What Falls Away, What Changes.

When you go through times when doctors forbid you to eat, whether that’s for a day or a month or a number of hours, it becomes less attractive to restrict food once you’re given the green light. When you’ve experienced the loss of your appetite for months at a time, once food is desirable again it’s hard to say, “No thanks, none for me.”

Last night, I ate some Cheetos. Oh, it’s newsworthy.

I was at the theater for the student production that was the result of the seven weeks of class I taught with my friend and fellow Neo, and I had just come from yoga. I was hungry and my only immediate option was a bag of Cheetos. Before I got sick, I probably would’ve turned my nose up at the Cheetos and suffered, secretly longing for the Cheetos but unwilling to eat them.

You see, I have gone through various degrees of food snobbery in my life. When I discovered food, real food, in college whilst dating a talented chef who trained in tony restaurants in San Francisco, I was quickly an incorrigible brat about it. Food had to be organic, it had to be delicious, it had to be artisanal, it had to be micro green, it had to come from France, etc., etc., until I drove my family nuts because when we were all home in Iowa for the holidays and out shopping in Des Moines, there was nothing that would fit my criteria. We’re not big fans of chain restaurants anyway, but God help us if there was only a Taco John’s to be had and we needed to get some dinner. I was really annoying about it and, family, if I’ve never said it, sorry for being such a pain in the ass.

I was like that for quite some time, but when I met D.W. I mellowed a bit. He relaxed me in every way, thank goodness, and I learned to appreciate the occasional frozen pizza once again. While I still maintain that foods like frozen pizza and Cheetos should be eaten sparingly—if there’s a choice between Cheetos and oh, say, homemade samosas, choose the samosas—sometimes you’re hungry and faced with a bag of damned Cheetos and that’s okay.

Of course, whenever a privileged white person talks about food this and food that, it’s tricky. I make food choices and draw lines in the sand because I can; many people on the planet (and surely, even on my block) cannot. I’m sensitive to this. And at the risk of sounding all Marie Antoinette about it, sometimes I wish food could be a little simpler, a little more “Food! Thank God!” and less, “Hm, I wonder how many calories are in that organic tofu and should I go totally gluten-free?” I know, I know. Luxury problems.

All this is to say that the food restriction part of the Art/Life project is not turning out to have much relevance for me. This month I’m supposed to be eliminating soda, but I find that not only do I just really, really want my diet root beer, diet root beer tends to work with my system pretty well. It’s impossible for me to chug any large amounts of liquid without dealing with immediate consequences (remember, I have no colon and therefore no absorption mechanism in place to suck up all that liquid) but for some reason, diet soda seems to “stick.” I can drink it with a meal and, magically, it seems to stay put. So I don’t want to eliminate soda in the name of art. I want to drink soda and make art while I’m drinking soda.

Make sense?

And the Cheetos were really, really good. Cheesy. Crunchy. Orange. Everything a Cheeto should be, pretty much. I’ll make it up to my foodie snob self on Thanksgiving when D.W. and I go to this fancy restaurant in Tucson. There are chestnuts and brussel sprouts with lardons involved, so the world shall be set right.

 

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