Cinemorphosis

Tag: food

  • The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

    The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

    At eight o’clock on Friday morning, I was moving through Trader Joe’s at my customary speed, which is somewhere between brisk shopping and evacuation. I hurled groceries into my cart with the urgency of a man who had been informed that at precisely 8:30 he would turn into a giant pumpkin.

    This is not because I dislike Trader Joe’s. I love Trader Joe’s. But at sixty-four, I have developed an almost religious scrupulosity about time. Friday morning has a sequence. Shop. Drive home. Unload groceries. Put everything away. Work out. Shower. Eat lunch. Nap. Then begin the afternoon shift of academic work and personal creative projects. Disturb the sequence and the entire day threatens to collapse like a poorly stacked Jenga tower.

    So there I was, scrutinizing a gigantic Japanese sweet potato, when I encountered a former colleague.

    He had taught Spanish and Italian at the college and had been retired for years. Now in his eighties, he is a petite man who nevertheless carries himself with tremendous dignity: chest out, posture erect, eyes bright and alert. He looked less like someone retreating from life than someone who had simply been reassigned to another department.

    He smiled.

    I faced a decision.

    Ordinarily, I might have offered a friendly greeting and continued moving. Conversation is dangerous when you are operating under a timetable. One innocent “How have you been?” can metastasize into twelve minutes, and twelve minutes at Trader Joe’s means the workout gets pushed back, which pushes lunch back, which pushes the nap back, which eventually threatens civilization.

    But this man deserved better than a drive-by salutation.

    So I stopped.

    We talked for several minutes. Nothing profound. Retirement. Teaching. Life. The ordinary conversational currency exchanged by two former colleagues standing beside produce while other shoppers maneuver carts around them.

    Then we parted.

    Ten minutes later, I encountered him again in the pasta-sauce aisle.

    He was holding a small jar of lemon pesto.

    “You have to try this,” he said.

    I looked at the jar.

    Lemon pesto was not on the schedule.

    Nevertheless, politeness prevailed. I took it, thanked him, placed it in my cart, and continued my race against the pumpkin.

    By lunchtime I had forgotten about it. Then, while assembling my usual salad—arugula, tuna, garbanzo beans, diced Japanese sweet potato—I noticed the jar. I opened it and added two teaspoons.

    I took a bite.

    Good Lord.

    The salad was magnificent.

    The lemon cut through the tuna. The pesto coated the arugula. The sweetness of the Japanese potato played against the acidity and herbs. Ingredients I had eaten dozens of times suddenly seemed to have hired a new conductor. I sat there staring at my bowl with the astonishment of a chemist who had accidentally discovered penicillin.

    It was easily one of the best salads I had ever made.

    And I owed it to the retired foreign-language professor I had almost been too busy to talk to.

    This is The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement: the older and more regimented your life becomes, the more important it is to leave small openings through which the unexpected can enter.

    The principle becomes especially important as retirement approaches. Retirement frightens me partly because I can imagine life contracting. Fewer colleagues. Fewer students. Fewer accidental conversations. Fewer reasons to encounter people outside the familiar perimeter of family and friends. You can respond to this contraction by becoming increasingly efficient, arranging your days into immaculate little compartments—exercise here, lunch there, nap precisely there—until you have constructed a beautifully organized life in which absolutely nothing unexpected can happen.

    This is the dark side of time management. You become so skilled at protecting your time that eventually you protect yourself from life.

    The antidote does not require moving to Tuscany, learning Mandarin, or taking up hang gliding at eighty-two. Novelty can arrive in humiliatingly modest packages. Talk to someone you ordinarily would have hurried past. Listen when he recommends something. Put an unfamiliar jar in your shopping cart. Allow two teaspoons of something new to contaminate the immaculate machinery of your routine.

    At sixty-four, approaching retirement, I am understandably preoccupied with what I am about to lose: professional identity, colleagues, income, structure, relevance, the daily friction of being required somewhere. But perhaps one defense against that contraction is remarkably simple. Keep the aperture open. Keep listening. Keep accepting small invitations into experiences you did not schedule.

    My retired colleague had been out of the classroom for years, but that morning at Trader Joe’s he taught me something anyway.

    I had interrupted my schedule for a few minutes.

    The return on the investment was enormous.

    Two teaspoons of lemon pesto.

    And evidence that the world was not finished surprising me.

  • Breakfast Eschatology

    Breakfast Eschatology

    I no longer want to resolve my eschatological crisis.

    I don’t want to determine the nature of substitutionary atonement, theodicy, and eternity. I don’t want to debate whether hell is eternal, corrective, metaphorical, mistranslated, or the unfortunate product of several centuries of theologians getting overexcited. I’m tired of sifting through my epistemic crisis as though somewhere beneath a pile of Greek nouns I will finally uncover the laminated instruction sheet for the universe.

    I’ve also given up on perfection, physical, spiritual, and otherwise.

    What I really want is a good breakfast.

    Not breakfast at home. Home breakfast has its virtues, but it is essentially maintenance. Oatmeal. Yogurt. Berries. Protein. The nutritional equivalent of changing the oil.

    I want to go to a café.

    A good one.

    I want banana-nut French toast, buttermilk pancakes, poblano eggs Benedict, crisp potatoes, and a waitress approaching with a coffee pot before I’ve even noticed that my cup is half empty.

    More importantly, I want people. Lots of them.

    A true breakfast is communal. Certain movies become better when watched in a packed theater, where laughter moves through the audience like electricity. Breakfast works the same way.

    The lonely café is hell on earth.

    Three customers scattered across twenty empty tables. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. A laminated menu curling at the corners. Somewhere in the kitchen, a microwave beeps with the melancholy finality of a hospital monitor.

    Technically, breakfast is being served.

    Spiritually, the place is already closed.

    The packed café is another universe.

    You open the door and hear the glorious racket of human appetite. Forks strike plates. Coffee cups land on saucers. Children negotiate syrup distribution. Servers weave between tables carrying platters of eggs and potatoes. The room smells of coffee, butter, toasted bread, maple syrup, and potatoes surrendering magnificently to the griddle.

    Every table is occupied.

    A line waits outside.

    This is not merely a restaurant.

    This is evidence.

    I call it Breakfast Eschatology: the abandonment of speculation about ultimate salvation in favor of recognizing modest intimations of heaven in the communal celebration of a magnificent breakfast.

    For years, I have worried about the Last Things.

    What happens after death?

    What is the nature of original sin?

    What are the rigors of postmortem salvation? 

    What did the Greek word aiōnios mean before two thousand years of theology climbed onto its back?

    At some point, the soul develops theological indigestion.

    Enough.

    Bring me the poblano eggs Benedict.

  • Snackrilege

    Snackrilege

    Introduced by Kellogg’s in 1968, Danish Go-Rounds occupied a category all their own. Imagine Pop-Tarts after several years studying pastry in Paris. Their flaky crust gave way to spirals of buttery dough wrapped around cinnamon and brown sugar with a generosity that suggested someone in the Kellogg’s test kitchen still believed breakfast deserved dignity.

    Then, sometime in the mid-1970s, they vanished.

    Kellogg’s discontinued Danish Go-Rounds while allowing Pop-Tarts to inherit the earth.

    I have never recovered.

    Pop-Tarts always struck me as breakfast designed by an engineering committee. They possessed all the emotional warmth of corrugated cardboard lightly dusted with cinnamon. They were perfectly adequate, which is often the first warning sign that something wonderful has been sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

    The disappearance of Danish Go-Rounds taught me an early lesson about consumer culture. Companies rarely announce that they are replacing excellence with mediocrity. They simply assure you that “customers prefer the new product,” as though an anonymous focus group had voted to replace Mozart with elevator music.

    Perhaps they did.

    As a child, however, I interpreted the loss with the disproportionate seriousness children reserve for the destruction of sacred things. A glorious breakfast civilization had collapsed. The pastry aristocracy had been guillotined, leaving only processed commoners to occupy the throne.

    Looking back, I realize Danish Go-Rounds became more than breakfast.

    They became a symbol.

    Their disappearance seemed to foreshadow a broader cultural transition, one in which craftsmanship quietly yielded to optimization, distinction surrendered to standardization, and memorable pleasures were gradually replaced by products that offended no one because they inspired no one. Before long came a parade of aggressively modern food innovations: Imperial Margarine, Tang, Space Food Sticks, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, SlimFast, and enough chemically enhanced convenience foods to make future nutritionists wonder whether the twentieth century had briefly declared war on its own digestive system.

    Of course, this is nostalgia talking.

    The 1970s produced plenty of culinary atrocities alongside their occasional masterpieces. Memory edits generously. It preserves the triumphs and quietly escorts the embarrassments out the back door.

    Still, I cannot think about Danish Go-Rounds without arriving at what I now call Snackrilege.

    Snackrilege is the profanation of a beloved food through its discontinuation, reformulation, or replacement with an inferior mass-market substitute, producing the irrational conviction that civilization itself has taken a wrong turn.

    Snackrilege is not ordinary disappointment.

    It is culinary apostasy.

    It is watching a corporation demolish a cathedral and replace it with a parking garage while issuing a cheerful press release explaining that parking is more convenient for everyone.

    The object itself hardly matters. One person’s Danish Go-Rounds are another person’s original Butterfinger, Jell-O 1-2-3, Marathon Bar, or McDonald’s fried apple pie. Every generation possesses its own edible relics, foods whose disappearance feels strangely personal because they were quietly woven into the emotional architecture of childhood.

    That is why Snackrilege has so little to do with pastries.

    What we mourn is not merely the loss of a favorite flavor but the disappearance of a small piece of the world that first taught us comfort, delight, and the reassuring illusion that the best things would always be there waiting for us.

    Then one day they aren’t.

    And someone hands us a Pop-Tart with a perfectly straight face.

  • Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    We spent a few days in Carlsbad at the Hotel Solea. Aside from the sublime crepes at The French Corner and the infectious energy of surfers drifting through town with boards tucked under their arms, the place left me strangely cold. Carlsbad struck me as polished to the point of sterility, a resort town forever orbiting the gravitational pull of Legoland. Everywhere you looked, there were souvenir shops, family vacation logistics, and the unmistakable soundtrack of overtired toddlers conducting negotiations at full volume. The town seemed suspended in a permanent state of cheerful tourism.

    Then, on the drive home, we traveled fifteen minutes north on Interstate 5 and discovered Oceanside.

    The difference was immediate.

    Instead of curated resort charm, Oceanside possessed the rough confidence of a town that exists for the people who actually live there. We wandered into The Beach Break Cafe, tucked beside a residential neighborhood, where every table seemed occupied by people who looked genuinely happy to be exactly where they were. Nothing about the place felt manufactured. There was no Instagram choreography, no designer rusticity, no desperate attempt to convince diners they were enjoying an “authentic experience.” It simply was authentic.

    More importantly, they don’t phone in breakfast.

    They treat eggs, pancakes, and French toast with the seriousness of a Michelin chef preparing foie gras. The omelets were generously stuffed without collapsing into greasy excess. The French toast achieved that elusive balance of crisp edges and custardy center. The whole-grain banana pancakes possessed a nutty richness that made them taste less like indulgence than craftsmanship.

    The manager—a fit man in his thirties with a neatly trimmed beard and a weathered gray baseball cap—told me he had taken over the restaurant from his father. Born and raised in Oceanside, he spoke about the community with the quiet pride of someone who had no desire to escape it. He mentioned that elite fighters from Camp Pendleton regularly come in for breakfast. After one bite, I understood why. If your profession involves throwing another human being across a room, this is precisely where you’d replenish your glycogen stores.

    That conversation crystallized the difference between the two towns.

    Carlsbad feels like milquetoast chic: affluent, immaculate, and carefully curated for visitors. Oceanside has working-class muscle. It doesn’t seem interested in impressing you. It simply gets on with the business of living. There is an honesty to that kind of place, a confidence that doesn’t require branding consultants or lifestyle influencers to validate it.

    Fifteen minutes separate Carlsbad from Oceanside.

    Culturally, they feel like different countries.

    I’ll take Oceanside.

  • The Gospel According to the Irvine Spectrum

    The Gospel According to the Irvine Spectrum

    On our way to a vacation in Carlsbad, we made an unplanned pilgrimage to the Irvine Spectrum. A retailer had forgotten to remove one of those magnetic security tags—the kind that doesn’t merely protect merchandise but threatens to baptize it in indelible dye should you attempt to liberate it yourself.

    It was ninety degrees outside, yet the mall overflowed with shoppers who looked as though they had wandered out of a lifestyle advertisement. Most appeared to be under twenty-one, gliding effortlessly through the promenade in athletic shorts, yoga pants, or denim cutoffs so abbreviated they seemed engaged in an argument with modesty. They possessed that enviable firmness exclusive to youth: muscles earned not through discipline but through adolescence itself. Nature had done all the work, leaving many of them with the faintly irritating confidence of people who mistake a genetic inheritance for a personal achievement.

    The boys wore that ubiquitous haircut that resembles broccoli sprouting from their skulls: luxuriant tufts piled high above sides clipped so close they looked apologetic. Somewhere a barber had convinced an entire generation that vegetables belonged on the human head.

    The older men were no less committed to the performance. Many looked to be in their forties, dressed in expensive athletic wear that existed less for exercise than for exhibition. Their fitted shirts advertised sculpted shoulders, bulging biceps, and veins that appeared to have negotiated sponsorship deals with their forearms. Aviator sunglasses completed the ensemble. They looked as though they had stepped directly from an Outdoor Voices or Vuori photo shoot, each one silently auditioning to become the patron saint of functional leisure.

    Then there was me.

    I was too old for the mall, too heavy for the uniform, and wearing exactly the wrong shirt: a T-shirt emblazoned with Snoopy and the words World Champion Dad.

    At that moment, I did not feel like a champion of anything.

    While my wife and daughters disappeared into the stores to rectify the retailer’s oversight, I settled into the shade beside a fountain and watched humanity file past.

    What struck me first was not the clothing itself but its uncanny uniformity. Nearly everyone seemed assembled from the same inventory. Their shirts, shoes, sunglasses, handbags, water bottles, and watches appeared to have been harvested from neighboring storefronts. Like hermit crabs constructing protective shells from whatever debris washes onto the ocean floor, these shoppers had fashioned exoskeletons from the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture.

    But the clothing was only the outer shell.

    The deeper transformation had taken place beneath the fabric.

    These people had absorbed the mall’s emotional atmosphere as thoroughly as they had absorbed its fashions. They radiated the mall’s synthetic optimism, its perpetual cheerfulness, its frictionless sentimentality, and its promise that fulfillment was perpetually one purchase away. Every storefront preached the same gospel: happiness is available in your size, and it’s twenty percent off this weekend.

    Deism proposes that the Creator reveals Himself through nature.

    Mallism proposes something else entirely.

    It teaches that the faithful gradually become expressions of the mall itself. Its architecture colonizes their imagination. Its values become their values. Its aesthetics become their personality. They cease merely to shop there; they begin to embody the place.

    The mall, in other words, manufactures not only consumers but a recognizable species of human being.

    Watching the procession from my shaded bench, I wondered whether I had stumbled into a habitat rather than a marketplace—a carefully engineered ecosystem in which identity, aspiration, and self-worth circulated through the air-conditioning along with the scent of cinnamon rolls and expensive perfume.

    Perhaps every civilization eventually constructs temples.

    Ours simply installed escalators.

  • Steak, Asparagus, and Existential Despair

    Steak, Asparagus, and Existential Despair

    In 1994, my friend S—a remarkably successful athletic coach—and his girlfriend L invited my girlfriend M and me over for dinner. The evening began with all the reassuring signs of suburban domesticity: thick steaks, asparagus, baked potatoes, and the pleasant illusion that four adults were about to enjoy an uneventful meal. The illusion lasted roughly as long as it took to butter the potatoes. A minor disagreement flared between S and L. Hoping to extinguish it, S tossed out one of those breezy, dismissive remarks men often mistake for conflict resolution. It had precisely the opposite effect. L’s irritation hardened into outrage. She stood up, marched to the bathroom, and slammed the door with enough force to suggest that diplomacy had officially left the premises. S responded with equal maturity. He retreated to his bedroom, collapsed onto the bed, and stared at the ceiling fan as though it alone understood the tragedy of his existence.

    After checking on S and confirming that he had transformed himself into a martyr for the cause of romantic suffering, I returned to the dining room. M looked at me expectantly.

    “What should we do?” she asked.

    I looked at the steak cooling on my plate.

    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

    “You can’t eat now.”

    “Why not? They’re the ones having the fight.”

    With that, I carved off a generous piece of steak and continued dinner as if emotional meltdowns were merely another side dish. M looked at me with the sort of disbelief usually reserved for people who clap when airplanes land. She wanted intervention, mediation, perhaps a heartfelt conversation. I wanted medium-rare.

    Fifteen minutes later, having completed my meal with admirable focus, I decided to make one last reconnaissance mission. I peered into S’s bedroom. There he remained, stretched flat on his back, one hand resting dramatically on his stomach, the other draped across his forehead like a silent-film actor portraying terminal consumption. He looked less like a man recovering from an argument than a casualty awaiting the arrival of battlefield medics.

    “I think M and I are going to head out,” I said. “See you later.”

    What emerged from him in response was not a word but a sound—a long, mournful groan so desolate that it resembled the final squeak of a woodland creature meeting an unfortunate end beneath a boot. It was a noise of pure existential surrender, as though every disappointment he had ever experienced had converged into one exhausted exhalation.

    A week later, the four of us met again at a bowling alley. S and L laughed, joked, and behaved as though the disastrous dinner had never occurred. The previous week’s emotional apocalypse had apparently been filed away with the leftovers. A year later they married. Two years after that, following the birth of their daughter, they divorced. S never remarried, though he went on to enjoy a distinguished coaching career and touched countless young lives. Time has blurred many details of those years, but one remains astonishingly vivid. I can no longer remember exactly what started the argument. I can barely remember what we talked about before it began. But I remember that groan. Some sounds become permanent residents of memory because they reveal, in a single involuntary moment, more truth about a person’s inner life than a thousand carefully chosen words ever could.

  • When Dinner Becomes a Competitive Sport

    When Dinner Becomes a Competitive Sport

    Last night I took my family to the wildly popular Din Tai Fung at Del Amo Fashion Center. The restaurant is so sought after that reservations are practically mandatory. We arrived at 5:15, where the hostess handed me one of those vibrating plastic squares whose sole purpose is to inform you that civilization has deemed you worthy of a table.

    The place hummed with confidence.

    While countless restaurants sit half-empty, echoing like abandoned aircraft hangars, Din Tai Fung radiates the quiet swagger of a business that knows people will happily wait an hour for dumplings. Crowds are persuasive. We instinctively trust a line.

    Let me say at the outset that I have nothing but respect for the restaurant. The food was fresh, the service polished, and the operation impressively efficient.

    I probably won’t return.

    The restaurant isn’t the problem.

    We are.

    More specifically, our method of eating.

    The pilgrimage began a month ago when my teenage daughter announced that we had to go. I immediately suspected the true maître d’ behind this reservation.

    TikTok.

    She already had the menu mapped out on her phone like General Patton preparing the invasion of Sicily. We surrendered command without resistance.

    Soon the table filled with cucumber salad, soy noodle salad, chicken dumplings, spicy chicken wontons, garlic string beans, sesame noodles, and spicy noodles.

    Then came dessert.

    Naturally, dessert wasn’t merely consumed.

    It was documented.

    My daughter carefully filmed her chocolate-and-mochi xiao long bao with sea salt cream, followed by a mountain of mango shaved ice, ensuring that posterity—and TikTok—would know she had participated in this important cultural event.

    The food was certainly good.

    But I never experienced the culinary epiphany I had been promised.

    Instead, I found myself eating an astonishing quantity of carbohydrates swimming through enough sauce to lubricate heavy machinery. Every dish seemed to plead for a dinner roll that never arrived. By the end of the meal I was pleasantly full but oddly unsatisfied, as though my body kept asking,

    “Where exactly was the protein?”

    The service, though gracious, occasionally drifted into theater.

    Our server—a delightful young woman—carefully demonstrated how to combine vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil with the solemnity of a physicist unveiling the double helix. Her instructions were earnest and impeccably delivered.

    I couldn’t help wondering whether I was preparing dumplings or splitting the atom.

    Then came the part I liked least.

    Family-style dining.

    In theory, it is wonderful.

    Everyone samples everything.

    Conversation flows.

    The table becomes a communal celebration.

    In practice, our table resembled an Olympic qualifying event.

    Chopsticks lunged in every direction.

    Bowls crossed paths.

    Sauce migrated across plates, fingers, sleeves, and probably several neighboring ZIP codes. I found myself wishing I’d packed a HAZMAT suit.

    Adding to the chaos, my TikTok-inspired daughter attacked the shared dishes with the urgency of someone preparing for hibernation, leaving her twin sister, my wife, and me politely negotiating whatever remained.

    The meal became less about eating than about strategic timing.

    Should I grab another dumpling now?

    Will there still be string beans in thirty seconds?

    Has anyone actually tasted the sesame noodles, or have they already disappeared?

    After paying the bill, a staggering $200, and we finally arrived home, my wife quietly toasted herself a protein pancake, spread peanut butter on top, drizzled it with honey, and ate what amounted to her real dinner.

    Then she made an observation that explained the entire evening.

    “I never relax during shared meals,” she said. “It always feels like an eating competition, and I end up with the short end of the stick.”

    The moment she said it, I realized I felt exactly the same way.

    The problem wasn’t Din Tai Fung.

    The problem was our assumption that communal eating automatically creates communal joy.

    Sometimes it creates scarcity.

    Scarcity creates competition.

    Competition is not particularly relaxing.

    I’ve reached a simple conclusion.

    Next time, everyone orders their own entrée.

    Everyone eats at their own pace.

    Everyone leaves satisfied.

    Family-style dining remains a lovely idea. It promises abundance, togetherness, and the pleasure of sampling half the menu.

    Sometimes it delivers exactly that.

    Other times it turns dinner into a low-grade food draft where you’re calculating dumpling trajectories instead of enjoying your family’s company.

    When that happens, I can’t help asking myself a simple question.

    Why didn’t I just walk next door to Frida, order a platter of rib-eye tacos, sip a mango margarita, and let everyone else fight over the last dumpling?

  • How I Saved Four Thousand Dollars by Skipping a Bowl of Yogurt

    How I Saved Four Thousand Dollars by Skipping a Bowl of Yogurt

    The first title best captures the essay’s central revelation: the story begins as consumer advice but ends as a confession about misplaced hope.

    My Aireloom mattress is thirteen years old. It still looks as though it came off the showroom floor yesterday. I paid about $2,200 for it back in 2013. It’s a medium hybrid, a compromise I made because side sleepers are forever warned against firm mattresses. The compromise never quite worked. The bed always struck me as too soft, too marshmallow-like, lacking the taut resilience I prefer. Still, I gave myself a lecture every time the thought of replacing it surfaced.

    Don’t be the princess forever searching for the pea. Sleep on the bed you have and get on with your life.

    For more than a decade, that pep talk held.

    Then, last week, the fever returned.

    Thirteen years sounded ancient. Surely I had earned a new mattress. After all, I had just paid off my mortgage. If there were ever a time to reward myself, this was it. Before long I had disappeared into the rabbit hole known as mattress technology, where every manufacturer promises salvation through proprietary coils, artisanal horsehair, glacier-infused foam, or some other miracle unavailable to ordinary mortals.

    I quickly dismissed the overstuffed pillow-top monstrosities. They looked less like mattresses than wedding cakes. I wanted something firm, springy, disciplined—a mattress with posture. After hours of research, I proudly narrowed the field to three finalists: Aireloom, Stearns & Foster Estate, and Beautyrest Black.

    Like an explorer hacking through the jungle with a machete, I congratulated myself on having separated civilization from chaos.

    The excitement wasn’t really about the mattress.

    It was about rebirth.

    A new bed would usher in a new chapter. Better sleep. Better mornings. Better health. Better life.

    Then I mentioned all this to my wife.

    “What do you think?” I asked. “Should we replace it?”

    She shrugged.

    “Our bed still looks brand new.”

    She was right.

    Neither of us had noticed any sagging. No body impressions. No mysterious valleys swallowing us during the night. The mattress had aged with remarkable dignity. Throwing it away would feel less like an upgrade than an act of perfectly good consumer vandalism.

    That conversation forced an uncomfortable realization.

    If I was looking for rebirth, I wasn’t going to find it in a mattress showroom.

    I was going to have to earn it.

    The problem wasn’t beneath me.

    The problem was on top of the mattress.

    Me.

    At 231 pounds, my sleep apnea becomes noticeably worse. My hips absorb the punishment every night as I sleep on my side. At 210 pounds, everything changes. My apnea drops to tolerable levels. My hips complain less. I wake with more energy, more discipline, more confidence. I feel like the man I keep trying to become.

    The mattress hasn’t changed.

    My body has.

    This isn’t a bed problem.

    It’s a food problem.

    If I launched into the psychology of my relationship with food, you’d be condemned to yet another memoir about emotional eating. We already own an entire library of those books. They all tell roughly the same story: we soothe ourselves with food, reward ourselves with food, celebrate with food, grieve with food, and occasionally mistake food for unconditional love.

    I have no groundbreaking theory to contribute.

    Here’s my autobiography in three words:

    I overeat.

    That’s it.

    I snack too much.

    I’m carrying twenty unnecessary pounds.

    So my latest campaign is almost embarrassingly modest. I’m eliminating my afternoon yogurt bowl—the one loaded with Greek yogurt, protein powder, and berries. Instead of eating four times a day, I’ll eat three.

    To soften the psychological blow, I’ll add a couple spoonfuls of Greek yogurt to my morning oatmeal. Lunch and dinner remain unchanged: protein, vegetables, and a sensible serving of rice or sweet potatoes.

    By my estimate, that should lower my daily intake from something approaching 2,900 calories to roughly 2,400.

    Whether my body cooperates is another matter.

    My metabolism possesses the cunning of an experienced labor negotiator. It has an extraordinary talent for reclaiming every calorie I attempt to eliminate. My unconscious mind may simply enlarge my lunch and dinner portions until I find myself back at 2,900 calories while congratulating myself on my “three-meal plan.”

    If that happens, I won’t invent excuses.

    I already know many of my vulnerabilities.

    Family vacations to Miami, Maui, or Coronado have an uncanny way of becoming weeklong festivals of excess. Every meal transforms into a celebration. Every dessert becomes mandatory because we’re making memories. Before long, memory has acquired another five pounds.

    If moderating carbohydrates proves impossible, I have another option.

    I’ve watched friends thrive on a meat-heavy diet.

    Breakfast is black coffee and electrolyte water.

    Lunch is ground beef or turkey bacon with eggs.

    Dinner is salmon or sirloin with salad.

    The simplicity has undeniable appeal. Protein suppresses my appetite better than oatmeal ever could.

    The problem is that I don’t particularly enjoy living that way.

    After several days, handling raw meat and smelling rendered fat throughout the house begins to repel me. I admire the diet more than I want to live inside it.

    Then comes the pharmaceutical path.

    For now, I have no interest in GLP-1 drugs.

    Perhaps history will prove them miraculous. Perhaps five years from now I’ll wonder why I resisted them. But at this stage I remain wary. Reports of pancreatitis, muscle loss, gastrointestinal complications, and other side effects make me feel as though we’re still watching the largest medical field trial in history unfold in real time.

    So I choose caution.

    I’ll begin with the oldest technology available.

    Eat a little less.

    See what happens.

    If nothing changes, I’ll reassess.

    And in the meantime, I have postponed spending three or four thousand dollars on a new mattress.

    Perhaps for another three years.

    The irony is difficult to miss. I nearly convinced myself that salvation lay hidden beneath layers of handcrafted latex, luxury coils, and cashmere ticking, when all along it was waiting in the space between lunch and dinner.

    The mattress was never asking to be replaced.

    Only its owner was.

  • From Family Table to Food Lab: Competing Visions of Eating: Example of an AI-Resistant Writing Prompt

    From Family Table to Food Lab: Competing Visions of Eating: Example of an AI-Resistant Writing Prompt

    As more students turn to AI to generate research papers, I have begun requiring what I call a Personal Engagement Building Block at the beginning of every major assignment. This opening section consists of one or two paragraphs in which students draw upon a personal experience—or the experience of someone they know—to frame the issue they will later investigate. The purpose is not merely autobiographical. It is to create a sample of the student’s authentic voice and thinking before they begin working with outside sources.

    These assignments are designed to be resistant to AI-generated responses because they require specific observations, concrete details, and personal knowledge that cannot easily be outsourced. At the same time, they must remain intellectually rigorous and directly connected to the larger argument of the essay. The challenge is to create prompts that move beyond simple storytelling and instead use personal experience as a lens through which students can examine complex social, cultural, or ethical questions.

    For example, in a research paper exploring how ultra-processed foods, food technology, and GLP-1 drugs may transform our relationship with eating, students begin by writing two contrasting personal-experience paragraphs. These paragraphs are intended to illuminate competing ways of thinking about food, pleasure, convenience, family, technology, and consumption before students engage with the broader research and debate surrounding the topic. The assignment begins with the following AI-resistant prompt:

    For the opening of your essay, write two contrasting personal-experience paragraphs that explore different relationships to food.

    In the first paragraph, describe yourself—or someone you know—sharing a memorable meal in a family setting. Focus on food as an expression of love, tradition, connection, and celebration. Use vivid details to capture the atmosphere, the people gathered around the table, the preparation of the food, and the emotions associated with the experience. Show how the meal becomes more than nourishment; it serves as a vehicle for family identity, cultural heritage, memory, and human connection. The food should be savored not only for its taste but also for what it represents.

    In the second paragraph, create a sharp contrast by describing an experience centered on hyperpalatable processed foods. You may focus on the compulsive nature of eating foods engineered to maximize cravings, appetite, and consumption. Describe the anxiety of never quite feeling satisfied, the urge to keep eating despite fullness, and the sense of helplessness that can accompany such behavior. Alternatively, if that experience does not apply to you, describe eating as an act of convenience and optimization rather than pleasure. Perhaps meals consist of protein bars, shakes, or packaged snacks consumed not because they are enjoyable but because they help you “hit your macros” or meet a nutritional goal.

    The purpose of these two paragraphs is to explore how modern technology is transforming both food and our relationship to food. Together, they should frame your essay’s argument about the cultural, psychological, and social consequences of ultra-processed foods.

  • The Death of Big Ideas

    The Death of Big Ideas

    Last night I dreamed that I had finally discovered the central truth about teaching college writing.

    Our students belonged to a generation too fragile to confront the Big Ideas.

    In the dream, the Big Ideas were never clearly defined. They remained tantalizingly out of reach, like a sacred text written in invisible ink. Yet everyone understood their importance. They were the reason genuine professors entered the profession in the first place. They were the intellectual equivalent of the Holy Grail.

    And therein lay the tragedy.

    The very thing teachers longed to discuss was the very thing students were determined to avoid.

    This revelation struck me with prophetic force. I became convinced that I had uncovered the hidden code explaining the modern educational crisis. Naturally, I assumed the world would be grateful.

    I was wrong.

    Like an itinerant preacher possessed by a dubious revelation, I traveled from place to place proclaiming the Death of Big Ideas. I lectured at colleges. I preached at vacation resorts. I cornered people at spas. I delivered impromptu sermons near construction sites. Everywhere I went, I explained that students no longer wished to wrestle with difficult truths, moral complexity, existential questions, or ideas large enough to rearrange their lives.

    My audiences listened with varying degrees of politeness.

    Some nodded absentmindedly.

    Others stared at me the way one stares at a man enthusiastically describing his collection of antique doorknobs.

    Most seemed annoyed.

    This bewildered me. I possessed what I considered the most important insight of the century, yet people treated it as if I were recommending a new brand of lawn fertilizer.

    Disheartened by the world’s indifference, I suspended my crusade and retreated to a health spa.

    There I took a shower using mashed bananas as body wash.

    I stood beneath the water, coating myself in a thick yellow foam that smelled like a tropical smoothie having a nervous breakdown. The banana lather clung to my arms and chest while I reflected on the fate of civilization.

    As I scrubbed, I could hear construction workers laboring outside.

    These men, I thought, needed the Big Ideas.

    Perhaps they had never encountered them.

    Perhaps they were waiting for me.

    Perhaps I was destined to bring them enlightenment.

    I rinsed off the banana residue, dressed hurriedly, and rushed outside to share my revelation.

    The construction workers were gone.

    Every last one of them.

    Apparently someone had warned them that an agitated college instructor was approaching with grand theories about society, education, and the meaning of life.

    They had wisely chosen to flee.

    I awoke sobered by humanity’s universal rejection of my urgent message.

    At the same time, I found myself strangely curious about whether mashed bananas might actually make an effective body wash.

    One thing was certain: Somewhere along the way, I had completely gone bananas.