The Girl Who Ate Everything

I don't think I should eat much tomorrow since I gained weight.

Yeah, good idea.

Yup.

I said this last night at home in NJ to my mum after stuffing myself with some local fruits. And perhaps a stroopwafel. And some chocolate. Of course, if you gain weight it's best to eat less. In general, it's best to eat less.

I'm already getting that crap, don't eat too much or else you'll be a lardo/piss off God/Flying Spaghetti Monster feeling I had last year during school and I haven't even been in school for a week. The anticipation of the foodstuffs that will be thrust upon me in the coming semester is making my blood pressure inch upwards. Of course, if you major in food studies (such as myself), you're going to be presented with food. If for some reason you can't handle that, you probably shouldn't be majoring in food studies. I already went through the "should I change my major?" debate and obviously decided not to.

However, I don't think I've ever been fit to go to school. (I suppose that's a whole other discussion not fit for this blog.) I've never really liked school, so I figured I'd at least choose a major that would be useful and that I may even like. A novel idea, yes?

My Food Production and Management class is going to kill me. (Actually, all my classes will kill me, which I'll explain shortly.) Besides the lecture, there are 40 hours of lab time, organized semi-randomly outside of class time. Here's a schedule for lab time in the department:

schedule of horror

I swear that I stared at it for 30 minutes, trying to figure out what I could or couldn't do based on my existing schedule. (There's another schedule for lab work outside the department, which will be four weeks from 9AM to 1PM on Wednesday mornings in a campus dining hall if I get the shift I asked for.) This wouldn't be that bad if I weren't also trying to get a job, but unlike last year, I actually applied for a job and (get read for this), I ACTUALLY GOT THE JOB.

But. This lab stuff is making schedule work time a tad difficult. And by a tad, I mean "my brain hurts, please shoot me" difficult. Last thing I want to do is annoy my new employer (the job I got in on-campus for the law school's web team) and not be able to work the optimal number of hours.

Of course, there are worse things. Like hurricanes. (But you already know about it, so...)

Actually, it's stupid for me to complain about anything as stupid as food. I know it's stupid, but I can't help it. For instance, I bought a bag of raw cashews on Wednesday from Life Thyme (on 6th Ave near 11th Street), something I haven't done all year. Cashews are my favorite nut and any food that falls under "Robyn's favorite things to ingest" also falls under "Things Robyn shouldn't buy or else she might eat a bucket-load, if the food can be measured in buckets." However, when I don't eat grain products, I tend to replace the void of grains with nuts or seeds, even though they're obviously not the same thing.

The bag I bought weighed around 14 ounces. More than half of it was gone in two days. If you're wondering, that's kind of excessive. Yup. After realizing that there was a mass of digested cashews floating within my body, I had a small freak-out.

What do I do with the rest of the cashews? Eat them? Throw them out? Yes, I should throw them out. But it cost a lot! Okay, maybe I'll keep them. Maybe I can give them to someone else? Who else eats plain raw cashews? Dammit! Okay, I'll just keep them. Or throw them out. Damn, now I really want cashews, crap, no!

When I should be thinking about my homework, I'm actually thinking about cashews or any food that I want to eat but know I shouldn't. You may be relieved to know that I'm not losing any sleep over the "minimal grain ingestion" diet I've put on myself, which isn't much of a diet. I'll allow myself to eat grains (aka SUPER TASTY FOODS) if I'm out with other people but when I'm by myself in my dorm, I shouldn't, hence the steady lonely college student diet of fruit, nuts, and yogurt and honey over the past week. It's delicious, you know. And addictive.

If you're wondering why I won't eat "normal food", just...nah, don't ask. I hope no one thinks I'm destroying my health or anything like that.

Crap, I lost my train of thought.

Oh, I was going to talk about my other classes. There are five of them. Damn, this is going to take forever. In that case, I'll just focus on one class: food and society. So far, so good. One of our projects is to write an essay about a food with nostalgic significance and bring it in or something to that degree, and the big project is an essay about some kind of food and society related topic. Vague? Ye-up. This is when I have to think about a topic, and it can't be "PANCAKES? YES!" Right now I have an idea for something related to the prevalence of characters and mascots in the Japanese food industry, but that might not work if I have to, like, learn Japanese.

Anyway, during our first class one of the things we talked about was how people identify themselves through food. Some of the first ones that popped up were ethnic foods, religious foods, special diets, eating disorders, and a crapload of others that I've already forgotten. A girl said something I found interesting, about how some people identify themselves by how much they can eat. She used a former roommate as an example: she was stick-thin but could eat just about anything in large quantities, and was proud of it. Damn, I wish. I guess I kind of identify with the fact that I can somehow eat lots of sugary things without skewing my mouth into a look of disgust or having my brain transform into cotton candy, but is that something I should be proud of? Probably not.

Lastly, I leave you with this: insane mooncakes that I would really like to eat. I haven't had a mooncake all year. I probably eat a very low quantity of mooncakes for a Chinese person, but I also celebrate a very low number of Chinese holidays (zero) for a Chinese person.

No wait, last-lastly: Shake Shack shakes are thick? Maybe I was unlucky, but the one time I got a concrete (and I don't plan on trying it again), it went from non-soup to soup seemingly more quickly than if I had just stuck it in a microwave. Yes, it was hot that day, but it was also past 9 PM so I doubt the sky was boiling at the time. While the concrete was full of delicious chocolate and brownie chunks, the thin soupy consistency ruined the magic for me. (sigh) Was my experience unique or have other people had soupy concretes also? I know the weather didn't help but it's not like you can get a concrete in the dead of winter, even though that would be the best way for it to stay frozen.