Hot Dogs and Forbidden Fruit

When the weather is as grey and muddy as it has been this January, my kids tend to get cabin fever, so as an antidote, I took the boys to eat lunch and play at the indoor playground in the mall. We sat at a table right outside the GNC store. The store windows were decorated with larger-than-life black-and-white posters of athletic bodies exposing lots of taut, shiny skin. The posters were surrounded by sober ads for supplements and weight loss drinks and weight gain drinks and “super-food” bars. I had to laugh. Next to those gods and goddesses of bodily health, we were enjoying (yes, enjoying) a delightful lunch of hot dogs and generic Cheetos.

The juxtaposition between those ultra-serious advertisements and our fun-filled little repast was downright comical. While my boys and I licked fake cheese off of our artificially orange fingers, I got quite a kick out of watching the women in tight jeans and the men in tight shirts parading into the nutrition store. In fact, the delight it gave me was almost excessive. Those black-and-white posters of hot bods dressed in Spandex were perfectly joyless when compared with the cheery, little ketchup-smeared faces in front of me. With us were all the smiles, all the color, all the joie de vivre. With them, only sexy pouts glaring into the middle distance and daring me to feel guilty for the greasy meal I’d set before my children.

But "guilty" is exactly what I refuse to feel. I don't plan on making Cheetos and hot dogs a daily staple of our diet, but neither am I living in fear of the "long term side effects" from an occasional dose of nitrates and food coloring. Worrying is bad for my health. Rock-hard abs and buns of steel are fine, if that's your cup o' tea. (Although displaying them in Spandex shorts at twice life size is another thing....) But pursuing the ultimate body or the perfect metabolism is not my only goal in life. It's not even a major goal.

Of course I want to be healthy. Of course it's better not to be out of breath just walking from the car to the couch. Of course I want my kids to live for a long time. Of course I'd rather not have my family suffer from disease. But there's so, so much more to good health—bodily and otherwise—than what I put into my mouth every day. However, from some of the conversations I've heard and articles I've read, you'd almost think that food was both the root cause and the ultimate solution to every kind of evil.

Given all the money and time and effort we put into our food, it's not surprising that we have strong opinions on the subject. And I think it’s good that we give some thought to what and how we eat. But something else seems to be going on here. Food has become a topic that is almost too hot to touch.

From Julie & Julia to Food, Inc., we're fascinated enough by food to pay exorbitant prices to watch movies about it. There's an entire television network devoted to it. A huge, adoring crowd showed up at WSU this month to hear Michael Pollan speak on the subject. We have chefs with celebrity status. We have major cities legislating whether we're allowed to buy a cookie made with shortening.  And then there are food books and food magazines and food discussion groups and food manifestos and food blogs. We are, in a word, obsessed.

Don't get me wrong. I love food—from homegrown tomatoes to Hostess Ding Dongs. But it's because I love food that I hate so much the way we've distorted it into something overbearing and monstrous. Instead of consuming food, we're letting it consume us. We're food fanatics. Cuisine cops. Nutrivangelists. The Gourmet Gestapo. Casually mention in mixed company (only as a hypothetical social experiment, of course) that you fed Twinkies to your children for breakfast, and wait for the sharp intake of breath and the stunned silence to follow.

Because we won't allow food to play its proper role as a source of strength, pleasure, and culinary imagination, food has become a real point of contention: You use margarine instead of butter? Your lettuce isn't organically grown? You cook in a non-stick skillet? Your peanut butter has corn syrup in it? You buy milk from the grocery store? Your bread comes in a plastic bag? Don't you know the myriad sins you've committed (you hard-hearted, environmentally insensitive, nutritionally ignorant food-heathen)?

The way people sometimes talk, you'd think that eating the forbidden fruit was only a minor mistake when compared with the unforgivable crime of eating genetically modified apples. White flour and homogenized milk are the new hellfire and brimstone, and the only "sins" that ever come up in conversation seem to be related to chocolate cake. Everyone seems to be laboring under a burden of guilt that has more to do with transfats than with transgressions.

Just take a look at the way women's magazines are emblazoned with with "guilt-free" recipe headlines—right alongside "sinfully decadent" desserts.  And the absolution for all of our corn-syrupy trespasses? More food, of course.

I found this description on a cup of yogurt that I bought not long ago: "Spoon. Savor. Stretch. Sigh. Trust calming notes of lavender to satisfy the senses and soothe the soul."

Soothe the soul? Right. So if I'm crushed with Chicken McNugget guilt; if I'm sorrowing over pesticide sins; if I'm living in biotech fear, the solution to my guilt, sin and fear is...yogurt? Pardon me while I search for the nearest complimentary air sickness bag. The yogurt was tasty, but the quasi-religious marketing pitch makes me rather sick.

And yet… This food-based salvation message does appear to be just near enough to the truth to make it particularly persuasive to our spiritually vapid culture. I know that organic brown rice will not save my soul from damnation in the lake of fiery fryer grease, but at the same time, food and drink are very near the true Salvation message: Body broken (bread broken); Blood shed (wine poured). True Gospel is all tied up with a meal.

We are all hungry, I think, for the True Bread. But the problem is that we think we can find it at the Co-Op bakery. And so the Co-Op bakery suddenly takes on an importance far beyond providing a nice bagel to go with our morning coffee.

The True Bread unites us.  But we have we allowed Wonder Bread to divide us. We're too busy cat-fighting about the Nutrition Facts printed on the side of the package (Package? What package?) to rejoice in what we have so bountifully received. We let ourselves complain about our spouses, lie on our taxes, ignore our kids, and gossip about our neighbors. But God forbid that we should allow any government subsidized corn product to cross our lips.

In other words, our priorities are all in a big tangle.

We've stepped beyond dietary prudence into the realm of dietary paranoia. My most recent issue of Martha Stewart Living has a whole article devoted to identifying "dangerous" produce and encouraging me to check 5-digit barcodes for the demonic number 8. I talked to one mother who won't serve cake at her kids' birthday parties because of all the empty calories and refined whatnots it contains. We're all so worried about staying alive that we're forgetting how to live.

I may, possibly, be two percent more likely to have thyroid problems if I eat a Twinkie than if I abstain. But I know for a fact that I'm thousands of times more likely to be hit by a bus if I leave the house than if I were to stay in bed all day. But does that keep me from stepping out the door? Hardly. I have a life to live.

Ah, there's the rub. That's the thing about living: It'll kill you. But who of you by worrying can add a single day to your life?

Instead of worrying and feeling guilty over eating hot dogs rather than hummus, I should be thanking God for the joy and unity that comes from sharing food of all sorts around a table. To paraphrase Proverbs, better is a dinner of hot dogs and Cheetos where love is than a bowl of sustainably grown quinoa with hatred. I am not going to hyperventilate over what I eat. My salvation does not depend upon it. So after breathing into a brown paper bag for a few minutes, lets fill that brown paper bag with lunch, shall we?

God's bounty is vast enough to include Cheetos and chèvre, hot dogs and hummus. There's a whole world of flavors and textures—of edible joy—left to be discovered, and I'm never going to sample more than the minutest fraction of it before I die. (This is one of the many reasons to look forward to the resurrection of the body and not just the immortality of the soul; my taste buds will live into eternity. Glory.) Food, in its rightful role, is a blessing and a delight.

Therefore, under the disapproving gaze of the black-and-white GNC gods, I can laugh with ketchuppy lips and lick salty orange fingers with my children. Contrary to popular belief, I am allowed to eat my Cheetos with joy and drink my Diet Coke with a merry heart. A merry heart, after all, doeth good like a medicine.