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Tonight, I had what amounts to a domestic catastrophe. ON Sunday afternoon I made an enormous pot of chicken noodle soup. It had noodles, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, pepper and four pounds of chicken. The first bowlfuls, ladled out Sunday and Monday, were delicious. By tonight, though, the remainder was beginning to smell like a pair of old sweatsocks. It probably wouldn’t have killed me, and might have gone down fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. So shamefully, in the middle of this recession when people are going hungry, I had to pour half a kettle of chicken noodle soup down the drain.
As I say, it was smellling quite bad, but I still feel terrible about it. It was supposed to last through tomorrow at least, and maybe, if I was lucky, until the day after Thanksgiving.
I knew I was going to do it by this noon, since I went out for a bowl of pho instead of ladling something from my pot. i have to say, though, that although I feel guilt, I also feel tremendous relief that I’m not going to eat a sixth or seventh bowl of chicken noodle soup in less than half that many days. A day or two of savory, nicely spiced soup is a grand thing for a day or two, but do it for four days in a row and it begins to feel like prison slops, even if the soup is good,and mine was turning into something evil.
This is another example of the way in which, though I am poor by American standars, I am almost unspeakably wealthy in relative global terms. Probably two thirds of the world’s six and a half billion people wouldn’t have turned their noses up at what I threw down the drain tonight. But though I am in the bottom rungs of the American economic scale,I am surely near the top in global terms.
Beyond that, I have enough to buy pho and pay rent while writing a novel. Hundreds of artists in Seattle alone, to say nothing of the United States, would like to be in my position, though I daresay none of them would like to lose their eyesight to get here. And that brings me exactly to the reason why, though I have some uncomfortable feelings about it, I can bring myself to waste that much food. Simply put, I’ve lost half the things which once gave me joy. I can’t read books the way I used to, or watch movies or participate in a thousand activities which used to round out my day. I don’t complain about that very much at this point. But I am simply not going to add unpalatable soup to my list of sufferings. A large part of dignity in my situation, I find, is the ability to draw lines, to say: only this much and no more. Some things, I find, are more precious than food ethics, which are very precious indeed.
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