Foodies, Food Costs and Body Shamers

Our St Patrick's Day buffet here at my independent living community was both traditional and amazingly good. I say that as someone who doesn't particularly like Irish food. It included stew, of course, corn beef, cabbage, soda bread, a chocolate concoction with Bailey's liqueur and doctored-up mashed potatoes that were so  good I wish I could have stuffed them in a pillow case and snacked on them through out the night. Unfortunately, during and after that meal I drank so much water that I literally made 14 trips to the bathroom between midnight and eight AM. 354 steps according to my fitness watch. Twenty-five steps per around trip. I did the math.

 My CCC gives us a $320 food allowance that we can spend any way we want between their fine dining room and their lunch cafe or snack case. We can even invite outsiders to eat with us and blow the whole amount in one for two sittings. The amount hasn't changed since they opened in October of '21 although the price of their meals has. For example their nightly specials are up to $14.70 (yes, 70 not 75) from $10.75. That only covers a meat and a starch and it's $5.00 extra if you want a vegetable, salad or other side order. Their meals not on special are around $17 for salads on steroids or salmon, $21 for a steak plus the sides are separate. Soup used to be $4.00 a cup at noontime but is now $5.00. Noon specials are $12.95 for mostly sandwiches and fries or chips. If you're careful---which I am---I can eat one meal a day six days a week, and make my allowance last the entire month…until there's a holiday buffet in the month which are $25 to $30 and always well worth it. Others here with families who take them out to eat often have money left over at the end of the month and since it doesn't roll over they look for friends to buy their meal for them. I have benefited from their generosity when a holiday buffet is in the month and I run short. No on wants to leave money on the table for the management.

The lunch special this week was waffles with strawberries and cream, which I lust after (but never order) every time it comes around. If I had ordered them I would have had to do in front of The Body Shamers. One in particular loves to point out how much sugar or white flour is in whatever I'm eating. I've rarely see her eat anything but giant salads or shrimp. Another woman I frequently have lunch with takes a more subtle approach, telling me that she couldn't eat that omelette or grilled cheese sandwich on my plate without gaining weight. 

I'm the second heaviest person living here and I know how they talk about the other fatty behind his back. "He takes too much bread." "He always orders extra sauce and gravy." "He struggles to walk but doesn't use the gym to help control his weight." "He cooks at home, too." "He gets lots of food delivered."

I never raid the table after everyone leaves to round up the bread left over in the baskets like Mister Fatty up above does. But I understand his obsession with doing so. Some of their breads are to-die for and half the women here don't eat carbs so it goes in the trash. I try never to sit next to him at the community farm table because all he talks about is his gourmet cooking which glazes my eyes over. There are two of us here who claim a life time of not having an interest in cooking so we joke about putting space between this guy and us. Grabbing a random seat at a table for 12 or 14 is an exercise in diplomacy. I don’t want to sit near The Body Shamer-in-Chief either or the woman who complains about everything she puts in her mouth. Don't get me wrong, I love the community tables because you can sit back and listen and they are a source of endless amusement with everyone's personal foibles on display and their past histories that get revealed. 

Just yesterday I learned that The Body Shamer-in-Chief used to be 80 pounds overweight before giving up sugar and white flour. Took her a year and a half and she claims that didn't involve any additional exercise. That fact put a whole new spin on her pointing out how much sugar and carbs I consume with my food choices. Maybe she's trying to help? Maybe she thinks a person in her eights doesn’t already know about the cause and effect of food choices? How I need more salads in my diet? When she's not eating salads she's drinking Champaign with a shrimp cocktail so I've taken to asking her if she knows that shrimp are bottom feeders who eat the poop of other sea creatures. It’s a childish tit-for-tat but her being a former principal of a grade school I'm sure she knows that. She's a take charge kind of woman who I really do like but someday I'd like to wrestle her to the floor and force-feed her donuts until she goes into a sugar coma.

Today I did something I haven't done since I was in my teens. I made waffles. A year ago one of the Skinny Minnie twins was selling brand new, Weight Watcher waffles makers for $5.00. I snapped one up for two reasons: 1) I love waffles and 2) I was/still am trying to grow a friendship with her. She, too, was a former fatty-fatty-two-by-four and has been going to Weight Watchers for over 40 years. The box of batter mix I bought back then I got the waffle maker was about to expire so I spent my Sunday morning mixing and baking and cleaning up and the waffles turned out perfect. It was a lot of work but I ended up with enough to freeze and pop in the toaster later. I have a half of box of mix left and will do it again when I can buy some fresh strawberries and cream to top off the waffles. Eating them at home without hearing a choir of comments about how sweet they are or how long someone would have to walk to burn off the calories will be my dirty little secret. 

Eating at community tables seems to bring out the food critics in all of us as we watch each other do things like pick all the onions, olives or candied nuts out of salads, or count the snap peas on our plates. Mr. Fatty is a pea counter and complains if he didn't get as many as someone else at which point someone will often share their peas with him. We all have our food foibles. I hate the rabbit-like eaters the most who leave half their meals behind while I am a member of the Clean Plate Club. I guess their moms never told them about all the starving children over seas. It's bad enough that I have to worry about my own guilt when children are starving and food is being thrown out. 

My teeny tiny next door neighbor is also in the Clean Plate Club but her dog helps her walk it off. Cause and effect. Yes, I do get it. I've gained and lost 50 pounds three times in my life but I just can't seem to find the motivation to go through that torture again. Being a one person assist in my future nursing home room, instead of a two person assist, is all I can come up with for motivation and so far I'm not altruistic enough to put saving their backs up against a year of always feeling deprived when I'm at a lunch or dinner table plus spending hours in the gym every day. My motivations before were: 1) finding a man, 2) keeping him once I found him, and 3) going into knee replacement surgery without a 30% chance of dying on the operating table. My lack of funds for a whole new wardrobe is also a deterrent and being so close under the noses of The Body Shamers who would surely notice if I start eating like a rabbit and that would only drive me back to closet eating. Been there, done that before. I don't take praises well when it comes from people who think they are helping when they point out good food choices. Makes me want to make bad decisions behind their backs just to prove something I don't entirely understand. But I know I'm not the only fatty-fatty-two-by-four who has done that. What's that all about? ©

Until next Wednesday.

A Little Bit of Everthing

I only eat at the lunch table here on the continuum care campus on Thursday, Friday and sometimes on Saturday. I love the lunch table. It sets 14 people and they come and go between 11:30 to 2:00 with some people staying the entire time and others eating and leaving for what we call the second shifters to take their places. l usually try to sit near the middle of the table so I can listen to and/or join in the conversations going on at either end of the table.

 Politics are rarely ever talked about at the lunch table but on Thursday I eavesdropped on five known MAGA supporters talk about Kennedy's confirmation to head the Department of Health and Human Services which includes oversight of the CDC and Food and Drugs. A well known vaccine skeptic, Mr. Kennedy has spread conspiracies theories about them to the point that my Liberal Ladies group (who eat together on Tuesday nights) is worried we're going to suffer another pandemic before 45/47 is out of office. Among the other things being cut by Executive Order is funding to any school with a Covid vaccine mandate for staff and students. These five MAGA fans were saying things like, "There really wasn't enough testing done on the Covid Vaccine" and "I won't be getting any more Covid vaccines until they prove they are safe." Thirteen billion dosages of the vaccine have been given to people world-wide! How much more 'testing' do they need?" 

They went on to talk about how Kennedy wants to get rid of all the additives in our foods and by then cynical me was thinking about how much the Republicans made fun of and had hissy-fits over Mrs. Obama's White House garden and her project to teach city people how to grow, cook and eat healthier foods. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an alternate world. It's certainly a tribal world. Ideas are only good if your team is pitching them.

One night I challenged myself to watch Fox News to see how they were covering the demonstrations across the country over firing all the people in USAID and they didn't even mention there was any push back in the courts or in the streets, in fact they were praising Musk for the fine job he was doing gutting USAID and other government agencies and "saving the tax payers trillions of dollars." If that were true why is 45/47 calling for the federal debt ceiling to be raised 4.5 Trillion dollars? Could it have anything to do with Musk getting 8 millions a DAY from federal contracts for his SpaceX project? We can't buy grain from U.S. farmers to send overseas to starving people because that's "wasteful USAID" but there's no oversight what so ever on how that eight million dollars a day to go to Mars is being spent. And what's the point of colonizing Mars---the goal of SpaceX---when we can't even agree on which groups of people here on earth are worthy of getting our tax money.

Another one of our hard core MAGA supporters died this week. He was such a nice, gentle guy. But a man with Pro-life and Trump bumper stickers on his car. Married 75 years. he lived a life devoted to his Church, his wife and large family. He held his wife's hand where ever they went and they never had a meal at the lunch table without praying (out loud) over their food. He was a one issue voter who could overlook all kinds of 45/47's sins in exchange for his promise to "save the babies." I try to remind myself of this couple when I'm about to I spout disrespect and hate towards all MAGA people. They are many things but most of them are not evil. 

Yes, it's very tempting to sit here and write a bitch session about everything that is annoying, wrong or downright scary going on in the country right now. The current administration's bull-in-china-shop approach to governing is destabilizing the entire world. And they are proud of that fact. If I was two years old I'd be that kid who'd be laying on the floor right about now, kicking my fat little legs up and down and crying while the adults do their best to ignore my temper tantrum. But I'm not two years old and in my eighty+ years of living I've learned enough to know that I'm the only person who can hop on the metaphorical white horse and save myself from what ails me. Unfortunately my armor is not shining at the moment from falling off the damn horse too often because I worry too much about things beyond my control.

But I can save myself from my continued weight gain which is  pretty much what my doctor told me last week that I have to do. He did look up a medication that he thought would be safe for me to take, but it requires a daily shot in the belly and he stated Medicare wouldn't cover it. So he asked me what has worked in the past and I made the mistake of being honest, confessing that lots of time spent exercising worked better than anything. He was what I predicted he'd be: sympathetic about how much I hate being fat and I hate exercise but he told me none the less to start walking three miles a day on the treadmill. It's been three days since I saw him and I've been to the gym three times since but I've yet to make it the full three miles. 

He also gave me a prescription for some liquid iron for my blood and a nasal spray for a persistent cough I've had all winter. My blood work showed that my Stage 3 Kidney Disease has not progressed---good news. But something I answered on the Medicare Wellness questionnaire must have triggered an automatic reply because a few days after my appointment I got a list on my patient portal for places seniors can get help with food or housing insecurities or mental health issues. I do not need a list like that but sadly for those who might, many of those services listed probably will get cut by President Musk. ©

Until Next Wednesday…

Farm Table Conversations and More

On an average day, when there are no lectures going on, there are around twenty-five out of the seventy-five people living in my Independent Living complex that I interact with. That includes brief "hellos" in the common areas and the most popularly asked and answered question: "Has Jesse (our mail carrier) been here yet?" Me, I'm more interested in if the Amazon driver has made one of its two stops a day but I rarely have to ask because I can see their truck coming and going from my window. Between them, UPS, Fed-x and USPS our mail room is always full of boxes and puffy bags in all sizes and shapes. We seniors have learned the fine art of online shopping. 

One of my six hall mates has appointed himself the package delivery person on my floor so I rarely have to retrieve an expected delivery. Another guy on the floor tried to give him a hundred dollars in a Christmas card for the mail-room-to-door service but he gave it back. By contrast I gave him a Valentine's Day card with a thank you message inside and a few pieces of Nutella. (The card idea pre-approved by his wife, of course.) Big tipper guy owns a company that makes high school and college class rings and he has two houses and one of biggest apartments in the building. Even though he lives across from me the only time I see him is in the parking garage where our cars are parked side by side. He's always coming or going from the airport and when he's gone lots of packages and the Wall Street Journal build up at his door. Except for his name, you now know as much about him as I do and we've lived across from each other for over two years.

Mr. Big Tipper Guy has nothing to do with the topic I set out to write about so I'll get to that now: I always eat one meal a day in our facility and every chance I can I eat it at one of the common tables. The common tables are where I do most of my interacting with fellow residents. At night it's a table known as the Farm Table, at noon it's just several big tables pushed together to fit fourteen of us. I especially love the Farm Table. Someone asked us the other day what's so special about eating there and several replied that we hate the required system of having to call around to find other people to make reservations with to fill a four or six topper table in the main dining room. We can't just show up and expect to be served in the dining room. We can do that at lunch, but not for dinner. Another reason we like the Farm Table is we like not knowing who we'll dine with on any given night. We still need to make reservations to sit there but we can only make one for ourselves. For me, I like to sit close to the middle of the table and just listen to the conversations around me.  Sometimes there are three-four of them going on at once. It's an eavesdropper's paradise.  Other times we're all engaged in the same topic.

There's a lot of laughter at the Farm Table like the other night the special was an oriental dish with oyster sauce in it and several of us at the table are allergic to shell fish so we were asking Seri and Alexa what's in oyster sauce. (Yes, we are like a bunch of teenagers with our phones out fact checking each other.) I don't know what one of the guys put in the search engine of his I-Phone that it came up erroneously saying that oyster sauce was made from "nut seeds." But we all caught the silliness bug and went with that tidbit: "Who cuts the nuts off from the oysters?" "How do they extract those tiny swimmer seeds out of the nut sacks?" And "who would have ever guested that was a thing?" We were laughing so hard and one of the guys was turning beat red. Laughing over silly things doesn't happen every night but often enough that I'm addicted to eating at the Farm Table.

Living here isn't the first time I've experienced the Farm Table concept of dining. When we traveled we liked to stop at mama/papa style restaurants in small towns. One year on vacation out West we discovered that a lot of the places we stopped at had these long tables for people who wanted to interact with who ever came in for a meal or just coffee. My husband was a good conversationalist and no one was ever a stranger around him for very long. Those Farm Tables gave us a feel for the regions that you couldn't get in the chain restaurants along the main interstates. One time, though, we sat down at a Farm Table and you'd swear we accidentally went to a Klan meeting and for once my husband kept his mouth shut. His mama didn't raise any fools. 

At another Farm Table the locals told us the place was famous for their cinnamon rolls and we each had to order one with the coffee we stopped in for. They assured us they were worth every penny of the $3 they cost (in the '80s). When they arrived, each cinnamon roll covered an 8"x10" baking pan and, of course we ended up passing them around the table. Turned out to be a game they played on strangers like us to get us to treat the table. It's a fun travel memory and I often thought that cross-country Farm Table conversations would make a good book, sort of like John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. I loved that memoir of him traveling with his poodle. We always traveled with a poodle, too, in what we called our Traveling Dog House aka RV.

Our Farm Table seats twelve uncomfortably and ten perfectly. It was made out of the biggest tree that had to be cut down when the facility was built. It was a custom-made gift given to us by the construction company and it sits off to the side of our lobby which leads to another reason why it's fun to sit there. We can see and interact with everyone coming and going into the main restaurant and into the lobby---whose kids are visiting, whose getting a Door-Dash dinner delivered, whose getting a take-out dinner from the dining room, whose dog is getting walked. It took over a year to get the dining manager to allow us to have a Farm Table in the evening and she kept pulling our noon-time tables apart. She insisted it was too hard on the waitstaff. But it took going above her to finally get our way and the waitstaff is doing just fine waiting on the flow of people coming and going from the noon table. At night we have to be there at 5:00 which was our compromise.

So there you have it, another borderline boring chapter in the life of a senior citizen living in an a continuum care complex. 

Until next Wednesday. ©

 

The Farm Table set up potluck style for one of our resident-driven parties. The management occasionally serves buffet style meals on the Farm Table, too, usually around holidays when they'd normally be short-staffed.

 

This photo shows the Farm Table on the near right and at far end of the photo is our fireplace gathering place. The people standing on the left (middle of the photo) are behind the concierge's desk, directly across from the entry door.