Quarantine comfort food: Our appetites, ourselves

When the urge hits, I tiptoe from the couch toward the kitchen. 

I'm hungry. 

Again. 

At least I think I am.

Still, this is not going to be easy. 

My wife has just witnessed me consume a mammoth hunk of extra-sharp cheddar cheese. And a slice of peanut butter toast before that. After I’d chomped down a banana, eggs and a couple of greasy oversized sausage links stuffed with mozzarella with my morning coffee. 

Quarantine comfort food.

She's working from home, sitting at the breakfast table, her back to the fridge, my hapless quarry, which sits ten feet away, ripe for the picking.

She is wily, watchful. 

But I am not to be denied. Stealth is required.

I sniff past the jar of mixed nuts, like a rat on the prowl in the quiet of night.

No, I need something more substantial.

Ever so slowly, I crack open the refrigerator. 

It might as well have been equipped with an alarm, an IED.

Boom.

Suddenly here she is, this woman keeping me from my worst habits of greed, gluttony and sloth. 

My warden.

My guardian angel. 

“You’re not hungry,” she says. “You’re just bored.”

As the weeks pass, this stay-at-home regimen has changed our relationship with food.

It has altered how we anticipate our next meal, lessened the interim time between feeding frenzies, the intervals when our stomachs begin to ring their alarm bells.

For many, food has become at best a diversion and at worst an unhealthy obsession.

It’s understandable.

While our homes remain safe, the world-at-large has become a treacherous place. A pandemic rages. The death toll rises daily. The safety net isn’t holding. Our politicians are failing us. 

Our futures are on hold, even in jeopardy.

The result: A creeping anxiety and even depression.

We’re helpless.

And thinking about food helps keep the stress at bay.

Meanwhile, our stomachs are having the time of their liives.

Studies show that the average American gains six pounds during the year-end holiday season. Well, our stomachs see these days at home as the Mother of all Holidays.

We worry that when it’s all over, we will have become grotesque creatures, no longer able to fit through our doorway thresholds, resigned to stay at home for eternity, like fattened-up little boys and girls in the bubble.

There's more bad news.

This prolonged quarantine has taken our instincts back millions of years, turned us back into primeval hunter-gatherers.

We now venture to Costco as our early ancestors would have hunted woolly mammoths, with clubs and grunts.

Once we’re in the aisles, let no man stand in our way. We hoard, forage for toilet paper to light our cave fires.

And this Early Man version of ourselves frets over his imminent extinction. Because the grasslands are empty of prey. The food shelves are empty, as barren as those in Cold War Soviet supermarkets.

We're not used to this this denial, this lack of instant food gratification.

Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in our lives, we cannot get what we want.

Toilet paper, hand sanitizers, lemons, Vitamin C.

When we get home, when are cupboards are full, we feel a sense of rare satisfaction, like bears in late autumn, knowing we’ll get through that long hibernation.

Because who wants to go back to that grocery store, where the virus potentially lurks under every leaf of spinach, on the handle of every shopping cart?

And so we cocoon, the calories from out repeat trips to the fridge replacing the steps on our Fitbits.

In our house, we don’t do restaurant take-out or delivery — too risky — so we’re limited to what’s inside or own fridge. There’s less impulse to our eating decisions.

We don’t say. “Let’s order in a pizza!” or “Let’s try that new Chinese place tonight!”

Instead, it’s yesterday’s lamb stew. We choose our meat by using the nearest-expiration date packages first.

Yep, I know what’s inside our refrigerator.

And in a way this brings me a sort of comfort. When my Chinese-born wife and I go our own ways, when she eats out for work lunches and brings back leftovers, my stomach tightens when I open the fridge door.

Because lurking inside that brown paper doggie bag or styrofoam container probably isn’t pasta or chicken cacciatore, but something culturally foreign.

Like fish heads, filmy eyeballs intact.

Um, no thanks, I’ll pass.

Now there are no such surprises because I was there when we loaded the fridge.

Actually, I’m faring better than most under these stockpiled food conditions because there’s a one-celled-organism simplicity to my food choices.

Frankly, unlike my wife, I lack imagination in the kitchen, or when it comes to food choices in any setting.

I choose quickly from restaurant menus, with little thought.

Years ago, I walked to a bowling alley kitchen each day for a takeout lunch I brought back to my desk.

Every day, without fail, I ordered the chef’s salad.

One day, the waitress couldn’t help herself.

“Don’t you get tired of this?” she asked.

“Um, no, not at all,” I responded.

The thing was, I liked my salad. It never occurred to me to shake things up and order something different.

These days, people post their prized kitchen creations on social media. When I see those fattening pound cakes or apple strudel, I think “Good for you. See ya at the gym.”

I’m staying away from the cakes and cookies. When I pass them in the hurried masked-up trips down the grocery aisle, I overrule my runaway imagination and pull myself together.

Absolutely not, I say.

In our weeks together, my wife is trying to expand my limited culinary horizons. The other night, we baked a loaf of bread from scratch, with healthy ingredients.

And yet I remain a slow learner.

When I’m lying there on the couch and the urge strikes, when my stomach demands satisfaction, my willpower fails me.

Following my body's commands, I go looking for some quarantine comfort, some gooey, greasy goodness.

That’s when I begin my stealthy creep toward the kitchen.

To the fridge, my unknowing quarry.

Behind the warden’s back.