The View from a Drawbridge

When I was young and thin and had the metabolism of a hummingbird, I worked for a few months in a place that sold, among other things, ice cream. I was in heaven. All the ice cream I could eat!

Well, that lasted, at most, a couple weeks. I took such advantage of that perk that it got to the point where I didn’t care if I ever saw ice cream again. And the secret they don’t tell you is that if you have a booming business, those ice cream scoops can give you a nasty case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Ice cream jockeys really earn their tips.

There really can be too much of a good thing. We Americans have an exceptionally hard time accepting that fact. We don’t just go out to dinner. We have to have an all you can eat buffet. We don’t eat, we gorge. Portions at American restaurants are obscenely enormous. If we don’t leave an eatery feeling slightly sick, we feel like we haven’t gotten our money’s worth. I was at a friend’s house the other day, and after stuffing ourselves, we were asked, “Did you get enough?” Actually, I got too much, thank you.

Europeans know how to sample small amounts of a given delicacy, fully confident that they will be able to do so again on another day. Americans act as if every meal will be our last. It’s as if we’re still in the throes of the Great Depression. The problem with that concept is that the rest of the world went through it as well, and yet they seem to have snapped out of their depression era need to grab and gobble.

The other day, in honor of Easter, I bought what at the time seemed like a reasonably sized ham for a single person. But I was apparently looking at it through American eyes, because I suspect I will be eating the damned thing every day for the next two weeks. It sucks to be single. Especially if you’re single and have an American-sized sense of acquisition.

[Image credit: thesun.co.uk]