To Eat to Live or Live to Eat? That is the Question.

I have just finished my last fast food meal. Well, my last fast food meal for, oh, let's say a month. We'll start with that. That sounds doable. Right?

I went out with one my classic meals: Two extra crispy drumsticks, two mounds of snowy, over-processed mashed potatoes and an extra side of under-salted, slightly gelatinous gravy of questionable origins. This is what I get when I it's 7:30 on a Monday and I haven't given any thought to what I am going to prepare for dinner. Or at least it's what I've gotten since Boston Market started sucking so much.

This is a decision that I considered heavily. Anyone who has ever eaten in a car with me knows that I have a dedication to certain fast food restaurants that could be classified as somewhere between loyal and obsessive. As self examination is one of my less-frequently utilized forms of entertainment, I will leave you to your opinion. The point is, I love fast food. I have a meal at each of my preferred outlets that I will only stray from in the event of alcohol consumption or apocalypse. I have a special way of preparing and consuming each item, down to the fact that I eat my extra crispy chicken directly over the top of my double order of mashed potatoes so that the extra crispies that fall off will land in the bed of potato, creating an interesting textural backdrop for the gravy that is delivered to my mouth via the potatoes. (And I will state here, for the record and in the case of pretty much every mashed potato recipe in existence, that I consider potatoes merely a vessel created for the purpose of delivering gravy. That is not to say that I won't eat mashed potatoes without gravy. I will. And I do. I'm just saying, they were created for the gravy. This is a point that I consider indisputable.)

You may be asking now why, given my inveterate, nearly fiendish love of all things fried or assembled in a line to my specifications, I have decided to forgo the ease and comfort of my friend, the fast food restaurant. There are a few reasons for this. One, I decided awhile ago that I'd rather not consume ingredients that are more than three syllables long. I feel that ingredients like sodium tripolyphospate don't belong in food. I am certain that one word food items that are perfectly natural but more than three syllables long exist, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Watermelon. That's one. Two, I'm curious to see if merely avoiding fast food result in a miraculous loss of recently acquired weight. I don't know how people get slender, and I'm not buying into this new "exercise" trend, but I am fairly confident that eating tacos prepared with grade F meat is not how this is accomplished. Thirdly, it is expected of me that I shall develop a more sophisticated palate in the coming months and I know for a fact that the Arby's medium beef with cheddar is not high up on the list of sophisticated foods. Nor are the oft-overlooked pintos and cheese at Taco Bell, or the "chicken" nuggets you can find at your neighborhood McDonald's.

I guess, to make a long story short, when you get down it, fast food just isn't that good. There is this concept of "eating to live" running rampant out there, especially here in suburban America. And in Subsaharan Africa. I do not and will not ascribe to this way of life. I ascertain that this concept is accepted due to the constant availability of quickly prepared and thoughtlessly assembled sandwiches containing sub-par ingredients in often inadequate portions (A quarter of a slice of American cheese on the Filet O'Fish? Really?). The line tonight at KFC was at least 8 cars long when we pulled into the parking lot and not a single person was in line inside. It's there, it's cheap, it's easy and, despite the aforementioned sub-par ingredients, it tastes good. Sort of.

But for the purpose of this particular experiment, and many others for that matter, I will strive to live to eat. So, starting tomorrow, Tuesday, September 15, I will Live to Eat Another Day. Or at least I'll try.