Maybe its because I was flying to the West Coast the other
night on a red-eye after being upgraded from an economy fare, when I could not
turn down the “snack” that was offered at close to 11pm. It was a ham sandwich with melted cheese that
immediately brought back the smell, taste and memory of the hundreds of hoagie
subs that I have consumed in my former years of youthful gluttonous
abandon. It truly was delicious but my
stomach was unaccustomed to eating that late.
It immediately resulted in gastric distention, and a feeling of intense
guilt for having been too weak to turn down the offer of food at so late in the
evening, in favor of the obvious healthier choice. I pictured myself gaining another two pounds
that night while adding another glob of fat around my waste that would be
difficult to remove. I rubbed my tummy
with my hand searching for evidence to disprove my worst fears.
I arrived in LA early in the morning, after an unsettling
attempt to catch a few hours of sleep, struggling to find a comfortable position
in the typically uncomfortable trans pacific Delta aircraft. I hobbled
off of the plane in search of the next leg of my travel. It was just after 5AM and there was an hour
to spare before my next flight. The
Delta terminal in the LAX airport is not my favorite but this morning it was
particularly lively, bustling with youth and young families, coming and going from
all directions like an ant colony. While
it no longer surprises me that virtually everyone….including myself….was “wearing”
their iPhone, it was indeed surprising to see……soooo many folks eating. They were eating at the overpriced cafes and
unfriendly food stands, they were eating seated at the gate and they were eating
walking to the gate. I took a rough
estimate and figured about a third of those there were eating something. My God, this was 5:30AM!
Wasting more time in the terminal, my eyes were drawn to a
large new food shop, euphemistically called the Farmers Market. Ostensibly situated there to appeal to those
healthier-minded travelers, I figured it was worth a few minutes of my time to
check it out. That’s when I found it!
The $18 sandwich!
Airport concessions are no longer robbing you, they are raping you! This sandwich or more accurately a croissant
enclosing some unknown buried treasure, the contents of which were invisible despite
the clear cellophane packaging. It was
sitting there, shameless, stacked neatly, brother to brother in the refrigerated
display. Indeed, the mark up must be astonishing – the contents of the sandwich could not be worth more than a $1 by any
imagination.
Anyway, the above comments are only the stimulus to what I
really want to say. It is not about my
guilty hoagie, it’s not about the airport, or the cost of food at the airport,
it’s about food in general and the ubiquitous preoccupation and obsession with
eating in the Americas.
Truly, too much time is spent eating too much food in too
many places. The center of life’s focus for so many of us, is what next to put
in our mouths. And there are too many food places…. in too many places (cities) to make this preoccupation a reality.
And it makes me wonder whether what I observed at the
airport that inauspicious morning was people
eating or was it eating people……meaning the overarching nature of man is his insatiable drive to consume
food.
I didn’t mean for eating
people to mean literally eating people where “eating” is intended as an
action (verb), but rather to describe the nature of many as “eating” (adjective).
In any case, I’ll let the ambiguity stand. Bon appetit!
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