Food should be eaten and enjoyed, usually by me
My mother is an incredible cook. Both my parents are, actually.
My dad invented a kind of barbecue sauce that knocks A-1 into a cocked hat.
He’s a whiz with anything having to do with meat, fish, or pasta. My mother’s calzone, pot pie, tuna casserole and chocolate chip cookies (especially those cookies) blow me away.
She makes a mean sandwich, too. My two favorite kinds of sandwiches in the universe (meat salad and ham ‘n’ Swiss, if you want to know) are made by her fair hands, and I can’t complain.
If I were starving to the point where I could only drag myself along by my hands, and there was a Subway restaurant three feet away, I’d still drag myself the 900 miles back to my parent’s house in Wyoming for one of her sandwiches.
Since any sandwich I make myself is, by default, inferior to Ma’s (it doesn’t have the secret ingredient that she puts in it), I must therefore use other means to try to heighten the food’s appeal.
In the absence of quality, I employ quantity.
I stuff my sandwiches. And when I say “stuffed” I don’t mean the way pillows are stuffed with goose feathers or dead animals are stuffed with sawdust.
The way that telephone booths are stuffed with people is more appropriate. The sandwiches I make are so bursting with filling and condiments that any attempt to pick one up or hold it would result in said filling and condiments exploding all over your shirt.
Take, for example, my third favorite kind of sandwich, the creamy-peanut-butter-and-strawberry-preserves-on-wheat.
My mother evenly spreads a modest amount of peanut butter and preserves (and a generous helping of that special secret ingredient) on the bread slices and then hands it to me for ingestion.
I slap obscene amounts of peanut butter and preserves haphazardly on the bread slices, cram them together so the jelly starts to ooze out like a bug getting squashed, balance a glob of jelly or peanut butter on the spreading knife, lick it off, wipe the knife on the bread and then eat it.
Hey, sandwiches are meant to be enjoyed. I’ve been scolded before about how gluttonous it is to put such obscene amounts of spread and fillings on my sandwiches, but I say it’s all part of living life to the fullest.
Food is supposed to be fun to eat, or else we’d have no incentive to eat it.
So (as long as I don’t go above my daily 2,600 calorie allowance), I don’t feel guilty about putting ridiculous amounts of cheese, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, ham, pastrami, salami, turkey, chicken, roast beef, mustard, barbecue sauce, ketchup, peanut butter, strawberry preserves, whortleberry preserves, huckleberry preserves, marmalade, horseradish or Miracle Whip on any sandwich I make.
So live a little. Don’t be afraid to take it to the max when you’re making a meal.
After all, you never know which meal is your last.
You don’t want to go to Heaven with hunger pangs because you skimped on the mayonnaise, do you?
Andrew is a senior studying mass communication.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum