As I’ve approached all the food of the holiday season I’ve thought often of the passage below from The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farras Capon. I’ve been trying to lose weight for eight months and I’ve often been frustrated as I’ve wanted a philosophy of food more than I’ve wanted to count calories.
The passage below has helped me think about food as a something that is limited and precious and that I should only dole out the space in my stomach to deserving foods. The bit on eclairs particularly has helped me pass over the constant supply of store-made sugar cookies in the break room at work in favor of a tastier apple. It also helped me justify an extra schnitzel on Saturday.
“The calorie approach is the work of the devil. He has persuaded otherwise sane men that festal (rich or extraordinary) eating should not alternate with ferial (reserved, regular) eating at all, but with dieting – an activity which, while it uses food, hopes that it can keep food from having anything significant to do with us.
The modern diet victim sees his life at the table not as a delightful alternation between pearls of great price and dishes of lesser cost, but as a grim sentence which condemns him to pay for every fattening repast with a meal of carrot sticks and celery.
In fact, of course, the insane distinction of fattening/ dietetic cannot be squared with the rational one of festal/ferial. The first fastens its attention, not on food, but on little invisible spooks called calories; only the second honestly addresses distinguishing good food from bad.
Take eclairs, for example. The world is full of them, mostly awful. Any true eater, ferial or festal, will be able to give you an accurate judgment as to which of them are worth meeting and which should be avoided. The dieter however, has lost all criteria for judgment. That eclairs are more fattening is his sole piece of information. If his is in a mood to diet, he will pass up the best eclair in the world without even a backward look; and if he is a mood to eat he will devour a corner-bakery, cardboard-and-cornstarch monstrosity as if it were something out of Brillat-Savarin.
He is a man who for all practical purposes has lost his taste. He will choose tough steak in the presence of elegant stew, and canned stringed beans when he might have dined on mashed parsnips drenched in butter.”
Here was a meal worth eating.
Posted by furthermusings 
So ends the DPP. Merry Christimas!
Posted by furthermusings 
Posted by furthermusings 
This week my sister 
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People at the Capital are serious about knowing where their doughnuts are.
