I Am What I Eat

A Short Play

The other night, as I waited for Brook to meet me for dinner, I overheard (and quickly copied into my Notes app) the following conversation. The main speaker was a woman and her audience was two men. The line breaks are her, gulping air to continue her monologue. Parentheticals are mine.

Woman: We met at the ocean and they made me face one of my biggest fears which is THE OCEAN

It’s amazing. It’s pure beautiful chaos. And now I’ll go every few months by myself for a few nights.  

(And then she steals kelp? It sounds like)

I’ve been doing a lot of shit. I joined an intermediate watercolor painting class. It was landscape. I went to art school. I went to CCA. Moved to Cali to go there 

Well, I lived in New Mexico. Moved here when I was 18. Went to CCA for 2 years, dropped out. Went to culinary school. Worked in (mumble) 

One man: Look at you, you fucking baller

Woman: Worked in catering then Gary Danke. Pastry. Fucking nuts. Nasty. 

Other man: Way too shambolic for that kind of restaurant.

Woman: I was only there for 6 months then I went back to school.  Got my prereqs. 

And that’s when I became a dietician.

Food Thoughts

I instantly disliked this woman, but I do have some questions for a dietician. The biggest one is: Why can I eat the same food for breakfast every morning and often the same food for lunch, but I can’t do that for dinner? I suspect lots of people can eat the same food every night, or at least similar food, but I crave variety. Every week, I make a menu that has a different dinner on it for each night of the week. I’ve tried to streamline it by using leftovers but I instinctively avoid serving the same thing two nights in a row. We don’t have back-to-back pasta, for example, or back-to-back chicken. I think my life would be simpler if I could serve the same thing every night, like a pot of beans with rice, but even if my family would eat that, I cannot. I probably would skip dinner on nights 2 through 4.

This was not always the case. When I lived alone at the beginning of my law career, I would eat the following dinner almost every night: beer and one of the following options, which are really the same thing: cheese and crackers, macaroni and cheese, Tony’s frozen pizza. Maybe I would shake things up with a cheese quesadilla every now and again. Part of me misses that diet; another part of me is repulsed. It was unhealthy but it was so easy. There were never leftovers and it was mostly vegetarian (the Tony’s had pepperoni). I want that again. I imagine that people with less income than me, or less access to a variety of foods, are much better at streamlined dinner menus. How can I get back to that?

I suspect that the Mediterranean diet is the sweet spot. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a low-effort pre-fab, high-variety “Mediterranean diet” cookbook. What I want is for someone to come into my pantry and refrigerator, clean it out, stock it with only “Mediterranean diet” food, and then come back every subsequent day and cook it for me. I want this person, or another person, to come into my closet and dresser and do the same thing with my clothes, leaving me with a highly flattering, very comfortable wardrobe. They don’t have to come back every day to dress me, but maybe they could leave a set of flashcards with outfits on them that I could copy. They would be welcome to return weekly or every other week to clean those clothes according to the label requirements, since everything I currently own has a different set of washing/drying instructions from every other piece of clothing I own.

In other words, I want a Mediterranean diet for my whole life.

The Long Run-Up to New Year’s Resolutions

Although we have a lot of holiday stuff to get through, it’s hard to forget that New Year’s and Resolution-Palooza is just around the bend. In the next couple of weeks, I will share my 2023 cultural round-up and my 2024 resolutions. I’ll also try to make some gift suggestions. To tide you over until then, here are my 2022 Cultural Round-Up and my 2023 New Year’s Resolutions (spoiler: I didn’t make any). If you can’t wait to hear what I enjoyed this year, hit the subscribe button below.