Riot -- Don't Diet

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Despite the cool ethnic food factor these movies and books draw on, any ethnic person raised in the United States knows that growing up with weird food might not be as fun as white people make it out to be. Did I want to come home to my mother gutting squid on the floor, to my dad frying up some fish so stank he would wear a showercap on his head to avoid some of the funk? No! I dreamed of peanut butter and grape jelly on Wonder bread, of tuna casserole with potato chips crushed on top, of green bean casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and Durkee French Fried Onions––food that I still yearn for to this day. (You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but . . . ) No one likes being a freak as a kid, when conformity is key. It was no coincidence that my fondness for Thai food only increased around the Asian Power period in my life, when I started collecting Nuprin notepads from my physician parents that said "Little, Yellow. Different, Better."

Sin or Hobby?
Increasingly, I’m adjusting my Grand Unification Theory (or GUT) of eating as a political and radical pursuit to reflect a more enlightened way of pursuing gluttony. I used to ascribe to the Golden Corral methodology of practicing gluttony (the Golden Corral was an enormous all-you-can-eat buffet I went to as a child in Iowa). But after leaving my teenage years behind, I find that my body does not enjoy heaps of fried chicken and onion rings as much as it used to. Instead, it wants to tell me all about the hard work it’s doing. And after returning from Japan, Land of the Tiny Food, and visiting Las Vegas shortly afterwards, I came to a sort of epiphany about the American way of eating. Surrounded by quarter-mile-long buffets and three-foot-tall margaritas, I felt a wave of bloat brought on by the overwhelming excess. In our quest for the Better Value, we sometimes forget that bigger is not necessarily better, that more is not always more.

So I’m trying to hone my gluttony to a high level by walking more along the Buddhist Middle Way of moderation. This may seem to be an oxymoron, but really, how can you relish the fish that sings of the sea, its own clean soul, its suchness, as the Buddhists would say, when you’ve eaten too many of the dinner rolls? Gluttony can be revealed as a sort of meditation––a way to contemplate the essence of a food, to cultivate bare awareness through chewing, to realize the interconnectedness of the food, the preparer, the eater.

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