A week ago, my burrito was suddenly infused with the coppery flavor of blood.
This was accompanied by a telltale crunch, as well as the sound of obscenities in my own voice; I had just bit the living fuck out of my tongue.
I’ve been prone to canker sores my entire life, so I knew what came next: two weeks during which everything I experienced would be filtered through a white-hot pinprick of agony. Canker sores on the tongue are particularly unpleasant, since they thrash around and scrape against your teeth while you eat, or talk, or breathe. And there’s nothing that speeds up their healing. Anbesol, Orajel, and other such dactylic elixirs numb them temporarily, but they do so by intensifying the pain a thousandfold for several seconds, so the normal pain underneath doesn’t seem so bad.
I actually kept a canker sore journal from March of 2000 to February of 2003. I catalogued them by date, severity, and location in my mouth.
2/5/01 Inside cheek, about a half inch above the left corner of my mouth. I think if it were going to get bad, it would have by now, but it’s very mild.
1/2/03 Just right of center, almost all the way down to the crevice below my lower lip. Fierce. Painful.
I read that three foods to avoid if you want to prevent canker sores are nuts, chocolate, and gelatin. Since that’s pretty much a list of my preferred movie snacks, I have so far been unwilling to make the sacrifice. But even when I am in the throes of a “fierce, painful” canker sore, I am perfectly willing to shovel salt-n-vinegar potato chips into my mouth, often tipping my head to one side so gravity will draw them away.
Despite the pain, there’s just a reflexive comfort of having that crap enter my body. I’m Pavlov’s dog, drool streaming over my ulcerated tongue.
• • •
This summer, Chicago Alderman Edward M. Burke proposed a ban on oils containing trans fat. Restaurants in the city would have to stop cooking with them or face fines.
This is in the wake of a smoking ban and a foie gras ban, to protect the health of breathers and geese, respectively. Many people, including myself, think those two bans are fine and dandy. But this last one has a lot of us wondering if our more libertarian fellow citizens are onto something: Perhaps we truly are being led by a power-mad phalanx of city councilmen.
Our mayor, Richard M. Daley, is no fan of the ban. “We have other things to worry about,” he said. “An example, the fire that killed six young children, injured others in that family. It's a great tragedy." (Notably, Daley stopped short of suggesting we outlaw tragic fires.)
The fat ban will never pass. This town’s cuisine runs on grease like a well-oiled machine. Besides, we’re adults: smart, responsible and mature enough to make our own decisions with regard to our food health.
Except we’re not. I’m not, at least.
When I headed off to college, a theoretical adult under my own supervision, I could probably have used an alderman or two to boss me around. It’s truly amazing that I didn’t graduate morbidly obese. In my dorm’s cafeteria, I had a harem of sugary cereals available to me for the first time in my life. It’s also where I was first introduced to chicken cordon bleu. (Chicken! Stuffed with cheese and ham!) A salad was a pile of iceberg lettuce doused in ranch dressing.
And when I moved out of the dorms? Life was a gay panoply of gyros, nachos, burgers, colas, and bags of Chips Ahoy. In four years of college, I bet I had a few months’ recommended allowance of vegetables. I didn’t even eat onion rings.
Of course I knew it was “bad for me.” But it’s not surprising that someone willing to nudge salty snacks past his canker sores would not be deterred by the vague promise of future health problems.
• • •
I once ate so many cookies I gave myself an acephalgic migraine.
I’d made a batch of chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips, and frankly, I was sick of them. But because they were cookies, and nearby, I kept eating them. Soon I was feeling very sluggish and out of sorts.
I was doing dishes when I noticed a streak across my line of vision. At first, I assumed it was one of those afterimages you get when you glance at the sun. But it didn’t fade for several minutes. Plus, it had a wavy, rainbow-colored pattern in it that seemed to be moving.
I panicked and poked around online until I discovered the acephalgic migraine: a “migraine without pain,” triggered by nobody knows what, but quite possibly some reaction to diet.
I lay in bed, dread creeping into me as I wondered if I would ever see normally again. Eventually, the psychedelic colors inched out of my line of vision, and I was good as new and awash with relief.
The moral of the story should be “I never overdosed on junk food again.” Instead, I went back and finished the rest of the cookies.
• • •
“They are going to tell you what to eat,” Mayor Daley eloquently warned his city. “They are going to go into your living room, your dining rooms every day, and your kitchen when you will be sitting there.”
With another week of canker sore pain ahead of me, I have given in and torn into a king-size Hershey’s Bar some friends gave me for my birthday. My tongue arches away from it like a hissing cat.
“I don't know that this ought to be adopted,” Alderman Burke said, referring to his trans fat ban proposal. “This is designed to start a debate.”
Screw that, Alderman. Get in my apartment and start banning.
The Banquet of Life is a bi-weekly look at one man's life through the food he eats.
