FEED ME

Don't Make Me Work For It

What would it be like to have meals prepared for you every day?

Without a thought about where your next meal was coming from, you could simply go about your day. And at the appropriate times, breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be ready for you to eat. This thought occurred to me as I was painstakingly planning the menu for my daughter’s college graduation, when my house of two would increase to seven for a week.

For years, meal preparation, and every aspect of it—the menu, shopping, prepping, cooking, and clean-up—have been a big part of my daily life. And I like it! I also like coming up with a theme for parties and a menu to match. I like exploring new recipes and experimenting in the kitchen.

Most of the time.

Do you ever had days when you just don’t feel like it? Like when you’ve worked a 12-hour day—and on your feet in high heels. All you want to do is sit down and your husband declares, “I haven’t eaten all day.” My husband says this all the time. Why do I feel responsible for that? He’s a grown man; it’s his fault he doesn’t bother to stop at one of a hundred food establishments that he passes as he drives along his work route.

When the kids were home, it didn’t occur to me that they could fend for themselves. I suppose they could have … and maybe I should have let them. I remember serving them three meals a day, not to mention nutritious snacks. It wasn’t always at the table … for a few years, we ate in the car going from place to place, but a meal wasn’t something they had to think about.

They may remember it differently, however. I remember having a conversation with my mom, and me complaining about how much work all this meal planning was. I said something like, “You didn’t have this stress because you didn’t cook for us.” She remembered it a little differently and reminded me of her delicious crock pot meals – no wonder I tried to forget.

The stress of meal planning has taken on a new life, not just because the kids are gone, but because of everyone’s hyperfocus on WHAT they eat. I’m a fan of the philosophy that food is medicine, don’t get me wrong. But I’m not a fan of the anxiety that spreads over you at the mere idea of hosting a dinner party! In recent years, nobody hosted dinner parties. At first, we blamed Covid, but now it’s just daunting—to me anyway—to try to create a meal that everyone will eat.

Something as simple as pizza quickly turns into a lesson on dietary requirements: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Flexitarian, Macrobiotic, Raw, Organic … and those are just a few! A friend said that I should contact all the guests I planned to invite over and ask them what they would like for dinner. I wonder what Dear Abby would say about that. I know what I say! I have another group of friends who held a dinner party on Zoom! Everyone sat in front of their own computers, eating the dinner they had prepared for themselves. Yuck! Sorry … but it’s my opinion of that dinner party.

So I’m back to where I started, wondering what it would be like to have meals prepared for me every day, without ever having to work for it.

I pass a guy on my way to work each morning. He sits on a busy streetcorner holding a sign that reads, “Will work for food.” Since I’ve been doing that for years, I’d like to have a new sign.

My sign will read, “Feed me.”

Photo by Tyler Rutherford on Unsplash