The Little Things You Miss: Food Edition

It's a Saturday evening formal count. I lay on my rack, wondering if the staff at Blessington will get this one right, or if we're stuck until the next morning as a wave of food envy crosses the threshold of my mind.

I'm a vegetarian, much to the amusement of others. I haven't eaten red meat or poultry in nearly two years, after a brief stint as a pescatarian to work my way down off the slaughter wagon. When people find this out around here, it confuses them: How can a human not eat meat and live?

The answer is the same way a person lives eating meat: one bite at a time.

But it's not without its agitations and worries.

Enter food envy and food cravings!

I miss tasty foods, being here in this place.
It's not like I have a stove or a standalone burner with a skillet where I can throw a handful of day-old rice, tofu, and vegetables together to make vegetable fried rice. Nor do I have the convenience of GrubHub bringing me spring rolls, glassy looking rice noodles, Beyond Burgers, and zucchini fries. Gone, too, is the availability of Instacart, with my picker bringing me a big bag of salad mix, Quorn's nuggets or patties, a pound of Kalamata olives, brown rice, and a loaf of fresh baked Italian bread slathered with garlic and butter.

Nay, instead it's usually pinto beans, undercooked (and woefully oversaturated) white rice, white bread, spiral noodles. The beans, I can tolerate. Rice, bread, noodles? I'm diabetic -- on the streets, I generally limited my intake of these to protect my health, but here, I must live on these complex, frequently overprocessed carbohydrates.

Adding to the mix, there's a television on where we eat. While I cannot hear the music and speech advertising yet another Wendy's exclusive (like the Pineapple or Salted Caramel Frosty) or Burger King declaring, "You Rule™", I can clearly see the food porn airing in the gaps between whatever's airing on TV.

I wasn't always vegetarian; the enticement is amplified after a steady diet of pintos. Welcome to Blessington; I hope you love BEANS.

Overcoming Temptation

It can be a struggle to overcome these temptations, recognizing them as the addiction they really are. Watching people bite into a crunchy looking piece of chicken can rub you the wrong way, leaving you seething with irritation.
"Why can't I be that person?" One opines audibly.

I consider the situation:

• I am here.
• I am not in the cast of that commercial.
• Much of that food is prop food, touched up to give us that gustatory feel without being able to eat exactly what we see.
• That gustatory feel is used to hook us, convince us that it's what we must have, what our people must have.
• For many of us, that commercial evokes memories from the past.

That last one is important to me, because my goal is to live here in the now, not deep in the memories of the past. Reflecting on lessons learned in past events is reasonable, as you may find knowledge there.

Reflecting on the times that you ate a sackful of Krystal burgers with extra mustard by yourself in one sitting can teach you that you were absorbed in the woeful failures of gluttony. If you can turn it into an object lesson, then sure, take a look. Just don't keep on re-living it.

Time flows like a river, and history repeats...

I'm determined to see this be the longest river in existence.
May this repeat point not be in this lifetime, or the next.

Count cleared, amazingly, so we go back to our evening.