You Are What You Eat

My wife has decided to diet. Anyone who has seen my wife knows that this is patently unnecessary but having lived with her for more than a decade I know that from time to time some alignment of the stars or a disruption in the circadian rhythm convinces her that it is once again time to pretend that we are people that eat well. We are not. We love fast food, we love snack food, we love junk food. Perhaps I'm projecting. Perhaps I am my wife's enabler. Perhaps I am conflating my own tastes for hers and without me in the picture Liz would happily subsist on a kale-positive diet that makes Gwyneth Paltrow look like Mr. Creosote. It is true that I do the lion's share of suggesting fast food places and I do the grocery shopping and I do the cooking, an activity that, to be done properly, requires a vast amount of butter, fat and grease, but I find enough discarded Culver's bags in the trash to know that I am not leading the horse anywhere it does not want to go.

But now the horse wants to eat different things. Since I am already courting trouble with my wife before I go any further I should make it clear that my wife is not a horse but a human woman and a lovely one at that. One of the things that binds us is our shared love of a good meal and our ability to become hangry when denied one In fact, one of our biggest fights (until the one coming up after I've compared her to a horse a number of times here) was born out of hunger. I believe that my love for my wife is strong and getting stronger but both of us recognize that food scarcity would shred it to ribbons in a matter of days. Once, when one of these aspirational moods struck her years ago, Liz proclaimed that we were going to complete Whole30, a dastardly nutritional regimen described by its satanic inventors as a "30-day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom." "Food freedom," in this case, meaning "a diet free from food." I volunteered to be the arbiter of the diet's strict, confusing and seemingly contradictory rules, a role that suits me as a Catholic. Basically, you can't have anything processed, no dairy and mostly raw things, especially fruits and vegetables (by the way, a raw carrot is still alive when you eat it, for all of you crunchy fuckers who praise the moral superiority of vegetarianism). I familiarized myself with the cans and cannots and we gave it a try.

Early on, with both of us peckish and perturbed, we went to a party where extreme diets like this one go to die. Resigning yourself to bland chicken breast cooked in flavorless ghee is hard enough to do at home but surrounded by people who recognize that culinary arts have progressed significantly since the prehistoric period and that we should celebrate that, not hide from it, it is virtually impossible. There is a word, groak, which means to silently watch people while they're eating, desperately hoping they'll ask you to join in. We spent the majority of this party groaking the hell out of the other guests and the rest was spent in the simmering, irrational rage that comes with extreme hangriness.

The dam broke when Liz reached for a small bowl of chickpeas, forgoing the mouth-watering appetizers and sweets that were on display but off limits. As the expert on the Whole30 rules, a role that was granted me by both houses of our domestic congress, I should add, I gently but firmly reminded Liz that chickpeas were outside of the scope of the diet. She lost it. "Oh, you're the king of the chickpeas, are you? You get your jollies by telling people who can and cannot eat the chickpeas, don't you? Don't cross Mr. Badass Chickpea, everyone! You sit alone in your stupid legume Vatican making all your rules, you don't own me, Chickpea man."
This was Day 3 of the 30-day guide to total health and food freedom. If I recall, we left the party in disgrace, got a Big Mac and pretended like the previous 72 hours had never happened.

Of course, I am only telling you one side of this story. I recall handling the whole affair with compassionate grace and understanding but it has been explained to me that my memory is lacking sometimes when it comes to my role in heated exchanges. Suffice it to say, since then, we have come to an understanding that, for our own safety, the diets have to either be short cleanses or flexible enough to for chickpea-sized outlets for food rage. We are not built for extreme diets. We like restaurants too much. The French Revolution was a terrible time of instability, terror and state-sponsored execution but the year it started there were fewer than 50 restaurants in Paris. Fifty! In Paris! 25 years later, when the Revolution ended at Waterloo, there were more than 3,000. That comes as close as you can to justifying the guillotine. The French get it. In 1813, Camembert cheese was made a citizen of Caen in Normandy. I accept migrants from all over the world to become a citizen of my stomach.

Historically, Americans eat out 5.9 times a week. I'm sure that number has shrunk some during the pandemic but not much in our household. Still, take home meals are not the same as dining in. The word restaurant comes from a soup that means to restore strength and there is something restorative about the social aspect of gathering around a meal. I miss it terribly.

I also miss carbs and sweets. I am, strictly speaking, not on Liz's diet but any one who cohabitates knows that if one person is changing what they eat, so are you. In a sense, I'm grateful that we live in a time where food is so abundant that dieting is deemed a necessary curb against obesity in the developed world. Truly, obesity kills three times as many people as malnutrition. We hear a lot about food scarcity around the world and that is a real problem but it's not because we don't produce enough food, half of the food we do produce goes to rot. Nor is it a problem of space, which grabs headlines as part of a narrative that suggests overpopulation is curtailing arable land. The planet is big. If we wanted to give everyone a plot of land as big as my house—everyone on earth, including individual homes for babies and children—all we need is Texas, leaving the rest of the world available for farming (to that end, once the pandemic is over, we could throw a raging dance party with enough room for everyone in the world to do the twist using just the tiniest state of Rhode Island). The main reasons people starve around the world is because unstable markets fail to produce food, economies fail to produce jobs or governments fail to deliver food to its citizens either because of poor infrastructure, planning or war and conflict. One in nine people on this planet are desperately hungry, a figure that, all joking about diets aside, blessedly does not include me. I do miss tasty food, though and I'd like to point out that Dr. Robert Atkins, whose diet books have proven so influential, died weighing 250 pounds.