Sex and Bacon (11 page)

I kissed my girlfriend on the mouth. “I love you so much, baby” I said tenderly.

I really did. She gave me a lot to think about. Also, my asshole was feeling really itchy and I wanted to slip into the bathroom to wipe compulsively. I regularly used up all her double-quilted girly toilet paper and replaced it with big industrial rolls of Scott, which I stole from work. She never complained, but every time I came over to her apartment the Scott was gone and there was another roll of delectably soft Charmm next to her spotless commode. It seemed to me that because of her work, my girlfriend paid attention to assholes and thoughtfully gave them the things they liked—her affection for me was proof enough of that. She was conscientious about both set and setting, from making sure her bathroom was a clean and pleasant place to poop to supplying the expensive paper I coveted but never bought for myself. She really knew how to live, and I loved her for that.

And a few days later when I woke up in the middle of the night, screaming and clawing at an invisible flatworm grown horribly large, determined to bore through my skin and into my guts in search of a broccoli floret to call its own, she just held me tight, bless her sweet and healing heart.

1.
I do realize there are medications specifically designed to address this problem.

2.
And yes, I do understand that many porno movies start-with this exact exposition, but trust me, this isn’t that kind of essay

3.
Bring on the dancing midgets!

TODAY I’M SLOW-BAKING A VANILLA CUSTARD TO GOLDEN
, nutmeg-crusted perfection in a 300-degree oven. I have Indian butter chicken percolating in my Crock-Pot, making my whole apartment smell of curry and spice and tomatoes and yes,
butter
—five wonderful, flavorful tablespoons of organic salted—and when it’s done I’m going to fork-shred the chicken and ladle it over hot jasmine rice and serve the ‘whole glorious spicy mess with a dollop of cool, sweet mango chutney.

I’m not having guests over, either. No —I’m cooking all this lovely food for myself, and I’m going to eat as much of it as I want, sitting with a good book and a tall, cool glass of beer. I’m hungry, and I look forward to eating my supper. I can smell the hot butter, and it’s maddening, so ambrosial I want to yank off the lid of my slow-cooker and plunge my spoon into it and devour every bit of sauce right now. It smells so good I want to roll in it. I’m undone—a slavering pet frisking around my own kitchen, begging for treats.

Fat makes food taste really, really good.

It keeps your hair glossy and your curves plump and most of all, it gives a certain silky roll to each mouthful, a smooth satin glide across your palate that feels like a long, deep kiss. Fat is flavor, from elegant infused olive oil to the down-home raunch of poured-off Jimmy Dean sausage grease. Fat is where flavor
Lived
. Fat is the good part. Fat wraps around fiber and eases its passage, makes it palatable, dresses it up. Fat is like a good, expensive pair of black boots: It goes with anything, always adds welcome flair, and gives you a sexy, ass-swaying strut.

Eschewing fat in the name of health is a losing proposition. When you deny yourself fat, you recalibrate your sense of satiety.
More
, your body demands. So, meaning well, you give it more fatless food. Quantity, however, does not replace quality. Your body knows the difference. It wants a certain amount of deliciousness, and whether you get that deliciousness from one lovely, crisp piece of buttered toast or from thirty dry, mealy, cardboard-flavored fat-free crackers, your body will eat until it is satisfied. As a result, we tend to take in far more calories when we restrict our fat consumption.

I know from fat. I used to
be
fat. I was fat, and I didn’t want to be, so I bought a lot of fat-free products, from salad dressings to those horrible stale-tasting cookies in the green boxes, each fat-free treat as packed with sugar and calories as three normal cookies. I also starved myself. But I was hungry all the time. I would have an apple and a container of fat-free yogurt for breakfast, I’d skip lunch, and I’d have a can of fat-free soup and one abstemious slice of dry bread for dinner. To my horror, no matter how little I ate (or how terrible my food tasted), I stayed fat. I even got fatter. I was beside myself—I couldn’t believe what was happening. I exercised. I ‘weighed myself. I baked potatoes in the microwave, broke them open, and ate the waxy semicooked chunks of potato flesh ‘with lemon juice and black pepper (150 calories). I bought low-calorie fat-free bread (50 calories per slice). I ate can after can of dry, water-packed tuna. I drank Crystal Light. Nothing I ate gave me any pleasure whatsoever—most of it tasted like paper, and the items that didn’t taste like paper tasted like chemicals.
Why was I still fat?

Finally, I gave up. I moved to New York and I started eating whatever I wanted. Fuck it—I was already fat; what could it hurt? All of a sudden there were worlds of food to explore, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. I wanted to mouth New York City like a baby, tasting every neighborhood, every cuisine, every nook and cranny of the big, dirty city I loved. I wanted to lick the pavement, suck on subway tokens like hard candy, guzzle water from fountains, take the city inside me like a lover. I wanted it to change me from the inside out.

I bought hot dogs from carts with plenty of mustard and onions and shredded sauerkraut ladled up from greasy lukewarm tanks of water. I bought giant flappy triangles of pizza that dripped hot oil down my forearms, staining my sleeves. I bought cartons of good Greek coffee in the blue-and-white key-patterned cups. I learned to order it “regular,” meaning loaded with cream. A giant muffin to go with my coffee only cost a dollar, and they were baked fresh all day. I liked the ones ‘with chocolate chips. I also liked the black-and-white cookies available in any deli. They •were half-vanilla and half-chocolate, Frisbee-size. I ate my black-and-white cookies ‘with two hands, gnawing equal portions of each side in turn so as not to run out of one flavor too soon.

In my Brooklyn neighborhood there was more pizza—better than I’d ever had before in my life, from real Italian pizzerias. There were Chinese dumplings, too, pork and vegetarian, dipped in soy sauce mixed with “duck sauce,”which was a sweet orange jelly squeezed out of a plastic sleeve. There were crumbly rice balls that tasted of salt and meat grease, as big as baseballs. There were pounds of Italian shortbread cookies, some dipped in frosting and sprinkles, and some plain. They came in big pink bakery boxes tied up with real string.

I went to kosher dairy restaurants, making sure to dress modestly to show my respect to the local Hasidim, who drank their coffee with fruit jam instead of sugar. I learned to order big crusty slabs of rice pudding as dense and solid as cake, along with strudels and kugel and
rugelach
and other guttural, delicious fruit-filled pastries. I ate vinegary knishes and little dumplings stuffed with cabbage. In the delis that served meat, I ordered sandwiches so thick I had to press the slices of rye bread together, savagely compressing piled mounds of corned beef and pastrami into pink and purple slabs in order to take a bite. I gnawed on oversize bagels the size of catcher’s mitts. My front teeth were constantly coated in bright yellow deli mustard. I washed everything down with Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, I no longer gave a flying fuck about being fat. There were plenty of fat people in New York—I •was merely one of many. We ran to catch our morning express trains clutching Greek coffees and crullers just like everyone else. New York’s famous indifference meant I could eat when I was hungry and stop when I was full without feeling scrutinized or even noticed. In a city of so many people, nobody gave a damn about one chubby Seattleite gobbling pizza from a sheet of greasy wax paper.

And I started getting thinner.

All that fat—all that
flavor
—and my body could finally relax and stop hoarding miserly calories, tricked by my own willpower into believing I was starving to death. My skin bloomed, and the extra weight I was carrying fell away, and at first I just thought my pants were getting “stretched out” because they were old and losing elasticity. Soon it became clear that my fat-enhanced diet was responsible for my loss of what was eventually six dress sizes.

You’d think this would have changed my life. Most people are conditioned by a lifetime of Before and After pictures —showing first, a lumpen, ashy mound of a woman and, second, a maple-brown fitness model posing in a thong—to believe that massive weight loss results in a better, happier, sexier life. But in reality, it only meant that none of the clothes I wore before I moved fit anymore —and that the Italian men in my neighborhood stopped making kissing noises as I walked by with my new, sleeker build. I bought two new pairs of pants and three new shirts. I didn’t buy anything else to wear because I was still spending most of my money on food. I was pleased by my shrinking girth, but I didn’t feel like I owned it. I kept waiting to balloon up again once my body finally figured out how much food I was actually consuming. I felt like I was getting away with something but feared getting caught and punished. I was sure that after six months of unbridled eating, I’d wake up resembling the six-hundred-pound man who had to be airlifted through his own ceiling for medical intervention.

Eventually my size stabilized. I had become a perfectly reasonable size 12—morbidly obese to the fashion industry, it’s true, but medium-size to the rest of the world. I remembered being fat and miserable in Seattle, feeling hungry—no,
starved
, my hunger lighting up every moment of every day like a flashing neon DANGER sign—and I found I vastly preferred the alternative: eating freely and joyfully in a city I loved. They say you are what you eat, and that if you feast on fat you’ll
become
fat—but the diet industry’s economic interest lies in keeping us fat through misinformation so they can sell us more weight-loss products, and I never wanted to eat another cardboard-flavored confection in my life. Gnawing on a black-and-white cookie in a deli in lower Manhattan, I realized the diet experts had been lying all along.

So now I eschew anything labeled “diet” or “lite,” and I eat when I’m hungry, and I try to make sure that everything I devour is as delicious and whole as it can be. And I’ve worn the same dress size for more than twelve years.

Who says diets don’t work? Of course they do. The ones that involve deprivation, hunger, obsession, displeasure, and calorie counting will result in inexorable weight gain, self-loathing, and depression, just as they’re designed to do. But the diets dictated by our own appetites—the ones that nourish us with flavor, fat, and deliciousness—will result in us being the size we’re meant to be, whether that’s 2 or 12 or 20.

Ladies, call off the hunger strike. Real -women eat fat.

SPAGHETTI SAUCE IS THE RORSCHACH TEST OF THE CULINARY
world: What’s telling in the details of any recipe isn’t about which ingredients are included and which are left out; it’s about what each individual cook thinks
should
be in it, and
shouldn’t
.

Nearly everyone who prepares food, amateur or professional, believes their spaghetti sauce to be the best—whether they spend all day dicing organic hothouse tomatoes, mincing fresh basil from their own herb gardens, and crushing garlic with an imported Kuropean press; or whether they open a can of Ragú, toss in some garlic salt, and call it their own special recipe.

But similar to the explanations created to justify the appearance of nonrepresentational inkblots, the personality-revealing aspects of spaghetti sauce live in the details of the story any cook tells about his or her perfect sauce. I’ve noticed a frequent moral cast to each narrative straddling related senses of Tightness and righteousness: Every cook seems to believe that a successful sauce must be prepared
one
particular way and
only
thatway—
their
way of course. Passions run hot. Two cooks in the same kitchen can end up sparring like ferrets over a single spoonful of white sugar if one chef was raised to believe that adding granulated sweetener to spaghetti sauce brings out a certain mellow, sun-kissed, tomato-y tang, and the other scorns its addition as a disgraceful and inauthentic Chef Boyardee—ism.