How to listen to your hunger
I can’t remember when it started, but at some point, I started trying to make my home-cooked meals look nice. (If I’m being honest, this effort probably lines up with the advent of Instagram.) By “nice,” I don’t mean anything precise or precious — the only tweezers in my kitchen are short and blunt, a $1 purchase from the restaurant supply store that I use to remove fish bones. But, time and energy allowing, I’ll do a minute’s worth of work to make my meal feel a bit more special. Scallions sliced on a steep bias for a finishing flash of green. A quick wipe to clear the sauce from the dish’s rim. A perfect dome of rice, inverted from a gently packed prep bowl. I won’t do these nice-ifications all the time — sometimes the food has to go directly from the pan to my mouth — but when I do, I always pause for a moment before digging in. I appreciate my work; admire it, even. The eyes eat first, after all. In a generous light, this act could be considered a bit of mindful eating, a concept that our former chief restaurant critic Pete Wells digs into in this week’s installment of Reset Your Appetite. Essentially, mindful eating involves slowing down and taking a moment to think about the food you want to eat, and paying close attention to your hunger. That’s a lot easier said than done, of course. “Entire industries are devoted to drowning out the signals our bodies send to tell us what we need to eat,” Pete writes. “Chip packages are designed in screaming colors we can see from across the supermarket. Chicken nuggets are engineered for craveability. TikTok and other forms of food media seed our brains with thoughts of life-changing Dubai chocolate strawberries.” He continues: “The noise is especially good at confusing us because our body’s signals come in different forms. There is physical hunger, the solid sense that it’s time for a substantial meal. But there are impostors, too, feelings dressed up as needs. There is bored hunger, sad hunger, anxious hunger and (my specialty) hunger in the service of procrastination.” What helps to dampen that noise, Pete has found, is to make meals that require and attract his attention. “Certain dishes force me to shift to a lower gear. Chewing a raw carrot takes about as much time as reading a chapter of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’ Most salads are slow food, especially when all the components have been carved or chopped or shredded into different shapes and sizes. I can trance out while cutting up radishes, scallions, cucumbers and hard-cooked eggs for a composed salad based loosely on Thai yum yai. The trance doesn’t totally end when I bring the bowl to the table, either.” Featured Recipe Chicken and Herb Salad With Date-Lime DressingOf course, not all afternoons or evenings leave space for such mindfulness; it’s not easy to pay attention to radishes when the dog is scratching at the door and the math homework demands help. I think paying attention to your hunger and your food can also include grace and enjoyment. “There are days when my walk takes me to a local pastry shop that makes excellent cinnamon buns,” Pete writes of his daily stroll. “But when I eat that cinnamon bun, I promise you, I do it mindfully. Find more recipes for mindful eating here and below, and we’ll be back next Tuesday with the final installment of Pete’s Reset Your Appetite series. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!
|
.jpg)
