So there are two very good eaters in this house. Well, three, actually. But the other two are pretty adamant about eating balanced menus and not a lot of red meat and hardly any butter or saturated fats and lots of pasta, whole grains, fruit and vegetables and olive oil and practically no sugary desserts (except mama’s ice cream, which is mostly fruit and very little sugar or cream) and on and on and on, ad nauseum…whereas I’ll eat just about anything that’s fish or fowl.
Fanatics, they are not, but healthy eaters, they are. Sometimes to the point of being a little bit TOO stringent about avoiding certain foods.
Like hamburgers. For example.
Then, one day papa mentions that a new comparison of the part that fats and carbohydrates play in weight gain or loss has found that you actually lose more weight if you eat more fat than if you eat more carbohydrates and less fat. I can’t really go into the details on this but it was in the NYT and you can read it, if interested. In short, even some saturated fats can be more helpful in losing weight than low-carb foods.
Hey, neither of these anthros is overweight. Neither of them has particular health problems relating to food, so FINALLY, just yesterday in fact, mama said, “Hey, why don’t I grind up some meat and we’ll have HAMBURGERS.”
“Yeah,” papa said, “with ketchup! Oh, boy!”
And mama got all excited and cried,”Great, ketchup it is, but for me, lettuce, tomatoes, mayo, mustard, pickles, and raw, sweet Toulouges onion slices!”
You’d think they’d just discovered gold under the tomatoes!
Well, my little mouth was watering and watering and I left a drool of saliva from the kitchen to the barbeque today when mama threw those babies on the grill (along with the buns and onions) and then flipped them, rare and juicy, onto their buns and mama and papa actually ate their first hallowed hamburger in about a gazillion years.
You know, when a hamburger (especially a home-ground, lean meat burger) becomes a delicacy, maybe it’s time to re-think one’s attitude toward food.
Somebody does a study or writes and article and reveals that chocolate or meat or eggs or whatever are suddenly very good for you and that you can give up all your worries about having a soft-boiled egg every now and then or a nice rare steak some evening or even a lovely slab of Brie from time to time and everyone jumps on the possibilities as if they were a life-raft in a stormy sea.
Suddenly you have permission to bite into a forbidden hamburger (that you haven’t had since you took your kids to McDonald’s TWENTY YEARS AGO!) or slather a nice piece of toast with salted butter or rillettes d’oie (goose meat and fat made into a pâté) and your life is enhanced by at least 85% if not more.
So, hey, back to balanced food. Yes, red meat can be more harmful to some individuals than others, and yes, huge amounts of sugar are not good for anyone and yes, bars of chocolate and slabs of cheese aren’t the best choice in huge quantities, but if you have a little of this and a little of that you will certainly not go straight to hell. But I suppose that holding off on some things for a long time can make the experience, when it happens, pretty memorable.
Mama gave me a tiny bite of hers, and it was pretty good, but I could take it or leave it. But I don’t think you could have wrestled those hamburgers away from mama and papa for anything on earth!
But now that they know they can eat all these nice fat things more often, they probably won’t. Forbidden somehow makes it more interesting.
Aren’t anthros weird?
Are you coming out here to flip these burgers or NOT?
