“DIng-ding-ding.”
I had been holding open the refrigerator door long enough to make it antsy.
“DING-DING-DING.”
I could almost hear my mother’s disapproval over the icebox’s sound of alarm. “You’re letting out all the cool air. Why don’t you just make a selection already!”
What I can’t decide is what looks good here. Leftovers? Salad? Something requiring no small amount of preparation and a much larger portion of skill?
I selected something from a box on the shelf before I sated the chimes.
Something prepackaged.
My teeth bear down on a corner of a hard-pressed bar of peanut-flavored protein. I will my teeth to cut slowly hoping to preserve my teeth, which may have reached the age of random chipping.
I chew slowly, digesting the reality that I care more about macros than about flavor, or texture, or joy.
Does this really qualify as food?
Who sold us this nonsense? Some hard brick of nutrients that may or may not be a relative of candy. It’s dressed up like a candy bar and touted as sustenance.
I peel the wrapper downward, in three neat strips, as if this excuse for sustenance were a member of some family of natural fruit.
Somehow we’ve accepted that this package of protein is not really “food” per say, but we embrace it as a convenient “fuel.”
As if we want to think of ourselves as precision instruments. Just cogs in a machine, needing only the barest necessities to survive.
The dog is at my feet, staring up at me, laser-focused on my mouth as I raise the bar again and take another timid bite. It has warmed up in my hand. The mouthful I’ve taken crumbles like wet sand. A thin layer sticks to my teeth, while a similar-sized piece above the wrapper, near my pinched fingers, falls to the floor.
The dog pounces. But misses. His nose snuffling around my chair without finding the morsel.
Truly, had I not been trying to streamline lunch, I might have taken the beige-colored nugget now on the carpet to be a shard of forgotten dog biscuit. Or something a little more indelicate.
I tap the floor with my foot near the drop zone, and he cleans it up with one quick slurp.
A few minutes later, I wad up the wrapper and pitch it into the trash. I open the refrigerator and stare inside. My hunger isn’t an immediate pang as much as it feels like a distant memory of fullness I’m trying to relive.
Each shelf offers a choice I could process by reheating or by simple assembly.
The bells alert me to the door left ajar too long. I shut it to make the noise go away.
Who needs the joy of food when you have the necessities of nutrition?
I wonder if I’ve bought into the convenience of supplements as staples because I don’t value real food as much as I value saving the time it takes to prepare?
The calculus of calories.
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