Food Is Proof That God Loves Us And Wants Us To Be Happy

But what happens when the last good thing is gone?

A perfectly cooked, butter-soft steak, smashed potatoes, crispy fried Brussels sprouts, and cheesecake at the end. It was at a restaurant called Char in Rocky River, Ohio, and I was with my boyfriend, and he had a gift card.

It was the perfect meal.

We still talk about that steak every so often, the way you talk about something you’ve lost that you can never get back, like your youth, or David Bowie.

That was in 2020, before everything went to a very real and tangible hell.

My neighbor has a pink, 1970’s-era limousine parked in his backyard, and of course, I want it.

I don’t know why I’m so interested in automobiles, considering I can’t tell most of them apart and I most certainly do not know how they work.

For example, there was an incident recently when I noticed I was low on antifreeze (I checked the manual to confirm this — the manual which helpfully declaims WARNING: AUTOMOTIVE FLUIDS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE, for those of us inclined to pour oil into the windshield wiper fluid).

I ventured abroad to purchase a jug o’ coolant and then forced my boyfriend to, again, confirm that I (he) was about to pour the appropriate automotive fluid into the appropriate automotive fluid receptacle.

This resulted in much pointing out of antifreeze receptacles when we got to the auto show later that day.

The auto show where we paid $8 for a sausage sandwich.

Now, of course, the price of food at things like auto shows and festivals is hugely inflated. You expect that you’re going to pay $5 for half of a potato cut into strips. It just comes with the territory.

What I did not expect was that this morning, I’d pay $2 more at McDonald’s for the exact same thing I bought last week.

The price of gas goes up and up (sometimes down, just to fake us out). Don’t even talk to me about eggs. I have seriously disturbing visions of pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash up to the drive-thru window like it’s Weimar Germany.

I don’t know why I think about cars a lot, but I know why I think about food a lot, and that’s because I can’t eat most of it.

When powdered nutritional formulas were recalled, I read about people who were in real danger of starving to death because of food allergies. The only thing they can safely ingest is metabolic formula, which they ingest through a permanent J-tube embedded in their abdomens.

A jejunostomy tube (J-tube) is a soft, plastic tube placed through the skin of the abdomen into the midsection of the small intestine. The tube delivers food and medicine until the person is healthy enough to eat by mouth. — MedlinePlus

I sat down with a married couple once to discuss bankruptcy. They were older and not in great health. The wife proceeded to tell me about her various ailments. Mostly normal, run-of-the-mill stuff.

And then she — I guess for emphasis? — flopped her J-tube out onto my desk.

It was a weirdly intimate thing to do. I mean, it was just a short length of rubber tubing, but the other end of it was in her body.

And it meant she couldn’t eat food. She could only sit there while she poured liquid nutrition into the tube, kind of like putting gas in a car.

My mom, in her 90s, can’t eat many things that she always loved, most notably chocolate. This is a recent development for her.

I’m in my 50s and already deep into the land of “things I can’t eat” for a whole host of reasons: MSG, GERD, IBS, Barrett’s esophagus, you name it. I go through periods where I can only drink Ensure. There’s a lot of peanut butter and cereal in my house. A lot.

You’d think I’d be wafer-thin, but apparently I can eat donuts, no problem.

And because I can’t eat a lot of things, I’m hyper-focused on food, cooking shows, recipes, restaurants — all of it.

Right now, I love Chef’s Table on Netflix, and my mom is making me watch this crappy Great British Baking Show knockoff called The Great Chocolate Showdown, which, God help me, is drawing me in, even with its charisma-deficient, robotic judges and monotonous challenges.

But what if I couldn’t eat at all? Would I think about anything else? Would life even be worth living?

Food will always be the last man standing, that small thing that can instantly bring joy in the direst circumstance. My mom loves her weekly Arby’s turkey sandwich, and I love my flat-as-a-pancake McDonald’s hamburger and crunchy apple pie. (No, it should not be crunchy.)

Later today I’m going to make a sour cream blueberry coffee cake with blueberries picked from bushes that grow in my mom’s yard. There’s nothing like baking with fruit you picked yourself, bugs and all.

As you cook, you remember the green of the leaves, the thunder clouds forming overhead, the first drops of rain that whisper “Get inside,” and that urge to pick just one more berry, before they’re gone.

Food is the complete package: it has a taste, a smell, a feel, and a look. And if you’re ordering fajitas at Applebee’s, it even has a sound.

Food is the beating heart of community, which is why restaurants have been at the forefront of the pandemic wars.

When people are ready to die, they stop eating.

One day, my boyfriend and I will go back to Char (if it’s still open) and get that same meal. But it won’t be the same, because nothing is the same.

And it will probably cost $500.