Home: eating in society
Dear Dining Companion,
We discussed how, when making food alone, it seems hard to do the magic step that makes it into a real meal—a ‘dinner’—and not just some rice and cheese that are tentatively near one another (minus some bites that one already ate in the process of vaguely wandering around the kitchen wondering which foods might go together, interspersed with eating bits and pieces of random other foods one came by, and getting entirely distracted by non-eating related things…)
Do other people have this problem? I’m actually only guessing what the problem is. But there is a problem, and it makes my life feel distinctly gross rather than proper or beautiful, when I am alone sometimes. Like the difference between a grungy hotel and an officially clean and nice hotel, except if they had almost entirely the same objects, and you just somehow got a bad feeling about one of them. (You might think that if I don’t like grossness, then when I’m alone would be a prime time to eat dinner properly rather than whatever this is, but maybe you need to emerge into the shared social world with its different ontology to get a real ‘dinner’ rather than a sad collection of biological matter? Or something..)
Anyway, you suggested I send you a photo, so that alone I could still dine in the social world. This did make it more like a meal, and was overall satisfying, though the causality seems complicated.
(A friend came along and asked to take a picture of me with my meal, because I so ‘looked like I had my shit together’, which was a surprising degree of recovery from trying not to feel too disgusted by my own eating habits. It also suggests that the causal path goes outside my psyche.)
Looking forward to eating some fried cheese together one day,
Katja
