Secret Ingredient: Adventures in Mindful Eating

There’s all sorts of writing about meals historically being social events, more focused on companionship, hospitality, an excuse to gather, a chance to show off or feel welcomed, a prolonged ceremony that gives you the opportunity to size up someone else under the pretence of letting one’s guard down. Breaking bread remains the way we think about getting to know someone, the first suggestion for a date activity, the first step in building community. The infamous long lunches of Europe, cited by grumbling American employees when their half hour is up, comes to mind. “Never eat lunch alone!” is a notorious networking credo, a great idea that assumes you already have some measure of control over where you eat or who you eat with, and for how long. I’m sure the more successful CEO’s are able to connect meaningfully for profit this way.

I don’t feel particularly in control of my meals, when they occur, what they consist of, and for how long they proceed. When I’m off work I enjoy cooking, but I’ve never mastered meal preps, and specifically my work lunches feel like the portion of my life over which I have the least control. I have half an hour, I work out in the middle of nowhere, and so if I didn’t bring something from home, I’m going to have to eat junk.

This week I sought to find something about lunch I could control, to choose to see my small lunch window as truly and fully my own, an opportunity to nourish not just my body, but my mind, a chance presented to me every day to recharge my whole self. Through mindfulness.

If you’re anything like me, your relentlessly reliable meal companion is your phone. I thought I was communing with the world, connecting to people through social media and my insatiable consumption of articles and other online content. And maybe to some extent I am. But it turns out I was also distracting myself from not-so-great meals: I honestly didn’t realize how much processed food I eat at work until I put my phone away.

And there are many problems with processed food, of course, for individual health, for the collective health of the environment. But what bothered me this past week most has been that processed food fails at the most basic component of what humans enjoy about food: taste. Processed food tastes flat. I knew this already, but it’s like I forgot. Processed food is as satisfying as a picture of that food, and in fact, it’s often the packaging that sells you on the product, and the packaging is all you see between levels of Bubble Crush Saga. The food itself contains only the suggestion of a flavor, and it’s always a little off. Like a memory that doesn’t sound right as you’re telling it, and then the person you’re telling says, “I told you that!” Like cheap hair dye, processed food is a handful of tones, compared to the multitude of flavors in each bite of something real.

At work I eat a lot of Lean Cuisine. They’re convenient, cheap, and they do a great job of looking like, smelling like, and approximating the textures and even some of the flavors of food. I imagine that when I see people in sci-fi movies order food from those oversized in-fridge dispensers built in to the walls of their spaceship that can supposedly produce anything by changing the chemical composition of a single, generic “food” ingredient, the meal they receive would likely be on par with a Lean Cuisine meal. It does a good enough job of emulating a thing that if you’re not paying close attention, or if you’ve been trapped in a tube hurtling through a vacuum for years, breathing the same air over and over, you would think, yeah, I had the thing I ordered today, and it was a different meal than I had yesterday.

But put your phone down, or better yet, leave it in the other room, and proceed to prepare and then eat this meal, and you will notice very different things. A Lean Cuisine stays hot for far too long. And then it’s immediately cold. The little microwave-burnt edges are the best part, and that obviously should not be. There’s actually more foodstuff there than you believe there to be when you’re shoveling the three bites (a sad sort of Goldilocks-themed micro feast: way too hot, still a little too hot, too cold,) into your fleshy face torus while staring down at your phone. A distracted Lean Cuisine feels like the small half of a meal. Looking out the windows (thank god for my wonderful breakroom windows!,) at the clock, or at unsuspecting coworkers, noses buried in books or their phones, the Lean Cuisine feels substantive enough, but unsatisfying in it’s fakeness. The same portion of the same meal, if I had prepared it over the weekend, like my Idealized Self would, will, perhaps, in the future, this meal would be enough.

Because real food —guys, I want to hold both your hands and look you in the eyes when I say this, like I’m confirming some great myth, it’s I-spotted-Nessie-when-I-visited-Scotland-and-I-have-PICTURES sort of news— real homemade food is worth putting your phone down for. On days I had leftovers, I was so much more excited than when I had leftovers before. Earlier this week I brought a sandwich from home and was delighted by the bread, like some sort of alien baby with access to memories of bread but no direct experience of eating it until this moment. And then a patron brought us homemade oatmeal raisin cookies.

Now, the oatmeal raisin cookie is often maligned, considered the lesser babka to chocolate chip’s total dominance of the cookie sector. But by an almost drug-induced heighting of my senses, sprinkled with the magic of my full attention, these cookies were divine.

In a homemade cookie, eaten 6 or more feet away from a screen and after 3 full, deep breaths, you can taste each ingredient separately in each bite, as well as the cookie gestalt. That first taste is Butter. This is whole world unto itself. You can taste it almost before you put it in your mouth, you feel it on your fingertips, it makes the edges of the cookie glow slightly by reflecting light back to you through it’s oily splendor. Sugar, crunchy and caramelized, crystalized inside each crumb through the magic of baking, of heat over time. Salt, there to bring out the best in everyone, the butter a little butterier, the sugar a little sweeter, but also savory, because of salt’s presence. Flour, of course, the Monica of the cookie, a stable base note, largely uncelebrated, holding the thing together. The cookie’s substance. The cookie’s bassist. All these ingredients a chorus of delight, setting up the dynamic duet of Oatmeal and Raisin, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, belting out Shallow. It was timeless, it was transcendent, and I could hold it in my hand.