Saturday, January 19, 2008


TOTEM POLE OF THE SENSES


Pate de foi gras? You can have it. Caviar? It's all yours. Filet mignon? Sauce remoulade? You can have those, too. Take 'em away. Just pass me the red beans and rice or the chile or goulash or ramen or minestrone or salad or sandwich with maybe a pickle. I've always been a one-dish man, and a simple dish at that. Nothing fancy, please; go to no pains.

Food has never meant that much to me; it's meant nothing, in fact, other than the asap assuagement of hunger with the sauce of simplicity. It's a bother to eat, a mere necessity after all, no need to make a fuss about it, certainly not spend much on it, of either time or money, and so it has been all my life. Same as it's a bother to sleep, but I have to do that too, or I'll collapse into my goulash.

I'm one of those guys who (at least when I prepare my own lunch) generally eats over the sink, to minimize the time needed for all the de facto pointless trappings, from plate (who needs a plate?) to utensils (what's better than fingers?) to napkin (ridiculous!) to cleanup (BIG waste of right-now time!), and I can get quickly back to whatever important it was I happened to be doing when this evolutionally spoiled body interrupted and said FEED ME.

Everything is more important than eating. Animals eat. And that's pretty much all they do, except find things to eat. In between, they sleep. Gustatory interests are probably lowermost on my totem pole of the senses. I even find politics more interesting. Well, that may be overstating the value of politics, but what the hell, it's my totem pole.

4 comments:

Tabor said...

Years ago when time was short I felt the same as you...now I am at the other end of the spectrum and love simple and complex foods and love the process of putting it all together and then savoring it. I still don't like the clean-up but that is the price to pay for pleasure.

Aisha said...

My husband makes goulash for me. I just love it! I eat with my fingers sometimes, it's common from where I'm from ad even taught my husband how to eat with his fingers.

Anonymous said...

Food and eating are central to my existence. So in that aspect we are quite different. However, I too relish standing at the kitchen sink and eating whatever I have hastily thrown together. Roomie thinks that is disgusting. She is entitled to that opinion and to leaving the room so she does not have to watch my gastric exercise.

I feel a blog coming on...

bookinista said...

I thought I was the only one who found hunger annoying and food merely a means to make it stop. Oatmeal in the morning (hot water poured over quick oats in a bowl), bagel for lunch, beans and rice or blenderized vegetables soup for supper. Currently saving for a countertop dishwasher...