Writing about food: James Villas, "American Taste"
"Often I have occasion to glance into home refrigerators, and what I usually see makes my temperature rise; gallons of soda, frozen vegetables, pizzas and TV dinners, pounds of processed cheese in individual plastic wraps, boxes of disgusting breakfast cakes and rolls, and packages of those processed meats I wouldn't even feed to my beagle. At movies I'm dumbfounded at the amount of popcorn, candy, and sweet drinks that is consumed (when and where do those people eat dinner?). ... Nerves wracked, metabolism shot, and overweight, much of this same society (roughly 20 percent of the American population at any given time) eventually reaches out for any means possible to correct the damage.
"Basically people know that the answers to good health and weight control ultimately come from no other source than plain old common sense, but big business stands steadfast. 'The will to be cheated,' Lucius Beebe commented some years ago, 'is, apparently, a deep-rooted and inherent American instinct, but it seems a pity when it leads to the rejection of the all-too-frequent natural pleasures that make life bearable at all. As someone once remarked, the customers at diet-fad groceries always seem to look as though they got there ten years too late.'
"Well, at least as far as I'm concerned, healthy weight control is no more problematic than brushing teeth or walking the dog or preparing breakfast, meaning that what might appear to be a boring chore can, through habit, be transformed into a very enjoyable experience. When I wake up in the morning (even with a hangover), I know exactly where and what type of food I'll be eating throughout the day and night ... the anticipation nears being erotic. ... Many enlightened souls throughout the centuries have championed gourmandism as one of life's more civilized pleasures, but surely none stated the case more colorfully than the composer Rossini: 'Aside from doing nothing, I know of no more delightful occupation for myself than eating -- eating, that is, properly. What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the chapel master which activates and directs the great orchestra of our passions. An empty stomach represents the bassoon or piccolo, one groaning out dissatisfaction, the other yelping for contentment. A full stomach, on the other hand, is the triangle of pleasure, the tympani of joy.'"
