I am what I am

I finally understand why I am the way that I am. Or rather, and perhaps more accurately, I've finally been given a plausible theory regarding my love for good food and desire to be a food critic despite my overwhelmingly awkward and unfavorable history against it.

I went out last night with my ex-boyfriend, a move that, I understand, doesn't seem like the best idea to most people. However, the night was pleasant and, throughout the course of a couple of beers ($2.50 special-list pints on Tuesdays and the Mash Tun Pub on NE 22nd and Alberta Street), we accepted what was, moved forward on what it and talked, as we always have, about food.

While he's never been much of a reader, he does relish in reading books about food and restaurants and people involved with food. As we were breaking up he was reading Jeffrey Steingarten's second book (Which I'm still mad I didn't get to read because of the breakup) which, according to Kevin, really details Steingarten's reasoning behind becoming and being a food critic.

One of the chapters is titled, "Brain Storm" and explains how suffering a head trauma could potentially lead one to have an obsession for gourmet food and refined tastes. The chapter's first sentence reads that "a profound interest in food may be caused by a lesion in the anterior portion of the right cerebral hemisphere of one's brain." When Kevin dealt this morsel of information last night I knew he knew I was thinking about when I was five-years-old and ran into a mailbox (Hey, before you judge, know that I was running for my life away from a dog scarier than The Beast in The Sandlot) chipping and swallowing half of my two front teeth and damaging some muscles in my right eye so severely that I developed a head tilt during my childhood years that was corrected only through surgery and near-coke-bottle-lens-sized reading and work glasses (Yes, I am wearing them as I type).

Kev continued recalling Steingarten's chapter, which surveys Steingarten's experience with the doctor who originally told him about Gourmand's Syndrome. The doctor told Steingarten, a glasses-wearing older man, that the most common symptoms of Gourmand's were visual spatial dysfunctions (Like I said, I am wearing coke-bottle glasses right now) and that there is some research indicating that eating disorders spring from brain injuries because even though eating disorders appear to be purely psychological, physical changes are evident too. (Of course, there's a lot of research indicating a lot of causes for eating disorders and I personally don't think there's a solid consensus and don't believe there really ever will be. It's one of those mysteries like whether we dream in color or that age-old standby wonder about the falling tree making a noise in the forest).

Steingarten's doctor continued over dinner at a five-star restaurant within the chapter that "changes in neurotransmitters and serotonin and noradrenalin along with brain lesions affecting the system have been linked to OCD, pathological behavior, kleptomania and so forth." So, people with Gourmand's might not necessarily crave gourmet food but they recognize the superfluous indulgence in steak tartare, black truffles, white truffles, foie gras, sea urchin, pork belly, monkfish liver, lamb burgers, toro (fatty tuna), sweetbreads (the gourmet nugget, if you will), geisha varietal coffee, kobe beef, chicken heart, beef heart, saffron and the like and crave the richness and indulgence of these delicacies.

In fact, Steingarten argued against his doctor -- who, I might add, says that Gourmand's Syndrome is bad for a person to be 'afflicted by' -- saying that he's okay "pleading guilty to an obsession with beauty, edible or otherwise."

Could I really have Gourmand's Syndrome? Probably not. I'm not a kleptomaniac and, despite my obsessive and compulsive fretting over the lifestyles at work (It's a good thing I've recently been officially assigned as a visual associate at Pottery Barn), I'm not, in medical definition terms, OCD. Still, it's nice to have another key as to why I, the once-food-fearing, fat-avoiding freak of a girl is now striding to becoming a try-everything-at-least-once food critic.

And as a food critic, I definitely plead very, very guilty to my obsession with edible beauty.

Oh...and yes, I've eaten everything in my aforementioned list of delicacies.