Last night I had phone conversations with two of my closest friends, both of whom were too distracted by love to pull themselves together for a proper chat. The first has a new beau and so wants only to talk of him, the second was hungry and could think only of food. I consider this second friend's hunger a kind of lovesickness because she is a bit of a gourmand (when you're talking about a friend, you say "gourmand" because "glutton" conjures up images of those corpulent behemoths who used to appear on shows like Sally Jessy via satellite because they were too large to leave the house, and Sally would always ask, "How did you get this way?" and they would always say something like, "I just don't know, Sally; one day you're an active young gourmand; next thing you know, you're eating entire wedding cakes by yourself and having gravy pumped directly into your veins through an IV").
Actually, now that I think of it, to describe this particular gourmand's relationship with food as one based on love misses the mark a little. It would be more accurate to describe it as based on lust. For she thinks about food in much the same way that teenage boys think about sex: with great frequency and much fantasizing, the latter enabled mostly by the pornographers at the Food Network (Paula Deen is a filthy, filthy whore). My gourmand doesn't get hungry for food so much as horny for it.
Personally, I've never gotten all that into the whole food thing. I eat it, of course, but I wouldn't say that it has ever made me hot and bothered. I could eat the same thing every day (and pretty much do: if it's true that you are what you eat, I am an endless succession of Chipotle burrito bols), and when, as The Jetsons predicted, food is replaced entirely by those meal-in-a-pill capsules, I don't think I'll miss it one bit.
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