Texas Hold 'Em

For what feels like a lifetime, I've been flying from west to east at the end of any given trip, losing daylight.  That's what happens when you fly east; the hours slip away right before your eyes, the sun setting over the horizon as you watch clouds turn gold and then pink in a higher level of atmosphere.  There's this sad little moment before landing when the city you call home presents itself, a matrix of lights beneath plane wings and the gravity of home hits.  Here you are.  Wherever you were was yesterday.  Now you are home.  

I spent a lot of time in airports growing up and I remember those dark flights home on Sunday evenings, wishing for a plane delay or cancellation, some finite extension of my trip.  I'm not sure that feeling ever really goes away.  No matter how much we long for home, doesn't a part of us always want the sunset to last a little bit longer, before we hit the final time zone of our destination?

It wasn't dark yet when I landed in Texas yesterday afternoon.  I had the best kind of layover, the kind that merely requires the collecting of one's things and the immediate departure from another gate.  My gate of arrival was C2 and my new gate of departure was C20, a miracle in Dallas-Fort Worth, where terminals can fall in four quadrants and require a light rail to get to.  

But I had a short walk in front of me, about seven minutes total from where I landed from Phoenix to where I would depart to New York.  In that seven minutes or so, I passed the following eateries: 

2 McDonald's

1 Taco Bell

1 Wendy's

1 Chili's

1 TGI Friday's

2 Pizza Huts

3 Starbucks

1 Texas rib joint

1 Blimpie

4 Magazine/Candy stores

Of these fine establishments, exactly two sold fresh fruit (well, I'm not sure how fresh, but anyway) and very few offered the kind of food I'm used to eating: unprocessed.  I made my first ever stop to a Blimpie, figuring I could get a sandwich on whole-wheat, and I did, but I'm pretty sure the bread was just white bread dyed brown.  

Texas is home to eight of the most overweight cities in the country and Houston is the second most obese city in the nation.  People drive everywhere and even in the airport a person can't get from destination point A to point B without encountering a million saturated fat temptations.  New Yorkers may have scoffed when a bill was passed last year requiring all fast food restaurants to post their calorie counts next to their selections, but it seems to me that a state like Texas, where the options range from pizza to burgers, would benefit from such legislation.  At least that way people would have no one to blame but themselves when they put on weight from a 1,200 calorie lunch. 

When I finished my disgusting sandwich, it was time to go home, and even though I was sad about that darkness creeping up as the plane headed east, the ultimate reminder that my trip had ended, I wouldn't have wanted to spend much more time in Texas.  When the lights of New York appeared beneath our plane, I was swallowed by the elusive sense of relief one seldom feels when home is near.  

Air Travel

My flight for Phoenix leaves at 7:55 tomorrow morning.  Fortunately, I live just five minutes from the airport.  But I know myself well enough to know that I won't be waking up any earlier than I have to, which means no breakfast before I reach the dreaded airport. 

Normally, this wouldn't be much of a problem, but I started thinking yesterday about the limiting culinary options available in airports, about the new and asinine policies created by wayward airlines: six bucks for a sub-par sandwich en-route, unless you happen to be part of the first-class elite. 

What does a person who is trying not to eat white flour, processed foods, or refined sugar do when stuck at an airport and faced with a day's worth of travel?

My old fallback plan used to include Dunkin' Donuts and American cheese, neither of which I'm keen on putting in my body these days.  I'm thinking I'll be lucky to find a piece of fruit that hasn't been mauled in the shipping process. 

Seriously.  This is the great American crisis.  Go to Italy and you'll find airports stocked with fresh pasta and veggies.  Even London, the holy grail of mayonnaise and butter, puts more effort into their commuter cuisine than we roly poly Americans do.  We have unhealthy diets, made worse by the constant and unrelenting availability of unhealthy options at places where we have no choice but to partake.  Nutritionists always say that it is a choice, that when you're in an unhealthy restaurant you can still choose the healthiest option.  But let's be honest: ordering a wilted salad at Burger King will not fill you up and it will not make you a healthier human.  

We are a fat and dying country, afflicted with diseases of the poor even as we count ourselves among the very richest nations.  We are addicted to sugar and flour, coerced by saturated fats and processed meats.  The slow food movement is no longer nascent, born in the 1970s when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, but middle America still has no option when immediacy wins out.  

I know this.  I live in New York.  No one ever has enough "time."  I can't tell you how many people tell me that they would cook for themselves, but they don't have enough time.  They would eat more vegetables, but they don't have "time" to prepare them.  They order take-out because it's so "time" efficient.  It might be the greatest American myth, that to eat well one needs to be unemployed or a stay-at-home parent.  

People in airports are a captive audience: they will eat what you give them.  If there were fruit stands, or produce stands, or a man selling fresh sushi (and I mean fresh sushi, and not those disgusting pre-packaged California rolls they sell at the grocery store) instead of--or at least in addition to--the Sbarro's and McDonald's of the world, people would eat better.  They just would.  I love French Fries as much as the next girl, but if I were in an airport with fresh plums, I'd eat them instead.  I just would.  It's a combination of making good choices and having good options available.  

As for tomorrow, who knows what the future holds.  I'll be lucky to find a decent banana for breakfast, something to carry me over until the captivity of the plane and the bad/expensive sandwiches that will almost certainly follow.  Maybe someday we'll take food more seriously, like the Italians do.  Fresh pasta for breakfast is something I can stand behind.  

Tune In, Tune Out

I was supposed to go out last night and I probably would have, but the snow made it difficult to conceptualize a trip downtown in the cold.  There's the ten block trek to the train station, the open-and-breezy elevated train, the pink tape I'm so accustomed to encountering when planning weekend travel.  And so I did what I have been doing since I was a very little girl, a latchkey kid left to her own devices on snow days: I made boxed pasta and ate it with cold, canned tomato sauce.  

I suppose that, when you're talking about comfort food, it could get a lot worse than whole wheat pasta (it was all I had) and almost-fat-free tomato sauce.  Not that I'm trying to pass this off as health food, but still.  I wasn't sitting around wondering how I had conceivably eaten an entire pizza instead of leaving my apartment.  That would be cause for alarm.  

Even the most high-minded foodies have their vices.  Mine tend to be junky and prepared.  I love candy with high fructose corn syrup.  I love diet soda.  I love the artificial cheese on certain kinds of chips (you know which ones I'm talking about).  I love the canned soups that are loaded with MSG and I love canned tomato sauce.  I love it in an entirely separate and different way than I love real, homemade tomato sauce.  To me, they aren't even remotely related.  Yes, they both come from tomatoes, and yes, they both go over pasta.  But one has preservatives, salt, sugar, and those little mushrooms that taste like they come from a can.  And the other tastes like someone actually spent time giving credit to the almighty tomato. 

Foods trigger memory, perhaps more than any one thing.  I remember that when I was a teenager someone told me that the sense of smell was the sense most commonly associated with memory.  Maybe that's true.  Maybe that's why I'm reminded of childhood Saturday afternoons when I walk into a McDonald's.  Maybe that's why cherry Blistex reminds me of my first kiss.   I think maybe taste is just as relevant a trigger.

Like how half-decent pizza reminds me of the drives home I used to make on alternate Sunday evenings with my stepfather, who could be easily convinced to stop at Papa Gino's and who probably wouldn't tell my food-restricting mother about it.  Or how Campbell's vegetable soup--even the low-sodium variety--reminds me of the other part of that journey, Friday evenings in my father's kitchen with the New Yorker, where I'd sit at the table after a flight from Boston reading cartoons that I didn't really understand.  Or maybe I did and my parents missed a good opportunity to enroll me in MENSA. 

So for me, boxed pasta and canned tomato sauce conjures the snow collecting on my back porch when the schools have long-since been cancelled. I know I will have to go shovel the driveway before anyone comes home.  I know I have to go shovel the stairs.  But it is cold and we have cable and for now I can enjoy the most corporeal pleasures from the comfort of the living room: cable television, processed food, a glass of soda from my mother's secret stash.  

I didn't go out last night because it was the type of night that reminded me of my least solitary solitary moments, the quiet of nothing and the responsibility of no one.