The linchpin of all of my goals is food. Food is the basis of my physical health, it touches on mental health, there is an emotional component, a social one, and it one of the largest line items on the financial health-o-meter. It is also the absolute bane of my existence. So much attention needs to be paid to the simple act of feeding myself and that attention comes with endless irritants.
I have a complex relationship with food. I am sure there is some sort of disorder involved but I am not sure it has a formal name or corresponding treatment plan. All I know is I don’t encounter other people with a similar attitude. They may lament similar aspects of my attitude or relate to pieces of my experience, but I am pretty sure I am alone in how I feel about eating.
As with most things, I can start with my childhood. I can also start with the idea of breakfast as the first meal of the day. Both parents worked, and there was never a morning ritual of parents in the kitchen making sure the children started the day with a home cooked meal. This may have happened in the past, but my brothers are 10 and 7 years older than me and by the time I came around that ritual was abandoned if it ever existed.
I lived very close to my school, and I also had cable TV in my bedroom. I sacrificed my mornings for late night comedy specials on HBO. This meant I was waking up with just enough time get dressed and run to school before the first bell. Breakfast wasn’t even grabbing something to go, it was eliminated altogether.
This meant I also was not taking lunch to school. I didn’t have a parent carefully crafting portions of food groups with care. Lunch was provided by the school. A limited menu of whatever could be cheaply made at scale. None of it was great, but it was food so I ate it.
My father never cooked. He was also very finicky. My mother made dinners to satisfy him and this resulted in a very limited menu. I didn’t like my mother’s cooking. It wasn’t terrible, but it was whatever my dad would eat, whatever was cheap, and whatever could be thrown together after a long day of working full time. This eventually devolved into Hamburger Helper 5 days a week.
What I remember most about my childhood was being hungry all the time. The trope is that Chinese food has some special property that no matter how full you are, you will be hungry again 30 minutes later. I never understood this because I experienced the feeling with all food. Eventually I discovered that I could ignore my hunger and it would be manageable, but once I ate, I wanted to eat more and more and more.
I graduated high school 6’1” tall weighing 125 pounds. This was not a matter of anorexia but of genetics and a lack of access to the right foods with the right nutrients at the right times. I ate plenty, it was merely an issue of not enough coupled with not the right food.
I entered my young adult life not knowing how to cook, not knowing how to shop for food, not knowing how to plan meals or even buy the ingredients to make something. I lived like a scavenger, picking up skills here and there but getting most of my calories from pizza and beer.
I met a few women, entered into long term relationships, moved in together, and they didn’t cook either. Everything was ready made, highly processed, or came at the expense of a restaurant preparing the meal. I wasn’t alone. None of my friends cooked, and I don’t remember them talking about how great their romantic partners were at making meals.
There was no internet in the sense of what exists today. Recipes were in books or handed down through the generations. There were cooking shows on television, but that wasn’t in my rotation. Learning to feed myself took effort I was not interested in. Given I rarely experienced joy when it came to food, I was content to essentially punish my body for being hungry.
I didn’t eat for flavor. I ate thousands of dishes Gordon Ramsay would have wretched into a trash can. I didn’t sit down for meal time to converse and connect and share nourishment with friends and family. I waited until the hunger could no longer be ignored than found whatever I could afford to shovel in there to quell the pain. If I didn’t have to eat to survive, I wouldn’t.
I have never experienced that orgasmic eye rolling into the back of your head thing over a bite of food. I have had top tier meals. I have enjoyed them. I know there are outstanding combinations of flavors that win awards and are known worldwide and through time. I just don’t care that much. It’s food. It delights for a moment and then you poop it out later.
It is a necessary evil.
After the internet came into vogue I started to learn about factory farming, GMO’s, chemical ripening, glyphosate, dyes, additives, and all manner of fuckery happening with food. At one point I lost my appetite entirely. I would be wracked with hunger, go to the grocery store, and end up leaving empty handed because it all seemed like poison.
My entire being was convinced that I needed to get a plot of land somewhere and grow my own food. I wanted nothing in the world than to disconnect and put my energy into feeding myself and creating a life closer to the earth. I started saving every penny and spent most of my free time researching how to live off grid.
This went on for years.
In the meantime I was learning about nutrition. I was learning how to cook, how to satisfy nutritional needs in the most efficient way possible, and how to grow and raise what I would need to survive with as little outside input as possible. All the while I was subsisting on pizza, beer, and the fantasy of a perfect life away from all this.
This plan was derailed by the whole falling in love, having a couple kids, and realizing there was no true escape from the system. I spent the next decade splitting the shopping, cooking, planning, and chores with my wife and it was fine. It was slightly complicated by the agreement to feed low sugar organics to the babies at a time when organic was expensive and cumbersome to procure, but we made it work.
The conversations with friends and relatives was a whole other journey.
After the divorce and when the kids got into high school, I began to abandon cooking meals. I was exhausted at that point. I had full custody so it was all on me. Luckily we had been teaching the kids to cook since they were very small so they were fairly self-sufficient by that time. There was always plenty of food in the house, I just wasn’t interested in satisfying three meals a day for three people any more.
A million minutes ago I gave up entirely. I was tired of going to the grocery store, walking the same old aisles stocked with the same old products. I was tired of trying to figure out how to keep the hunger at bay with the same old flavors I have had a million times before. I was tired of watching the prices rise while the quality waned.
All of it sucked.
Everything related to food is bothersome.
This doesn’t even touch on the whole doing dishes thing. It isn’t enough that I have to shop for the food, I have to decide what to make, I have to prepare it, then I have to clean up afterward? It’s all such a hassle and it never ends.
I have come full circle. I don’t like food anymore and I only eat to keep my body from complaining. I don’t care how it tastes. I don’t care what nutrients are in there. I don’t care about aroma or presentation. I care that it is cheap and easy to make.
The issue now is I am aging and fat. That same 6’1” frame is now draped with 205 pounds. This is not lean athletic muscle either. Most of this is a belly of bad decisions I am deeply ashamed of. I went from not wanting to take my shirt off because you could see my ribs to not wanting to take my shirt off because I am an amorphous sack of blubber.
In terms of a goal, I absolutely need to figure out how to have a better relationship with food. At the very least I need to get my nutrient intake in check and get into a caloric deficit. Other than that I doubt I will ever enjoy food. Eating will always be a kind of punishment. I am merely trading one kind of punishment for another. This new punishment simply comes with less convenience and added sugar.