eating | Beth Hull

What You Eat

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Beth Hull

Is there such a thing as a McDonald’s hangover? Because I think I have one.

After reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, I jumped right onto the big green bandwagon sporting the bumper sticker “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The growing dependence I’d developed on soda when I worked at the restaurant (like, seven years ago) was the first to go, and I planted a mini winter garden in awesome redwood planter boxes my dad made for me. (My winter garden is mostly lettuce, and a few struggling beets. Nobody even likes beets.)

Yesterday before the writer’s group meeting I ate an apple in an attempt to safeguard against any unhealthful food temptation. After the meeting, though, I needed something. And what I spied first was McDonald’s. Bummer. Husband and I had sworn that place off years ago after watching Super Size Me. Then during the first trimester of my pregnancy, those crappy cheeseburgers (and those fries–oh, those fries!) were the only things I could even consider eating. Sometimes I wonder how Z is as healthy as she is.

So after eating (mostly) good things for the past couple of months, I do the McDonald’s drive-through. This morning? I feel terrible. Totally disgusting. I couldn’t even get out of bed (okay, so that at least is normal). Next time I’m tempted by fast food, I hope I remember how fast it makes me feel terrible.

Kitchen ‘Capades

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Beth Hull

This morning I was greeted in the kitchen by the Mt. Everest of dishes, looming precipitously above me and sucking up all the oxygen with their stench. Didn’t I JUST do these? I wondered. Hasn’t there been enough kitchen cleaning for one week? Does it never end? I know I’m not the first stay-at-homie to ponder these philosophical quandaries. With my easy solution, perhaps I’ll be the last.

For those of you interested in my ground-breaking solution, here it is: stop eating. No food means no dishes. I know I can certainly survive until the Fourth of July off of my stomach fat alone, not even needing to use up the fat stores from other parts until much later. Z can survive off the handouts she gets at playdates. Seriously, the kid walks into a stranger’s house and starts begging. I try to convince the other moms that she does eat at home, but they don’t believe me. So I may as well stop feeding her and make the rounds to the other toddlers’ houses. And Husband? He barely eats anyway, somehow getting through an entire day on three cookies. In fact, he doesn’t even have to eat those cookies. He takes them to work, then brings them home; he magically absorbs whatever calories he needs just from carrying them. I magically absorb whatever calories I don’t need just by looking at air.

But this isn’t an article intended to poke fun at my weight, as easy as that is right now. I’m mystified by the kitchen, and the dishes inside it, and how they seem to dirty themselves through the very virtue of being dishes. Perhaps I don’t get it because I don’t cook. So when I see the dishes it’s magical in an Oh-No-Voldemort-Just-Apparated-In-My-Kitchen sort of way.

When I do finally tackle the mess, usually in the morning (I mean really, who wants to waste Z’s precious bedtime hours cleaning?), I vow to never again let it get this bad. “Never,” I say, scrubbing a chunk of enchilada off the rim of a plate. All good intentions are lost as soon as Z looks “thoughtful” and needs a new diaper. My child protects me from doing too much work because after the diaper change she wants a story. And in the face of all those dishes, reading Rosemary Wells’s Bunny Planet trilogy forty-six times sounds like nirvana.