UNITED STATES—Time was school children and serious adults lived with the gripping fear of The Bomb, the very real possibility that the earth and its people could be blown to kingdom come. Today the killer wears a Santa Claus suit. The apocalypse is generosity itself: it is an obscenely wide gamut of food choices. To face so many choices is honestly a stressful experience, and can be a source of great displeasure unless the bounty is counterbalanced by a generous portion of conversation, control, and companionship.
This becomes vividly apparent to me as I note the evolution of film-set catering. Gone are the days when bread had no butter and there was only one kind of bread. Now there is a superabundance of choices; nowhere more in evidence than at a recent breakfast that had ham-and-egg sandwiches bathed in hollandaise sauce, omelets with a choice of 15 mouth-watering ingredients, breakfast burritos, French toast, hotcakes, and oatmeal, cereal from Raisin Bran to Fruity Pebbles, milk, coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. At home, I’d be content with a couple of pieces of fruit.
Dealing with all the food you can dream of is a challenge. To reject it completely is to deny a great good gift. And to surrender to the mirage of satisfaction and embark on that joyless quest, consuming all the food and goodies galore, ultimately serves only to remind us that happiness is never found at the bottom of an ice-cream tub.
Here are some basic things to remember when defending our better dietary practices in the face of the food bomb. Keep it Simple – Make it one hearty thing. Have beans instead of chili con carne. If you want carne, go with a plain hamburger patty. And plain doesn’t mean boring. The grilled patty or dish of beans can be smothered in the full cacophonous accompaniment of salsa, onions, cilantro, sliced tomato, pickles (the veggie component).
Keep it fresh – Keep focused on the natural-grown, water-rich foods as they come out of the ground and grow on trees. Veggies should constitute half of a typical meal, or more. And this is where catering and buffets really have improved. It’s getting easier and easier to find an excellent assortment of veggies and fruits. Just that the good things get drowned out by the call of “comfort” foods that often lead to abdominal discomfort.
Be ruthless in limiting your choices – Limiting our choices maximizes the opportunity for pleasure. If you have a mid-morning juice, enjoy it fully. When you finish, which may not necessarily coincide with finishing off the serving (it may be when you are called back to work, or your mind turns to new projects) say goodbye and toss the cup out.
The best milk experience I can share with you was a single glass at aBeverly Hills coffee shop; it was splendid, though the cows might have been swimming in rBST hormones. It was served to me in a tall glass. I could appreciate its coldness and the foam on top tickled my upper lip and I tasted of the rich creaminess. I finished the cup and I left the establishment. It epitomized my belief that milk is a meal in itself and the result was a wholesome satisfaction.
True satisfaction has a beginning, middle, and an end. The beginning is the sweat of work and building anticipation. We have to labor first; it is the validation of eating to live, the toil, the activity leading up to it. We see people eating as they drive to work, or while distracted by work, and they are completely eliminating the beginning phase necessary to have a satisfying meal. There is something called instant gratification, which seldom is, because it seeks enjoyment without the wait, work or anticipation. It will invariably leave you hungering for an experience to nourish the heart and the senses.
After we have enjoyed—by sticking to simple foods, keeping it fresh, and ruthlessly limiting choices—then we have prevailed over the food bomb. Otherwise, there’s gonna be an epidemic of latter-day lotus eaters, reclined foodies, nibbling away the day, who will cause the Earth to go out of orbit, and half of humanity will be catapulted into space. Trust me on this.
Humorist Grady Miller is the author of “Lighten Up Now: The Grady Diet,” available on Amazon. He can be reached at grady.miller@canyon-news.com.
