the gross stuff we eat when we're alone
cooking for one is hard, and admitting we all eat weird food
Some nights when I’m not planning to leave my house, I stand in front of the fridge, rip off a hunk of Galbani mozzarella cheese, stuff it in my mouth, and call it dinner.
I’m pretty sure I shut my eyes when I’m doing this, I’m so present. There’s something about concentrated milk fats and proteins that have been salted and then molded into goo. Hunger vanishes.
Objectively, I can see that this is gross. Consider the dietary crimes committed in this act. There’s so much fat and salt and cholesterol that I can feel my nutritionist aunt wincing from 300 miles away. There’s some protein in there, but I’m violating about every nutritional law. I’m also breaking every rule of polite society: eating in the front of the fridge, tearing the ball of cheese with my hands and nails, licking my fingers.
Other nights alone, I actually cook. It’s a tin of sardines, fried with onions, scrambled into eggs, and coated with hot sauce. Leftover brown rice microwaved with sesame oil and sambal oelek (buy some rn, trust me) and whole peanuts. Bananas and sunflower seeds mashed into oatmeal with cinnamon. Some of these foods might even qualify as a balanced meal. But they’re not meals I would cook when I’m trying to feed my friends or impress a man. They’re not even meals I would discuss, usually.
Yet they are meals — and they matter. Despite the informality and unusual ingredient combinations that should, in theory, disgust someone as dedicated to the pursuit of good food as I can be, I remember them, repeat them, and iterate them. I feel them, often more than meals I’ll spend hours cooking, and lately I’ve been trying to understand why.
In my search to put words around this phenomenon, I’ve become a creepy anthropologist, excavating the eating habits of my roommates and friends when they imagine they are free from observation. (They probably dislike living with me right now). I’m going to out them all without their permission to make a point.
John makes pasta with onions and ricotta cheese, then eats it over the stove. When I come upon him by surprise in the kitchen one night, he tells me it’s comfort food he learned from his mom. Maggie breads and then air fries chicken breasts at least once a week. Steven toasts an Eggo waffle and pan fries a salmon burger and eats them side by side. The guy I’m seeing subsisted for 24 hours last week on convenience-store chocolate-coated donuts and yogurt. We agreed there’s something about those donuts that hits a deep and usually inaccessible place. The same goes for the Eggo waffle, the pasta, the chicken breasts, my sardines.
Our bodies reveal our cravings when we are free of others to judge what we eat. Sometimes it might not be “healthy” or traditionally delicious, but it’s uninhibited. Some of the joy comes from the secret pleasure, from the sense of the forbidden, but most of it is just that when we’re alone, our palettes and our guts can express their own needs freely. We allow ourselves to revel in a dinner that others might consider sad.
(A quick aside: If you’re feeling the urge to lecture me about how I’m endorsing unhealthy eating, or giving yourself a pat on the back for never giving into this animal instinct, please consider whether you might seek more joy in your own meals. Who cares if I eat something objectively unbalanced occasionally? Sometimes disgust can be fun, and embracing shame is about the worst thing you can do if you want a healthy and honest relationship to food.)
I’m not talking about junk food, though junk food is part of it. Ultra-processed foods (the technical definition of which is the combination of two or more ingredients that are not recognizable as foods on their own) are designed to hack our evolutionary chemical rewards systems so that we literally cannot control what our brains tell us we need. That is the dictionary definition of insidious, and a subject for a different day.
I’m talking about the fact that what we find delicious when we’re alone comes from that same chemically rewarding place, unmediated by the constrictions of social and dietary norms. That obviously includes junk food, but it more importantly encompasses all manner of nontraditional combinations of foods. It reconnects us with our impulse to eat and with the reality that we are hardwired to appreciate food. Even the most stalwart of my “food is for function” friends have lost their minds alone with a bag of clementines or trail mix (hi, Emily).
The weirdness, the grossness, the lack of abandon, whatever you want to call it — I am so for it. I think we would all have a healthier relationship to what we’re eating if we weren’t so subconsciously caught up in ignoring the fact that most of the time, we just have to eat. Eating alone is hard. Feeding yourself alone is hard. Sometimes you’re just really hungry, and what you crave in that moment is probably at least a little bit gross. That can be fucking great, and it would be even better if we acknowledged it and embraced it.
No restaurant notes this week
I don’t have restaurant recommendations for today because I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of cooking for other people and baking pie, but I’m still thinking about the two I mentioned in the bottom of last week’s pancake recipe.
I will instead use this moment to advocate that everybody come visit me at the Brookland farmer’s market on Saturday, where I sell FABULOUS apples and other produce for a great little farm called 78 Acres.
