How could I say no? It would probably be rude, wouldn't it? It's her grandmother's recipe. I'm at work, putting in that holiday half-day, and 'That E-mail' came through. One of my coworkers sent it to everyone in the department. 'Cookies by the copier. Enjoy!' So yes, I'm sitting at my desk at 10:00 am eating a cookie. How could I refuse? It had that adorable little dollop of raspberry jam on top. And so it begins...
Now, I am not a gluttonous eater. And I'm a bit of a health and fitness freak. And I really just don't understand dessert. Why after a meal would I want something heavy and sweet, creamy or baked? But what is it about the holidays? No matter what your usual bent, no matter what you promise yourself, it just happens... copious mountains of food find their way into your face.
I would wager it's all tradition, from earlier times, when without refrigerators, freezers, or Applebee's, once the weather got cold, there was no more food easily plucked from vines, trees, and bushes. People literally fattened up for winter. We really don't need to do that anymore. Yet we do. I just stashed away all my board shorts from beach season, so naturally my urge to bake bread and slow-cook heavy stews and chilis is kicking in. Isn't it amazing how dusty your crockpot gets over the summer?
I know a lot of it is social. Even if I set as my goal not to overeat tomorrow, I still just caught myself recommending that my coworker find Paula Deen's recipe for mac'n'cheese, because you know, they say it's the best. Did I really just recommend Paula Deen? Really? The woman has no shame with her sticks of butter. I usually get sick to my stomach just watching her show. But I just praised her use of butter AND heavy cream in one dish. Who am I?
I really did promise myself this year: no need to overeat. I recently finished the nine-week at-home Insanity workout program and shaved over two inches off my waist. But today it was cookies at 10:00 am and discussing the merits of various mac'n'cheese recipes. The seal has been broken; I don't want to know what tomorrow will bring. Oh fine, pass the cranberry sauce. How much sugar went into that?
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Jeffrey Seeds
Kim Brittingham
Salon.com
Comments
Western society is in a weird place now on the timeline of history, because we have all the food we could ever need and its preparation has been elevated to a true art. Manufacturers and purveyors of food have figured out how to make food products biologically addictive and psychologically irresistible. We are a nation of eaters. We eat because it tastes good. We eat because it looks good. We eat because it's Food o'Clock, because it's Foodsgiving or because Grandma gave us some Food in our Trick-or-Food bag or nestled it into the plastic grass in our Foodster basket.
At the same time, we don't need to get off our asses, really, to do...well, ANYTHING, anymore.
So we've got this imbalance of food availability and fewer passive, routine ways of working it off.
And to further complicate matters, while living in a "Yay Food!" culture, we simultaneously live in a "Boo, FAT!" culture.
God forbid all that food you're constantly being encouraged to eat should make you fat. You'll enjoy the en masse hatred of a culture that delights in redirecting its gluttonous guilt onto the people who APPEAR to be doing all the eating.
Never mind that the mixed messages EAT/DON'T EAT, EAT/DON'T EAT are turning us into a nation of vomiters, self-starvers, chronic dieters, cosmetic surgery junkies, diabetics and food obsessives.
The fact is, we don't know HOW to co-exist with all this food, and all this maleovelent advertising coaxing us into eating more and more and more of it -- and then turning around and THRASHING us for eating more and more and more of it. We don't know how. Contemporary American human beings don't know how to say "yes" to Grandma's cookies and simply enjoy them without overthinking what those innocent couple of cookies are doing to our waistlines. We don't know how to feel about engaging in a simple act that we've been taught is both the most heavenly sin and the most destructive blessing we'll encounter on any given day.
Life was so much simpler when we had grizzly bears to fear.