my personal relationship to food is extremely wonky and tumultuous at best, i admit.

i know this article is from a little while ago, but it's still i think one of the best ones i've read on how we view what we eat:

read me, i love you!

personally, i find that while i also take great joy in the act of both cooking and eating, and exploring tastes and smells and textures of foods, i also find myself often preoccupied with thoughts of how much of this or that i'm getting in my diet. have i had too many calories? enough fiber? and so forth. so much so is this a concern that i'll find myself making numerous obsessive calculations throughout the day, theorizing that if i eat this and this, and then have that for dinner, i'll have had such-and-such calories and such-and-such protein, and so forth, instead of simply allowing myself to eat and enjoy an abundance of simple, fresh food every day without worrying that it doesn't adhere to a ludicrous and arbitrary number i have for some reason determined is how much i need in a day. i think in part it gives me something to focus on, so i don't have a chance to worry about how my courses are going, or whether i'll get the living room tidied in time for my dinner party, or whether i'll ever manage to get a PhD and a decent teaching job, and whether i'm wholly repellant to other people and that's why they always seem to get sick or busy after one or two dates.