Portion Control

My oldest married son, a father of three, works full time for a household name media company.  He has also suddenly become a gourmet family chef.  He recently read an alarming book titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma.   It tells the story of a catastrophic decline in the quality of our food supply.  Seems most manufactured food is full of stuff that makes us obese, messes with our metabolism, and dials down our immune system.  Our body can’t even recognize some of the synthetic foods we ingest as food at all.  It doesn’t seem to matter though; most of us are eating more calories than a football team at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  We all know this.  Even famous fatty Charles Barkley recently commented that drinking a 44-ounce soda is like “sucking a cake through a straw.”

Well, my son decided to do something about it.  So he and his wife began to plan original, home cooked gourmet meals for every night dinner.  They carefully shop for fresh, high quality real food.  And then he prepares dishes like wild salmon with white wine sauce and fresh asparagus-squash mashed potatoes.  He loves doing it, and his 3-year-old son has amazing food stories to tell his pre-school friends.  As for the family, the food shopping, preparation, dining, and clean up has become a positive family ritual.  There is only one drawback.  It costs more in time and thoughtful effort.  It doesn’t matter.  Not at all.  After he told me what he cooked for Thanksgiving dinner for 20 members of my daughter-in-law’s family, which included ingredients like truffle oil and some sort of caramelized fandango, he said he’s never going back to factory made food.  He reminded me that healthy eating can be a great source of intense pleasure when paired with thought and enthusiasm.

It strikes me that this is true of about all forms of consumption.  The day after hearing about my son’s artistic Thanksgiving dinner, my wife and I found ourselves in one of Phoenix’s new super malls.  What a scene.  Store after store with an astonishing abundance of stuff.  In many ways the obvious excesses of hyper-consumerism is like obesity.  Store after store full of empty calories.  Aisles and aisles filled with things we might buy and take home for a few months or years before they end up in a landfill.  Our homes are like a halfway house for garbage.  But then I thought about my son’s example of savoring quality, uniqueness, and taste.  It occurred to me that the upside of all of this material abundance is our unprecedented choice to enjoy prized possessions.  If we carefully shop for things the way my son shops for food, our lives can be enriched.  It seems that each of us have preferences and interests that bring us continuous, genuine enjoyment.  Things that give us a buzz no matter how often we use them.  What’s important is that we notice what few things are really important to our conscious enjoyment.  For those things we need to carefully and thoughtfully select like a gourmet shopper picking the perfect fruit.  For everything else we need to minimize.  Consumer obesity occurs when we load up on “door buster” junk just because it’s a good deal.  It’s not.  Nearly all of us have way too much stuff we don’t derive either satisfaction or utility from owning.  It’s just clutter.  It’s much more satisfying and fun to be a slow, thoughtful consumer of a few things that matter rather than inhaling the infinite varieties of double-cheese burgers served up by our over-retailed society.  More is not better.  Better is better.  And less allows us to savor the better.

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