This week, I published The Considered Man. And the week before, I mostly did not eat well. There were a lot of pieces of gluten-free toast. There was dark chocolate almond milk drunk at my desk. There were pieces of fruit, some cheese. Most meals I do not remember because they were not really meals. Food had become an interruption, and I was treating the moments when I had to eat like an inconvenience.
Then, somewhere mid-week, I caught it. The finishing touches on a guide about the importance of rituals — of taking the time to take care of one's self — were getting in the way of one of the most basic acts of doing exactly that. There was no excuse for the toast. I had been hurrying through my own meals. I had young arugula I could cut from the boxes I planted as soon as spring let me. I had soft garlic from last fall's harvest, the kind that has begun to give under the thumb but is still entirely itself. I had olive oil from Morocco — where some of the healthiest olives grow, and the oil tastes like nothing else. I had eggs.
What I made took fifteen minutes. The eggs scrambled slowly, the way scrambled eggs ought to be made. In another pan, a fat clove of garlic, sliced thin, golden in the olive oil before the sesame seeds and arugula joined it — heat down, the leaves softening to a deeper green, the peppery edge gone nutty. Plated together. Salt. Pepper. A drizzle of olive oil over the top.
This is what quick and easy used to mean. A few real ingredients, no fuss, no apology. Somewhere along the way the food industry decided it owned those words. The aisles labelled quick and easy and meal solutions now mostly contain stabilized sauces, kits of components you assemble like furniture, frozen entrees built around starches and gums and flavorings designed to survive a microwave. They are sold to tired people on the premise that this is what fast food has to be. It is not. It is what the industry needs fast food to be in order to sell it. The version with five ingredients and two pans still works, and it is not slower, and it is not harder, and it tastes like food. The reason most people no longer make it is not time. It is that they have been taught they cannot — that they do not have time, that it is too hard, that what is in the box is somehow the better version.
The night the guide was published I had pistachio ice cream on the terrasse. The kind made of cream, milk, sugar, pistachios, egg yolks — before the ingredient list went wrong. Very few decisions in a day, or a life, matter more than which version of things we choose. Most of those choices are small. Most of them look like ice cream.
— Catherine