The Eating World -Divided Up

I hate the term Foodies.  It implies that one considers themselves superior to normal calorie-in-taking humans.  As far as I am concerned there are three basic types of people when it comes to food.

The first is the person who eats anything that is put in front of them with little concern for exactly what it is, where it came from and what it might do to their body, but they do like to eat.  This makes up are large portion of the American population including most teenage boys and people who vacation in the Ozarks.

The second group is a very minority population of people who never think about food at all.  Sometimes they are over heard saying things like, “Oh, it’s 4:00, I forgot to have lunch.”  The skinniest upper east side ladies who lunch, despite having the word lunch in their moniker can be in this group as is Carter’s Godfather, David, who uses his oven as storage space for his tax records.

The third group is the rest of the world.  People who love food, think about food, talk about food, read about food, watch it on TV, sometimes cook, sometimes can’t cook but eat in a lot of different restaurants, blah, blah, blah.  Those who have the greatest affectation call themselves “Foodies” trying to raise the standings of their taste buds above the fray, but really who cares.  This group lives to eat.  It does not mean they live to eat too much, but that what they are eating is important to them.

My husband Russ and I are in the last group.  I have always been a cook.  My first memory of cooking something by myself was making scrambled eggs at age four.  It was the 1960’s and my young parents still stayed out late on Fridays and Saturdays nights so I was often up alone for hours in the morning.  Learning to fend for myself was key.

Russ had a mother who always provided a meal for him, but flavor was not often a key ingredient.  Marrying me opened up a new world of culinary exploration that made Russ question whether he might have been adopted.

Today, Russ and I are in Seattle on vacation.  Seattle has a world of good food at every turn, smoked salmon, cupcakes, unusual cheeses, bread galore.  Normally we would take full advantage of such an opportunity and eat whatever tempted us from morning ‘til bedtime, savoring each new taste, Russ begging me to dissect new dishes in order to recreate them at home…but not today.   I’m on my weight loss challenge.

So for this trip poor Russ has been pulled from his happy group of people who love food into the minority group of people who don’t think about food at all, very much against type.  But he does not complain and he helps me pretend I am in the non-food-lover-society.   That is just one of the many reason I love him and am so lucky that he asked me to marry him exactly 21 years ago today.