Every Single Thing I Ate This Week (Part I)

Actually, this photo-mosaic shows every single thing I ate halfway through last Wednesday. I couldn't get everything into the picture because of insufficient geekiness on my part. If all goes well, I hope to post the complete photographic record shortly.

This has been an enormously instructive exercise, and I am grateful to Sam for getting me started. I learned a great deal this week, including the extent to which what I eat differs from the ideal I imagine. The most striking example of this is the soy shake with which I began almost every day. My official position is that one should eat real food that looks like what it really is. My most cherished cookbook is The Unplugged Kitchen by Viana La Place, which advocates a culinary repertoire prepared entirely by hand. Nevertheless, I find it very difficult to face the great bounding, prancing, snorting bull that is the morning without turning on the blender to grind up my hemp seed and soy milk drink. I'm also a little embarrassed to let on about using ingredients like soymilk and hemp seeds. Next you'll be expecting to hear me talk about textured vegetable protein and nutritional yeast. Not that anything is wrong with either of those.

I also eat some things that are decidedly non-photogenic. The deconstructed French toast in cell 6, 2 is an example. On the other hand, my efforts to make my food more photogenic turned out to be the most edifying part of this project. Have a look for example at Tuesday's lunch, the black beans and rice in cell 6, 1. It is not too likely that I would have taken the trouble to mince parsley for a regular weekday lunch at home by myself, but I do sometimes do things like that. It is even more unlikely that I would have sliced those zingy little slivers of Santa Fe chile peppers for that sparkle of redness, but it turns out that the parsley and the peppers were just the very things. I have resolved that henceforth, even if I don't photograph every single thing I eat, I will try to cook and eat as if I do.

I would also like to point out that I did not eat nearly all the food you see here; I had only one spoonful of the ice cream in cell 1, 4 (well, perhaps two or three spoonfuls), and only one bite of each of the pasta dishes in cells 5, 2 and 5, 3, and the injera in 2, 3 and 2, 4. That’s parsnip soup with fried sage leaves in cell 2, 1, and home-squeezed apple juice in 6, 3.

I do not normally drink this much wine or coffee.

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