three bowls

I don't mean in the sense of "It's a recession and we're all stretched thin." I mean in terms of actual location.

Well, I'm hoping I do. I'm hoping it's at this cleaned-off table.

I'm about to do a post about another recent happy marker of progress in the Learning How to Cook process that has been this blog thus far.

But with all the progress I've made in the cooking arena, there's really one area where I remain shamefully troglodytic: eating.

I'll spend all this time cooking and then revert back to old, haphazard, disorganized, thoughtless, careless eating.

As mentioned in some of my original posts about why I started this blog, I don't have a personal history of organized, structured, actual sit-down-at-a-table meal-eating. And while I've learned some great meal preparation techniques through the learning process of the past few years, I still do not have an organized, structured, actual sit-down-at-a-table meal-eating life.

And one can't help but wonder: what good is learning how to cook great meals if I don't actually sit down and eat them like a civilized human being instead of grabbing a piece of something and trying to keep the crumbs off my keyboard because I didn't even put it on a plate?

I overeat for many reasons, but I've been realizing lately that one of those reasons is that my brain is not registering the experience of eating because I'm not truly conscious of doing it. So I'll eat a meal with 90% of my brain elsewhere, and then later, have a feeling I need to eat and so I will, even though I'm not technically hungry.

You are supposed to listen to your body for cues of hunger in order to know when to eat. But that, in my experience, isn't the whole story. And telling yourself that story is one surefire way to feel like a failure if you ever try to reduce your food intake for weight control reasons.

I am starting to think lately that having a certain kind of conscious emotional experience of eating is probably just as if not more important than the actual physical experience of it. So many diets and weight loss schemes seem to approach the problem as though those emotional needs are to be somehow ignored, tamped down, burned through with sheer willpower and machismo. But then those same plans fail, so maybe it's not really effective to think that emotional needs are somehow inferior to physical ones.

I don't know enough about the Harry Harlow wire monkey/cloth monkey experiment beyond the broad brushstrokes, and I'm really too sleepy right now to try to tease out the connection to this burgeoning personal hypothesis I'm forming, but it's in there somewhere: my dinner table! terrycloth monkey! comfort and food! These ideas are on simmer, they're not quite ready for consumption yet.

But in order to help narrow things down, this week I'm tweaking this whole experiment a bit. What I'm focused on this week isn't really the cooking, it isn't using up all the produce in some perfect matrix, it isn't learning some new culture and cuisine. It's just eating actual meals sitting at an actual table.

In order to make that a little easier, I did a bunch of pre-work this weekend.

Made a bunch of stuff so that the actual meal prep can take less time, leaving more time for the meal-eating.  So now, it's just a question, really, of keeping that table cleaned off this week so that I can sit at it and eat some of the above like a civilized person.  Wish me luck, I think this is actually going to be a lot harder to do than any cook-a-thon.