The Early Meals

Justin Cox 🌮 pointed out to me on POMQA that I was featured under the food tag. That seemed strange because I thought I didn’t like to talk about food. In fact, one of my favorite rants is an anti-foodieism screed, but who am I to argue with Medium? It was right there in black, white, and green.

Maybe I am interested in food and food writing and didn’t know it. Do you ever worry that maybe you were made to be something that you never realized you were made for? I do:

What if I was supposed to be a food writer? What if, despite the fact that I have no sense of smell and don’t really care about food, I had it in me to write the dime store version of Blood, Bones, and Butter?

I have to admit, and I don’t mean to brag here, but even though I don’t care about eating, and usually feel guilty and disgusting after I do it, I’m quite an eater. I get a lot of practice. I eat all day every day. For my entire tenure on the planet, I’ve been in a kind of eating “beast mode”. There were a couple of years of high school wrestling and some religious retreats where I might have dropped the donut for a little while, but other than that I have been wood-shedding the fuck out of the eating thing. I got my 10,000 hours of proficiency by the time I was 27, and let me tell you, since then I’ve seriously picked up my game.

Let’s Give the Food Writing a Whirl

Have you ever seen a overweight, white-haired, oldster sitting behind the wheel of a convertible sports car, like one of these?

I have too. What I think when I see that is, “That guy should just give that car to a 24-year-old girl or boy.” You see, 24 year-olds are the ones that should be driving around in sports cars, but they can’t afford them. Some old guys can afford such cars, but they look silly in them. They missed their chance to drive a sports car when they were young and good looking, so they should give that opportunity to someone else. They would be the Bodhisattvas of capitalistic vanity.

What Does This Have to Do With Food?

You may wonder what sports cars have to do with food. Here’s the link. Someone once told me that all of the best food memories come from before the age of 12. You will go mad trying to chase the food of your youth because your taste buds have been deteriorating since adolescence. Like hair, skin, and memory, your gustatory high point happened before you even understood what a high point was.

Anytime you walk past a fancy restaurant that has really good food, you should look at all of the older patrons and think, “we should give their spots to twelve-year-olds.” Sure, twelve-year-olds like to eat macaroni-and-cheese, pizza, and chicken fingers, but that’s because they can taste everything and nobody is saying, “Let’s go to Peter Luger’s and drop $500 on your pre-teen palate.” If we did, they might tell us something. If it tastes great to a twelve-year-old, it’s probably really good.

I know you’re thinking, “twelve-year-olds don’t have sophisticated tastes. They won’t touch foie gras, shad roe, or anchovies.” The truth is, if you had your taste buds in tact you wouldn’t either. You start eating increasingly bizarre flavors to counteract the fact that you can’t really taste that well. After you’ve killed your taste buds with a lifetime of smoking, drinking, and licking postage stamps, you gravitate towards grapefruit juice and turpentine end of the flavor spectrum until you give up altogether and start eating salty pablum because texture is more important than taste.

So, I plan to do some food blogging, but I’m going to blog the meals from childhood, when I was at the top of my eating game.

You wouldn’t want to hear about what I ate today, would you? Really? OK, I had jalapeño flavored cheese-doodles for the first time. Here’s my review: you know exactly what they taste like from the name.

Tomorrow: Toast.