I got to the park early and, hungry, got in line at the Shake Shack, which was of a manageable length owing to the 185 degree heat. I wondered, though, if this was the right thing to do: I was meeting up with a dear friend, and we needed to talk—she and her long-time boyfriend were breaking up. It was a serious afternoon in the park.
Later, at the table, I had trouble holding my big sloppy burger together—it contained, among other things, a cheese-stuffed, deep-fried Portobello mushroom. And, as I feared, it was even harder to eat this thing while looking like a supportive friend. I was listening with attention and care, but it’s kind of awkward to be like, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” while slurping burger juice and digging molten cheese out of a paper wrapper. Or dipping excellently crispy crinkle-cut fries into ketchup. This is not food for emotionally sensitive situations. But what is? Is there such a thing?
I remember numbly walking around New York on September 11th, hours after it had happened, and getting a box of Halal chicken and rice from a cart. I love the chicken-and-rice guys that work the city, an integral part of my New York streetscape, and buying a meal as I walked past was almost instinctive. (Later, I would think about how I approached him, a Muslim man, and gladly gave him money for whatever measure of comfort his food might give me in an atmosphere that would soon be charged with hatred for him. That unfairness did not escape me.)
As I ate, I could only marvel at the fact that I was hungry, that I could feel anything at all. But I got no pleasure from it. The thought of eating, of taking in food and pleasure on a day like that, seemed obscene. That had just happened. How could there be room in my mind, in my life, for something as banal as lunch?
I wrote this to a friend who replied, “You shouldn’t feel bad. Underneath your discomfort at being able to enjoy food at a time of tragedy lurks the opposite impulse, to find in daily pleasures, particularly food, something that will keep us going because it links us to the rest of humanity at times when that link seems fragile.”
I appreciate his larger point—that sharing food and sharing pleasure is one of the greatest powers of eating. But I think I was troubled in the park the other day, and in that moment on September 11th, because they were precisely the opposite—they were so solitary. Whatever pleasure or basic animal satisfaction I got from eating at those times only divorced me from the moment, from the people and the world around me. Eating, in those moments, made me feel small and selfish.