Slow Food

Among my weaknesses is the propensity to eat really quickly.  I’m a victim of the fast food culture!

Someday I am going to be in France and I’m going to sit at the end of a long banquet table, surrounded by friends and family, and we’re going to have a 9 course dinner.  It’s going to start at 3 in the afternoon and go until 9 at night.  We’re going to eat small, light portions, and break up the eating with anecdotes, laughter, entertainments, and joy from being together.  There will be a large fire burning at either end of the dining room, and a joyful house staff waiting to cook and serve for us.

This is a dream of mine.

Instead, my sad reality is that most of my meals are composed of some pre-processed, pre-prepared food, hastily slapped together and quickly consumed.  Lately, my sodium-filled delights of choice come from Subway and Chick-fil-a.  I also enjoy a good Firehouse Sub every so often, but in these slim economic times, I prefer to walk across the street and save $2 rather than driving down to Firehouse.

So my problem is twofold: 1) the nutritional value of what I’m eating sucks and 2) the rate at which I consume said unhealthy food makes it doubly unhealthy.  I eat so fast I tend to consume more than I probably should.  Someone once told me that if you eat slower, you give your stomach more time to send the signals to  your brain that it is satiated.  I have no scientific basis to accept that other than to say – I think they’re right.  Even though nerves pass signals really fast, my stomach is kind of dumb and lethargic and sometimes doesn’t know its own state of being — kind of like this guy:

More often than not, I eat because of habit rather than because of hunger.

So, I’m  thinking I need to join the Slow Food movement.

I find that when I cook a meal, I tend to eat less of it; sometimes because I’m just tired of the smell and want it flushed down the drain, sometimes because I tasted along the way, and other times because working for it just made me less hungry for it.  The food most often tastes better because I use fresh ingredients, but is more difficult to do because it involves planning.

I tried this theory out last night by making fajitas and spanish rice from scratch.  “From scratch,” meaning, I used a McCormick spice pack for the chicken and rice from a box.  But besides the help in tempering the food, none of it came pre-cooked.

The result?  Two very satiated adults with indigestion.   Maybe the tomatoes I used had been in the fridge too long, or maybe the spanish rice spice packet had something in it that disagreed with us.  Either way, slow food has turned into slow-to-digest food as well, and I’m seriously considering something much lighter and fibrous tomorrow.  Perhaps we’ll just gnaw on a head of lettuce…