Fuck Food
Society is built around consuming nutrition.
Wanna see a friend? Let’s have lunch. Wanna see a movie? Don’t forget the popcorn. Wanna walk down the street? Take a look at all the pastries in the shop windows. And of course, our centuries-long streak of being unable to come up with a better way to celebrate a holiday than “Grandma’s house for dinner” or “my uncle’s house for a barbecue” shows no sign of ending anytime soon.
Hockey players, I’ve noticed, take more of a 35,000-foot view. To them, food is fuel. Ask their favorite meal, many will say, “chicken and pasta.” Why? “Gotta get those protein and carbs,” they’ll say. “It’s all about protein and carbs.”
If you look from that zoomed-out view, society’s food focus — not to mention the whole “foodie” culture — begins to look rather absurd.
I mean, have you ever had cheese (protein) and crackers (carbs)? Then you’ve pretty much had it all. You’ve had fish and chips in England. You’ve had a slice of pepperoni pizza in New York.
Have you ever had a pastrami on rye at a kosher deli? Surely you’ve had two all-beef patties on a sesame seed bun. And who hasn’t had a peanut butter and jelly on Bunny Bread?
“You, Trevor, eat to live,” someone told me once. “I live to eat.”
Steak and a baked potato. Milk and cereal. Protein, carbs. This is what people live for??
Fried chicken tries to hide the carb part from its name, but we all know the crispy crust is called breading. The traditional Japanese dish has a name that mentions neither protein nor carb, but it ain’t fooling me. It’s still salmon wrapped in rice. Other dishes, like lentils, try to include the protein and carbs in one neat little legume, but the nutritional information on the back of the package doesn’t lie.
Spaghetti and meatballs dares to do the unthinkable by reversing the order. So does macaroni and cheese. Rice and beans feeds half the world every day.
The truly adventurous dishes go one way or the other. Steak and eggs is all protein. Veggies are all carbs.
Fruit and croissants and muffins and pies are straight glucose — a streamlined version of spaghetti, rice, and potatoes that saves the body the work of turning carbs into sugar.
To be clear, I love every damn one of these foods. I’d eat Turkish doner kebaps (lamb inside of pita) all day. Sliced apples covered in almond butter? Mmm-mmm-mmm. I spent a summer in Argentina eating nothing but beef empanadas, which are virtually indistinguishable from Polish pirogies. My mom makes really good chicken quesadillas in flour tortillas. There’s nothing better than a hot dog in a toasted bun at a ballgame. My all-time favorite food is tortilla española, a Spanish dish made of eggs and potatoes.
But I’ve realized that five minutes after a meal — or sooner, if you take a sip of water — the taste is all but gone from your mouth.
So what’s the point of eating expensive, unhealthy, and/or time-consuming food? Even if you think all these slight variations on the protein-carb theme are, somehow, different, there’s no arguing this: By the next morning, it’s all the same shit.
If you enjoyed this post — or even if you didn’t — I think you’d like my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.
