Eating Well vs. Eating Good

Okay, so this post has been brewing in the ol' brain pan for a little while here, but I figure tonight is as good as any to dust it off because I have been blowing my nose so much today that I think a wee portion of my brain has ended up in all those discarded tissues.

For those of you who know me, I'm what some might call "portly". I was once a fit and trim young whipper-snapper, but my current corpulence might lead you to believe otherwise. Personally, I think I'm too tall to be portly, but that's all semantics. Long and verbose story short, I'm a big guy and I loves me some food.

Having said that, I do my best to eat well when I can - I always make sure I incorporate fruits and vegetables into my meals, and the closest I come to fast food joints are pubs that serve fish and chips or getting a burrito at my local taqueria. I can't really remember the last time I ate a meal in like a Burger King or Taco Bell or anything like that. Still, at my former place of employment, I had a number of co-workers who were "foodies" but they always tended to eat on the ridiculously healthy and scant side. This got me thinking: when did we, as a society, forget how to eat food that is at least relatively good for you that comes in a reasonable portion? And when the hell did debates go from "chicken or pork" to "quinoa or spelt"? I mean, are ancient grains really that big of a deal for people who eat real food?

This isn't just a "big guy is cranky about skinny people eating tiny bowls of skinny people food" rant; I am thinking specifically of examples in my family and those around me. Yes, my grandfather was an anomaly: he smoked up to three packs a day, drank four pots of coffee a day (yes pots, no that's not a typo) and added heaping mounds of salt to damn near everything he ate. He lived to be eighty five, and had a build somewhat similar to mine. My grandmother (on the other side of the family) is going to turn 96 in just over a month, salts everything she puts in her mouth, and even puts butter on cookies. I shit you not. Now, granted, they didn't grow up in an era where restaurants were churning out two and three thousand calorie meals, they couldn't buy a 96 oz. Coke at 7-11, and they didn't have all the chemically treated crap that we have today. But you know what? They ate. They boozed it up (believe me, I have NOTHING on them in their prime when it comes to drinking). They didn't worry about hydrogenated oils in their foods or if they needed whey protein supplements.

Another perfect example is Julia Child. For my sensibilities, she is everything that is right with cooking and cuisine. She had a ball, she loved to cook, and she loved to eat. A recent article I read classified her "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" as one of the top five unhealthiest cookbooks of the decade, yet she lived to be 92 -- what the hell is wrong with us nowadays that we can't eat or enjoy real food? Have you seen that cookbook? Have you read the recipes? There is so much butter in there, she could have singlehandedly saved the entire dairy industry. And you know what else? The dishes are fucking delicious.

So next time you're down at Whole Foods or somewhere like that, and you're wondering if you'd be better eating faro or millet, take stock of what you're eating and try something from the butcher counter instead. Yeah, you might have to put in an extra hour on the treadmill or something like that, but you know what, it'll taste a whole hell of a lot better going down, and you will probably find that it was unbelievably worth the extra effort. Personally I feel life's just too short to tolerate the food you eat, I'll gladly exchange a week or two of the tail end of my life if it means I have cleaned my plate and an completely satisfied when I finish a meal.

If you're like my relatives (and me) you'll probably want to chase that red meat with some bourbon, but that's a whole other blog entry for a whole other time.