Summer Eatin'

We don't do this yet at Carl's, but I can foresee a time when we'll offer to deep fry people's children for an extra $1.40.

Lunch is a funny sort of meal for me. Since I usually get up somewhere between 10:00 AM and noon, lunch is really more of my breakfast. Dinner, also, is screwed up, because comes at whatever time my manager at work decides to give me a break, and then, depending on whether I’m working at Bella Fresca or Carl’s, it can either consist of sautéed halibut or beer battered red meat. Because I tend to sleep in so late, I don’t go to bed until it’s pretty late as well, and so Dinner2 comes at around 1:30 AM when I get hungry enough to sneak down to the refrigerator for a late night hummus binge.

Since lunch has to pull double duty as both lunch and breakfast, I ordinarily go for a more ambiguous combination of the two when I take this meal at home. Usually, this winds up being my time-honored favorite: two or three pieces of sourdough bread with peanut butter spread very thickly on them. Inevitably, I wind up clutching the counter with one hand and massaging my esophagus with the other, praying that the chunk of peanut buttery, yeasty goo will slide into my stomach before my windpipe is completely sealed off and I suffocate. It’s decidedly unhealthy to stare delicious, legume-derived death in the face every morning, especially when you can look back on dozens of previous occasions on which you have almost died under these same circumstances and wonder why you haven’t learned your lesson yet.

Since peanut butter is so bad for me (both in that it’s fattening and in that it could undoubtedly asphyxiate me) I sometimes try to seek out alternate breakfast/lunch choices. Since I’m far too lazy to undertake any sort of food preparation more complex than unwrapping a loaf of bread and screwing the lid off a jar, I tend to go out for lunch when I want a little variety. There are two fast food restaurants close to my house: One is Carl’s, where I have a 30% employee discount, and the other is Subway. I tend to frequent Subway, because I’ve noticed that a great many people who frequent Carl’s are so large that they have their own gravitational pull.

During my senior year of high school, I sat next to my friend Matt in Art History, and every morning he would say one of two things: “Truman, I smoked too much weed last night”, or “Truman, I hate working at Subway.” He came to school once with a giant burn on his hand from a mishap with a bag of molten sauce and often told me horror stories about the unsanitary preparation rituals for tuna salad and the meatballs that, while ball-shaped, were most certainly not meat. After hearing these stories, I decided that henceforth I would be a Quiznos man. However, while Quiznos may have all natural ingredients and considerably foxier employees, Subway, both at school and at home, is always closer to where I’m living. Also, they offer the Five Dollar Footlong.*

*I guarantee you, this is the name of a Taiwanese porn movie. I don’t know for sure, and I’m certainly not going to go looking, but I’ll give you better than average odds that such a movie definitely exists, possibly with a dozen or more sequels.

I tend not to go crazy over discounts or sales, but the simple fact is that paying $5 for 12 inches of uninterrupted sandwich is a really, really, really good deal. Then, on top of that, is the fact that what you’re getting is ostensibly healthy, which in and of itself is worth another $3 right there. Eating at Subway sort of gives me the moral high ground in everything else I do during the day. Sure, I haven’t been working out like I promised myself I was going to, but I did eat at Subway before playing Bioshock for 3 hours, so, I mean, it’s a start. When you think about it, walking to Subway and then eating there is pretty much all Jared ever did, at least as far as the commercials are concerned.

There’s a sign on the door of my Subway that says, in big, exciting, happy letters, “ENTER FOR A CHANCE TO APPEAR WITH JARED ON A SUBWAY COMMERCIAL!!” And, I mean, that’s fine – it’s their corporation, they can advertise whatever the hell promotion they want to – but when I look at the list of Things I Want To Achieve, I don’t see “Meet Subway’s Jared” anywhere on there. I mean no disrespect, because he seems like a really nice guy. He looks like the sort of guy who would offer you a ride home for spring break, and then when he drops you off at your house and you go to pull out some gas money he’d say “Ah, don’t worry about it.” That being said, I know four or five of those people already, and I don’t think I have room in my mooching schedule for one more. As a promotional tool, Jared seems to be doing great things for Subway, but as a charismatic celebrity who everyone wants to meet, well, he has yet to ascend the throne of the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

In my estimate, Jared got so popular not because of any overabundance of charisma or charm, but because he symbolized The American Dream; that is, to lose a lot of weight without doing a lot of work. That an ordinary person like Jared could drop a few hundred pounds by walking and eating sub sandwiches did something for Subway that the Taco Bell Chihuahua never could. By selecting the nutritionally sound menu options at Subway and doing a lot of walking, you too could conceivably become slim and trim; however no amount of Gordidas will turn you into a streetwise talking dog. Question for class discussion: If Gordidas could turn you into a talking dog, would you eat them?

As much as Subway claims to be committed to healthy food, though, I can’t help but call bullshit on some of the things they do. Sure, most sandwiches at Subway are a lot healthier than any given menu item at Carl’s, where they would deep fry water if it was scientifically possible, but it’s still easy to make a sandwich that’s just as bad for you as a burger. There’s nothing stopping you from building a sub at Subway that consists of bacon, cheese, and mayonnaise, and if you get a footlong then there’s probably more unhealthy stuff there than in a hamburger. Say what you will about the health value of a hunk of cow between two condiment-rich pieces of bread, at least it stops after a few inches. An unhealthy sub sandwich, however, just keeps going and going like a fat and cholesterol highway.

So far this summer I’ve lost a few pounds without really exercising besides walking to work, and I think the secret to my success doesn’t involve the footlong chicken breast sandwich (one of Jared’s favorites, so the menu tells me). I think my secret is just that I eat when I’m hungry, and since we don’t really have a lot of snack foods in the house I usually resort to pitabread and hummus, which is sort of the cornerstone on which all health food is built. If there’s no pitabread and hummus to be had, I’m lazy to the point that I’ll actually reevaluate my overall hunger against my willingness to go to the effort of seeking out food, and often wind up not eating until a mealtime. In the end, I suppose it’s Sloth that saves me from Gluttony.

Truman Capps understands that there are a litany of factors affecting weight gain and loss that he can’t hope to comprehend, and is willing to admit that his recent loss of weight is probably less the result of good eating habits and more the result of some horrible wasting disease he has yet to be diagnosed with.