Inkhat Explains How To Eat the Food You Have!

Sometimes we are stuck with the food we have, instead of the food we deserve. Especially as a student and a space cadet, I often find myself limited by income, time, and tiny tiny attention span. Often I find myself with a loaf of bread, spinach, and a paper that cannot be ignored any longer. Personally I think I deserve sushi more often, or at all really. I also deserve to be taken out and treated like a lady once in awhile!

But that is beside the point. The point is I have bagels and bacon bits left and half an hour to get to class.

Step 1) Lie in bed and forget that you didn’t go shopping yet.

This necessitates the sort of post REM sleep that creates a state of –if not complete confusion – at least happy disorientation. At this point your mind, perhaps in a desperate attempt to protect your fragile psyche from realizing the situation you, yourself, have placed your body in, will produce a wide range of things that might be eaten. It will include amazing things, pulled from every day of your life: the eggs your mom made, the fruit you bought at the market on your summer vacation, the toast you picked at on that first date that sadly (perhaps devastatingly) went nowhere.

You will, in your mind, walk around the kitchen and gather these things. You will imagine how warming and refreshing this breakfast will be; how it will prepare you for the hard day ahead. Indeed, nothing else could.

Step 2) Realize you have nothing in your fridge

But, of course, once you get out of bed you begin to wonder what you have been thinking. You haven’t been to the store. You have kidney beans and ramen noodles left. At this point it is traditional to stomp around your domicile cursing your life and situation. Profanity is acceptable here, as is knocking over difficult to break objects and glaring out windows into the street.

Although the goal of these steps is to help you come to terms with your food related grief, this is a perfectly acceptable response. The hope is that, by becoming aware of this step and learning to control the destructive tendencies it inspires, you will achieve a grace and serenity in your foodlessness and move on with your life.

Step 3) Collect what you do have

This step should be easy. There shouldn’t be much, and the combination will likely be odd. Get it all together. Try to make some logical combination.

Step 4) imagine eating it

This one is best done in another room, or while completing another chore. Maybe while showering or reviewing your work for the day. Imagine the things you like about those elements. Repeat commercials in your head. Remember that Cheerios are good for your heart! There isn’t anything wrong with your heart, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Remember that you always wanted to have cookies for breakfast as a kid. Isn’t it, really, sort of decadent to eat these things now, alone in your apartment? Isn’t it sort of wonderfully self indulgent? And romantic as well, in that starving artist, bohemian sense. Realize you have become a beautiful character from a movie or book, the kind with the amazing mind who dwells so much in and of themselves that they cannot be bothered with mortal concerns like food.

Step 5) Eat it

Just…just eat it already. You have shit to do today.

Step 6) Find this hilarious

I can’t believe you ate that.

Step 7) Tell someone about it

This is the fun part. Likely if you are living in this situation you know someone else who is as well. Swap breakfasts like trading cards. Mountain Dew and a chocolate bunny! That completely trumps Triscuits and rice! At this moment you can enjoy grossing out the upstanding members of your circle, those who have not scrounged. (It is highly likely that this group has, in fact, completed this same exercise, but will never, ever admit it). You may also encounter the older person who has ‘totally been there.’ This person can only enhance the shared experience game, though they will win every time.

Step 8) Reach totally and complete understanding

and go to the store.