Way Too Much

I’m always amazed when people say they’re not all that interested in food. How is this possible? The only thing that surpasses food in the hierarchy of human needs is air. Breathing is our primary interface with the world. We take the outside into ourselves through our lungs. After that seems to be working properly, we start right in wanting to eat, yearning to incorporate more of what the world is offering by reaching out for what is edible, potable, and beyond that delicious. For some of us, food occupies so much bandwidth that when we’re not eating, we’re likely to be thinking about eating (pause to grab some cashews) or checking out some suggestive food porn like reviews of restaurants we’ll never eat at in places we’ll never go to. What in the end is the best Korean barbecue in Omaha? The same goes for recipes and food programming.  Show me a new way to make crab cakes and you can be pretty sure I’ll save it, add it to my vast collection and never make it. Give me a half hour of Ming Tsai before bed and I’ll sleep soundly. Sometimes food porn is more satisfying than actual eating. It’s cheaper and less fattening and calls for no shopping beforehand and no soaking or scrubbing afterward. 

Photo by Amie Bell on Unsplash

In the First World, where we are currently looking into the possibilities of Filippino cuisine, these preoccupations are always murmuring in the background of consciousness. It could be that young people are thinking about sex, but rest assured I’m thinking about peanut sauce and flourless chocolate cake. We are defined by our ability to buy and consume almost anything from almost anywhere in the world. As a demographic, those of us who live in or near cities in the West are omnivorous and insatiable. It is after all Super Bowl season. This means that 123 million people can be depended upon to stare at their enormous televisions eating various salty combinations of pork and cheese and bread, even people like me who have no idea what they’re watching and see only streaks of red and gold running and piling on top of each other. Super Bowl Sunday is a tribal marker. It tells us by its groaning board of edibles that we’ve crossed the midway point on the liturgical calendar between between roast goose and baked ham, or for some of us latkes and macaroons. 

Meanwhile, a few miles up the road and almost everywhere in this country and throughout the world, people have nothing to eat at all. On Friday mornings, Frank and I help out at a place called The Upper Room where 150 lunches are prepared for delivery to the local shelter for homeless/unhoused people. Each brown paper bag contains a cookie, a small bag of potato chips and a sandwich of either turkey or roast beef with American cheese. I can’t comment on the taste, but I can tell you it does not look or smell anything like the lunch you eat at your local organic food co-op or your favorite sushi joint. The turkey is slimy, the roast beef a dull brown. I found a niche for myself that involves putting cookies in wax paper bags. It’s clean work and I’ve developed a reputation for being good at it, which is to say fast. I’m a little embarrassed by the satisfaction I take in being the Cookie Queen of Placerville but so be it. If someone is a little less despondent after eating an oatmeal raisin cookie, I’m all for it. It’s gives me the sense that I’m making the tiniest contribution to alleviating the catastrophe of global hunger now manifesting in Gaza, as well as South Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Mali. In Gaza, Netanyahu with the support of our government is using starvation as an instrument of war. The babies with emaciated limbs and bloated bellies in Africa that I remember in Life magazine and on newsreels when I was growing up are still there, but they have now been joined by entire blockaded populations. I feel heartbreak and shame when I look at the faces of the hungry. Some days, when my anguish for the world presses down on me and I can’t bear it, I eat to comfort myself, to alleviate my sorrow. I start the day with maple pecan granola while trying to make sense of the binary reality of way too much and not nearly enough.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In February, seventysomething is delighted to introduce Substack writer Jocelyn Lovelle who writes about the excruciatingly beautiful and heartbreaking human experience of holding the knowledge that we are both darkness and light—all the time. 

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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