I suppose since the first leftover was my origin story, I should square the circle and describe the future of my eating habits. It's simple, these days I try to eat when I’m hungry, and in the future I'd like to do this all the time. At the moment, I estimate I’m hungry around 75% of the time I eat. Some obvious areas of improvement are silly - I’ve had a few Boston Cremes since August, not a single one when hungry - while in other cases the challenge is more about navigating social situations and might prove more difficult for me.
The immediate frontier for me is on the satiety side. I’ve always oveate and this bad habit was reinforced by intermittent fasting. I’ve had my moments but lack consistency. I’ll never forget ordering paella at a Portuguese restaurant at the end of the summer, there was a lot of food on my plate and I shocked myself when half of it came home with me in a container. If you had asked me at this time last year, I would have said a dog was more likely to ignore a fallen roast beef sandwich than I was to bring home leftovers from my own plate.
The challenge is equal parts technical and mental. The technique is easy, I eat too fast, so slower eating should help me get a grip on my fullness signal. The mental side requires more work. I need to get it into my head that the refrigerator is a friend, or at least a trusted ally, and find ways to get excess portions into the right containers. The demon I battle every time is a profound aversion to wasting food, this force that drives me to Haymarket on weekends ensuring a deep sense of loss anytime I see something edible in the waste basket. I wonder sometimes what role this feeling played in making it impossible for me to continue volunteering at a food bank. The planet is not without challenges but a food shortage isn’t among them, a fact lost in the rationing system imposed on the city’s most vulnerable residents.
