a young child to eat fast and excuse myself quickly. 

But escape was never easy.  Sometimes dad would want to talk.  I mean that of course in a one way sense.  He’d want me to sit there and listen to his complaints about work, or mom, or a relative, or whatever hurt he’d perceived that day.  And so I’d watch him eat.  He’d struggle for words as he prepared his plate.  The preparation phase could go on for awhile.  First dad would take half a white onion and dice it.  Then he’d cut up a nice green jalapeño on top of that.  Both of these would be spread in an even layer over the entire area of the plate. On top of this spicy sediment would go whatever dish mom had worked so hard to prepare—never to be tasted, just drowned out by aromatic volume.  On top of the food would go a layer of black pepper.  He knew he had enough when he could no longer see the food underneath. 

I’m sure my father had no taste buds.  Between the smoking, the drinking, the yelling, and the pepper, how could anything have lived in his oral/nasal tract?  Maybe the pepper and onion were his way of feeling something other than pain. 

The “shovel it in and get the hell out of there” culinary tactic served me well during my teenage years and worked for the military also.  After all, the drill instructor only gave us 13 minutes to eat each meal.  I could wrap it up in five—I was a star.

But it began to breakdown as my social life evolved.  Imagine finishing your meal a solid ten minutes before your date.  Even if you can fill the gap with witty conversation (and I couldn’t), the shock of witnessing this carnage was usually too much for her.  She’d make her excuses, and I’d take her home, always assuming I’d said something dumb. 

Miraculously, I worked past this.  I learned to slow down a little.  I still eat too quickly in private, but when dining with others I manage to monitor my pace fairly well.  These days I can enjoy a meal with friends and family without twiddling my thumbs for ten minutes or leaving my tablemates covered in organic detritus. 

But this progress leads to the second reason I am now rethinking my epicurean approach. I now have friends. And some of those friends are devoted foodies.  Which means a good deal of the conversational content I participate in revolves around meals.  It’s seems that everyone I know is eating well and taking the time to tell me about it.

It’s a constant thing.  Meals of the recent and not-so recent past, are all re-lived and re-described in intricate detail.  Some are even photographed and posted online, others are fed to me (yes, pun intended) in near real time via twitter.  What’s worse, all my friends seem to have become talented food writers!  I’ve read Facebook statuses about cereal that leave me envious:

“Granules of nubile young oats, naturally fertilized by wild Canadian geese and harvested at the fall equinox by native Americans wearing ceremonial attire.  The grains are lightly toasted; blended with hand-reared, sun-dried grapes; and then laced with delicate strands of hormone free, Kashmirian honey.”

I’ve tried to reciprocate.  But for some reason I have trouble doing this.  When it comes to food, my romantic side is just gone.  Take this recent example involving something almost everyone likes, chocolate chip ice cream:

“Bovine mammary extract, retrieved by a mechanical process and then agitated until molecular separation ensues.   Lovingly combined with refined sugar, chicken ovums, and a hand-selected blend of chemical preservatives; aerated, frozen and mixed at exactly the correct moment with chocolate particulate in 500 gallon vats.”

I’m doing my best to get up to speed.  I’m tossing out phrases like “Flavor profile” and “sustainable farming” to great effect.  I took the former from Top Chef and the latter from Food Inc. (or maybe a Chipotle brochure, I’m not really sure).  I’ve bought cookbooks and watched tons of Alton Brown and paid close attention to the reality shows.  But even with six years of passive training under my belt and I still can’t tell you the difference between a Meyer lemon and…well a non-Meyer lemon. 

My travels have given me a bit of a leg up.  I’m no Anthony Bourdain, but I’ve had a chance to put it out there.  I’ve eaten dog in the Philippines and bought balut off a street vendor there.  I’ve sat in a Korean dive and filled the table with different kinds of kimchi.  Worldwide, I’ve ordered off many menus I could not read and just waited to see what appeared in front of me.

But sucking down a pickled duck embryo is not exactly fine dining.  This is why a few nights ago, when I had the opportunity to visit Barrio, a fairly upscale tapas joint here in Columbus, I felt awkward and out of place.  I was right at home with the company, but at the same time felt like a complete poser with regard to the food. It’s incongruent—all this experience and not a lick of sense. 

So how do I fix it?  How do I build a new food philosophy that lets me be myself and even live a few years longer?

It’s radical, but one thought is to perhaps eat less?  Today I can walk ten steps from work and get a burrito the size of a Volkswagen.  This demand for massive portions seems to be an American exclusive.  Why?  We’ve taken our bounty too literally.  A feast is supposed to be something special, but these days it applies to every dish I order.  So, I’m going to learn to eat just half the half pound burger.  And I’m going to figure out how eat it slowly. So that my belly fills and my taste buds have time to send little messages of gratitude to my brain. 

And learning to cook will be good too. Most of the recipes I prepare these days are heavily dependent on microwave technology. Yet I own a pretty impressive set of All Clad, plus tons of gadgets and other implements.  But right now it’s only the frying pan that sees any action.  Truth be known I’ve spent more time writing about my skillet this year, than using it. Time to put it to work.

© 2009 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.