On Wasted Meals

Not necessarily meals eaten while you're wasted, of which I can count a few (suck it, Cook Out), but more pertaining to a weird anxiety I've carried around with me every since I can really remember. Sometime when I was young, it hit me that I had a finite number of meals left in my lifetime (I thought about such things a lot as a child. I didn't have a lot of friends). For a long time, with every meal I sat down to — mostly meals of fishsticks and Kraft macaroni and cheese as a result of our economic situation — I would often be overcome by this gripping fear that I was wasting some sort of meal reserve that I was automatically gifted with at birth. Because of this, I hated having the same meal many times over in a short amount of time. Although, this completely explains my weird aversion to leftovers.

I distinctly remember whipping myself up into a panic many times when I was younger after reading an issue of Gourmet or looking at a beautiful cookbook, terrified that I just wouldn't have enough time in my life to cook all of the beautiful recipes I pored over, or go to all of the amazing restaurants I read about with such veracity. This feeling haunts me every time I look at Food Gawker or Taste Spotting. This is probably why I haven't yet been able to bring myself to open up the copy of "The Silver Spoon" that my mom bought me last year for Christmas. Thousands of lovely Italian recipes and I NEED to cook them all! But there's just not enough time!!! Gaaaah!

Even though I'm only 22, and I probably have a good 44,000 meals ahead of me (60-ish years x 365 days x 2 meals — I don't usually ever eat breakfast), I still get a little panicky when I remember that I've eaten burritos every day for the last 4 days because they're cheap and also delicious. This also spills over into every trip I've ever taken. When I make plans to go to New York, I get really anxious that I only have 6 or so meals to eat, and I labor over where to go (god forbid my travel companion has any opinion on the matter and insists on something that I find unpalatable, or not special enough. This is probably why I got so pissed at one of my friends when he wanted to eat fucking hot dogs from carts the entire time we were in New York).

I could promise myself that I'm going to try a new recipe every day, or do something to end this madness, but I think I'm just gonna go eat a burrito.