Soliloquy on Food

Yogurt, bananas, apple sauce. This is not the kind of food I’m used to. Being the typical, if overly skinny, teenage boy, these were not my usual fair. I’ve never thought too much about what I ate. I just ate it. If I was hungry, I ate. If I wasn’t, I didn’t. All my life I’ve never cared, and my metabolism never cared much either.


But after a summer of canned food sustenance when I lost ten pounds, and a bought with mono when I probably lost another ten pounds, my metabolism has caught up with me, and rather quickly, too. Several months after recovering from mono I noticed that my jeans weren’t quite fitting like they used to. I let it slide for a few months more, but pretty soon my jeans simply didn’t fit, and I couldn’t stand the skinny legs and tight jeans look. Being the cheap college student, I couldn’t afford brand new jeans, so I went to the local thrift store. There’s nothing like a good pair of broken in jeans.

Now I belong to the average size bracket for men my age, 32-34. Of course I wear them rather baggy, so I’m not quite the average. Either way it’s a lot better than my old 29-34.

Now where was I going? Oh yeah, eating habits. Recently I’ve decided it’s time to be a little more health conscious. I’ve started eating weird mushy foods that I formerly found in candy. My mom would be so proud. I’ve also started cutting back on pop. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you grew up drinking pop for two meals a day (I think my parents caved a little too easily on that battle), you develop quite a habit.

For some reason it’s suddenly dawned on me (i.e., my metabolism caught up with me) that eating all the crap I eat can’t be good for me.

But there’s others out there who go farther, and I used to look at them strangely. Vegetarians. Being a good Baptist, I’ve never understood these non-meat eaters. God gave us the animals to eat, so eat them! I never understand the people who complain about cruelty to animals. Oh the poor cow! But they forget to crusade for the ailing carrot.

Recently I had a friend who decided to be a vegetarian, and for once I heard a line of reasoning I could respect. She decided to be a vegetarian because eating lower on the food chain is more efficient and less damaging to the environment. For all the grain it takes to feed a cow to get one meal of meat, you could have ten meals of grain. I don’t know if my ratios are right, but it’s something crazy like that. And with Americans eating hamburgers like nothing else, that’s a pretty non-efficient food system.

Of course I’ve never really had a problem with eating too much red meat. Not that I have such noble beliefs, I just don’t care for it. And all my life my Grandpa (a farmer from Kansas) has been chiding me to eat more beef. I’ve always thought it was too chewy. I was a finicky eater and a slow chewer as a kid, so beef took twice as long for me to eat. I preferred chicken, and for a lengthy period of time ordered nothing but chicken strips when I was taken out to eat.

And that’s my soliloquy on food. I imagined it being a lot better this afternoon, but that always happens when you preplan a pondering, thinking ahead to the stunning prospects it will have as a full fledged essay.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *