A Meditation on Consumption

What we do when we eat has always been a topic of interest for me. I think it started when I was young and learning the politics of family dynamics around the dinner table. Both of my parents are first-rate cooks and dinner was something we always had together, no matter what. This was especially true on Friday nights when my mother would make a Challah bread and light candles and my father would say the Kiddish. I remember, and this is still pretty much true, that all dinners began with a moment of silence. Not a prayer, or even a planned break from action, but a spontaneous quiet moment that would come as the food was set at the table, or when you sat down to eat. The eyes would always eat first, and the anticipation of a good meal is a strong feeling.

That moment was the first quiet pause. The second would come after the first bite. There’s a mechanical override switch that gets tripped in the mouth, and you cant speak; only chew. Each chew is immediately followed by a partially involuntary and partially intentional moan of pleasure. This is the most critical moment of the meal as it’s what sets the tone for the rest of dinner. On a particularly good meal, we would begin with a long, deep, quiet chewing session. When the food was half or mostly gone, someone would utter something and the conversation would have slow starts and restarts until the meal was mostly done. What would we talk about? The food and how good it is.

These are moments we should all pay more attention to. Yes, food is something we have to eat. We need to eat to survive. Eating certain “convenience foods” like a sandwich from Subway will remind you of this. You always begin eating a subway sandwich thinking “Boy, this is exactly what I needed”. But who can honestly say that by the end of that sandwich, you feel more like you’re obliged to eat the rest of it out of guilt for the six dollars you spent or the starving children in Africa (no judgement here…). By the end of eating a really good sandwich, I often find myself wondering if I had eaten the wax paper or not.

Good food, however, brings your physical hunger together with your intellectual hunger and the result is a more complete and deeply gratifying experience. There is a magic moment between the first taste and the end of a meal; an arc of meditative narrative where your mouth is full and so your mind talks to itself. What happens in those quiet moments are yours, and this is where the zen of a meal can influence the rest of your day. If you’re like me, good food causes you to sit, think, be quiet and mostly still. These are the cornerstones of your day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner and the little sneak attack snacks in-between are like living punctuation marks when we reflect back on our day and what was accomplished. “…It should be finished by lunch….I’ll do it after dinner…..I get more done before breakfast than….”

I thought about this today when I ate lunch. I was eating a slow cooked pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw and a coke. It is my favorite meal in the world. After about five minutes of bliss, I suddenly became lucid to my condition and was able to focus on how I was enjoying the meal. I could best describe it as if I were an errant rock careening through space about to orbit a giant planet that is my lunch. The way the sandwich gets to my mouth is not like the quiet moments in sci-fi film when a ship gets stuck into a tractor beam and quietly and gently floats into the mother ship, but rather a much more parabolic trajectory where the speed increases by a power of ten for each inch it gets closer to my mouth. Once chewing, there’s a quiet moment of visceral sensory submission. I’m so encompassed in the experience of eating this sandwich that I am reduced to a radius of awareness that I’d not put past five feet. There’s a sense of urgency that I think everyone feels when they eat a really good pulled pork sandwich. It’s that perpetual anxiety caused by the juices dripping down your for-arm warning you that if you were to loosen your grip but only slightly, the entire center of the sandwich will fall out the bottom. This is the moment when you’ve truly connected with your meal and you now feel personally responsible for your lunch’s well-being. I remember thinking, I better keep eating this or it’s going to land on my plate, or even worse; my shirt! Then, I’d have to eat it with a fork! Would you like that? No! This is actually a game I play with myself, and I know it. The truth is, my favorite part of eating a BBQ sandwich is at the end when the bread parts are gone and you get to go back and eat all the little droppings of slaw and meat with your fork as sort of an after-meal gift.

This is good food. It brings you to a halt, it spins you around, and when you’re ready to embrace the moment, you learn about yourself.

The right hand does most of the work. I call it my sandwich hand. The left hand is the steady-hand or the drink hand. When I started paying attention to myself eating, I realized I did a curious thing. When I would reach for my drink, I would pinch it with as few fingers as I could manage. I think the notion was “I shouldn’t grab this with my whole hand because then I’d get the can greasy and it might slip, so instead I’ll just pinch it with my greasy thumb and first-finger…” Besides being an idiotic conclusion and likely something I’d quickly mock someone else for doing, this part I think is actually an act of love. Maybe I’m doing this because I want to treat my food with respect? Who cares if I put grease all over the can? The Coke doesn’t care. I shouldn’t care. My bullshit logic is ridiculous. If I wanted to not spill the soda, I’d go for the full grab, not pinch it like a dainty tea cup. …bite, chew…The taste in my mouth reminds me: “I’m a rock spinning around the pork sandwich planet, I have no control over my trajectory.”

In this moment of thinking about my lunch, I was able to glean some information about myself from a slightly more objective point of view. I wont tell you how my lunch ended. It was messy and I did, in fact, eat most of it with a fork. Did I care really?

No.

Still the best lunch a guy could ever ask for.