I endured a rather challenging search for employment after leaving school. My lack of skills not being in demand. The majority of the many CVs and letters I sent out failed to elicit as much as a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ reply, with most of my applications remaining unanswered, despite the modest level of position for which I was applying. My Dad would always remind me that I only needed one chance and the pain of the search would be forgotten. On this rare occasion he was right. After some anxious months of looking, a letter fell at our door asking me to come to interview, for a position I had almost forgotten I had applied for. The job itself was unclear but the company was attractive, as it had openly declared that they were ‘willing to take a chance on people’. As it turned out, this was mostly through a drive to forego qualifications for the opportunity of a low wage bill, but also, as I once heard two senior managers discuss, they were trying to fill positions for tasks ‘an untrained chimp could do’.
The interview itself was unremarkable and contained the standard questions one would expect in such circumstances. It stands out in my memory not because of what I was asked but more due to the answers I gave. Or more precisely one answer to one question in particular. When asked to describe my strengths and weaknesses, after some consideration, I replied ‘eating’ for both. I then followed this up, in detailing where I saw myself in five years’ time, by providing ‘hospital’ as the considered response. Surprisingly the interviewers laughed and with a wink suggested that I would fit in well in their office. They had mistaken my interview impudence and brazen honesty for humour and rashly offered me a position.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until my workshy temperament and untrainable disposition stood out as unusual and I was let go. But they had been right in that in the short time I was there, the double edge sword I had laid before them in interview was common to most, it not all, of those within their employment. Food was both ally and antagonist to many of those I met in my short time in there. This does not mean that the company had collected an unusual assortment of specimens, on this matter at least. Far from it. For most of us, both inside and outside the office, the paradoxical nature of our drive to consume means that it is the reason we are here but may also prove to be the cause of our demise.
It takes little aptitude to eat. All that’s really required is opportunity. Unlike the majority of employable skills, such as resource management and spreadsheet design - things the company eventually decided they valued above inadvertently humorous interview responses – very few of us do not possess the ability, nor the desire, to put something into our mouths. Eating is innate, it is driven by our bodies. We wake up hungry. We feel peckish at mid-morning. We struggle to hold out from snacking till we dine at a reasonable hour. Our body tells us when it wants food and then it tells us when it wants no more. Unfortunately, the way those two feelings conspire to keep us fed, may sometimes prove more hindrance than help.
I will venture to provide an example from the Diot family archives, citing an occasion on which we, as a unit, ventured out to celebrate a significant birthday of my father. This celebration, as with all Diot events, centred around food. The location for this was a newly opened ‘all you can eat’ steakhouse that my father had seen advertised in the local paper and which he had excitedly booked some months prior to the big day.
Sadly, on arriving at the establishment, the thrill of limitless meat dissipated as soon as we were shown to our table and the waiting staff presented the options available to us. It appeared that the advertisement, or my father’s reading of it, had been misleading. In so far as we weren’t allowed to eat all the meat we could manage, but we did have a free reign on the starters, sides and desserts. Vast swathes of soup, potato done numerous ways, rice and pasta options sitting in a long line of chafing dishes along the wall closest to the kitchen. Staff hurrying to and fro, regularly refilling each receptacle as customers walked back to their tables, balancing plates piled high enough to fill the hole left by the disappointingly small protein portions.
As soon as we had determined the business model for the establishment, we vowed never to return, but as we were there, we felt we should have our feast of the cheap carbohydrate fillers, in a bid to get our money’s worth. My father, who was footing the bill for his own birthday meal, had banned all of us from taking in any food that day, preceding the restaurant visit, in expectation of a mighty feast. A common occurrence when dining out with the Diots. By the time we arrived we were in the grip of overwhelming feelings of hunger, that once released, led to an uncontrolled fit of gorging. Like a swarm of piranhas that have picked up the scent of blood, we soon cleared even the most well-stocked of serving platters.
We were frenzied in our eating. All of us in the grips of an overriding appetite. Starters, followed by sides, followed by meat, followed by doing it all over again. Until we completed the feast with cake, jelly and ice cream. Even helping ourselves to the mints that we found sitting by the till as we walked past it. On and on we went, demonstrating remarkable endurance and drive to devour everything the place could offer. Things became so extreme that at one point the manager felt obliged to come to our table to tell us we had eaten enough. My mum, ever one to welcome a fight, pointed to the ‘all you can eat’ invitation on their menus, fliers and walls and insisted we could carry on as long as we wanted. Which we subsequently did, hungered further by a sense of injustice. Until finally, replete and happy, we left the restaurant that was now empty and silent save for the light sobs of a ruined owner.
I clearly remember that it was on the 10-minute drive home that the happy feelings of satiety gradually subsided to be replaced by some discomfort. My siblings and parents, obviously beginning to feel the same way, shuffled uncomfortably in their seats. On arriving home, we all waddled into the house, collapsing in any free space on furniture or floor that we could find. It was five minutes after this that the moans started, followed closely by some extreme sweating, rather incongruous in the chill of our winter home. Before long we were in the throes of a collective agony, writhing in unison. To this day, my brother claims he had started to hallucinate. The walls of the lounge bursting out at him and the ceiling washing up and down in waves.
Initial thoughts were that we had picked-up some kind of infection and the recently visited eatery seemed to be the likely source. We tried to identify a culprit, by comparing dishes we had eaten, in the hopes of finding one common to us all, but it was difficult to reduce this expansive list to a single item. All of us had tried pretty much everything on offer. Once the group vomiting started, my parents, breaking with tradition, did the sensible thing and called the out-of-hours doctor, who came promptly round fearing a food poisoning outbreak.
After an extended prodding and poking of their family of patients, the medic claimed, with some confidence, that our sudden deterioration was indeed down to our recent meal, but it wasn’t something we’d eaten, it was everything. We had all simply consumed too much.
Unable to prescribe a cure for gluttony, the doctor resorted to offering some sensible advice, telling us all to listen to our bodies in the future, as they will tell us when we have eaten enough. With that, they left. Suitably chastened, we waited to hear their car leave before loudly rejecting the trained medic’s recommendation. We had, we all agreed, listened to our bodies and it was them that had got us into this predicament.
Even now I reflect on this and wonder if my body has ever imparted helpful or healthful advice on how I should treat it. Normally the opposite is true. I only have to start taking a few steps and my body will tell me to stop running. It practically shouts sit down and relax at most times of the day. In addition, it asks for food whenever it can. I imagine yours is little different. Our bodies don’t know. Many an eater has stopped their intake at the point of comfortable fullness only to find themselves painfully stuffed sometime later. The moderate discomfort of the recently finished meal intensifying in the time following completion, until we are suffering the pain and bloating of overindulgence. It turns out that our stomach screams when it is hungry but whispers when it is full.
This means that we can’t rely on our bodies to control our consumption. Quite the opposite. They are designed to keep us eating, through agonising feelings of hunger and more tolerable feelings of fullness. One so difficult to ignore, the second so easy to overcome. The body makes little sense when you listen, for it is not a body intended for the times we find ourselves in. After all, they were designed when later was not always an option. They were built to allow us to take advantage of the current situation, not knowing how tomorrow would turn out. They were fine-tuned to feast and famine, at a time before buffets were commonplace. Our predecessors did not gather at the edge of the savannas to see cattle, fowl and fish seated in a row ready for selection, conveniently placed next to an outcrop of vegetable sides. Indeed, such a past may have meant our stomach would have taken a more central role in our overall wellbeing, telling us to take enough for now and to come back for more later, as it will always be here.
I may go as far as to say that had there been enough high fat, salt and sugar options to commit our forerunners to a life even shorter than those they endured at the time, we may be predisposed to avoid such foods. We might see the mistake in our ways now, but for our bodies these learnings prove to be a couple of million years too late.
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