Gluttony

I am not a skinny person, a nutrition obsessed millennial or a trendy vegan. I enjoy eating and even more than that I enjoy drinking together with the occasional cigarette. This makes me the least qualified individual to judge the eating habits of others or actually the most qualified, depending on how you look at it. Either way, sharing the house with our group of friends this Christmas was a whole new experience for me food wise… It was literally disgusting and it might be the trigger I needed to make a dietary change in my life!

Complaining of eating too much during Christmas with their families and comparing, with great wit and self sarcasm, themselves to ducks being force fed before being turned into expensive French pate, I expected a relaxed attitude towards meals. My assumption couldn’t have been further from what was to follow. Only the first evening, our fully stocked house run out of pretty much everything, with seven wine bottles necked like water between 3 people, cheese, baguettes, pate and saucisson devoured in seconds while somehow managing to top all this with 12 faggots, butter cabbage, salads and Greek sweets for dessert! This first evening felt excessive, but it didn’t quite reach the orgy levels that were to follow.

Every breathing moment from that evening onwards was related in some way or another to food or drinks, and this is not a literary exaggeration. Morning coffee was not singular but 3-5 of them combined with bread, sweets, butter, biscuits, pastry, anything found at sight. Mid snacks followed 10 minutes later to build up the appetite towards lunch, sacred and craved lunch. Every outing involved looking for food, talking about food, stopping for snacks until we found food and stressing about not finding food. Cities were rated according to their food offerings. Architecture, people, shops, history, art, cathedrals, culture, meant nothing. Mere backdrops to the way of feeding the beast. Why walk when you can sit and eat, sit and drink, sit and discuss about what to cook for dinner. Absolute madness! Greeks have a very accurate description for people like these but it’s the first time in my life I truly understand its meaning – slaves of their bellies!

The culmination of this sick daily repetition was of course NYE and the seafood feast that was being discussed non stop till then. Let’s get EVERYTHING there is in the supermarket! Lobsters, clams, prawns, oysters, pate, scallops, langoustine and a huge piece of meat as a safety blanket in case these are not enough. Let’s count the oysters per person, hope others don’t like the oysters even though they paid for them so that we can have more, beg for people’s oysters while we pretend to be aristocrats, talk pompously about oysters all night and then throw up oysters down the toilet.

And when the banquet of pretension is devoured and every bottle of alcohol is gulped, life loses its meaning and New Year’s Eve is another sad drunken night….but wait, there were lentils that were not on the table, countless small brown survivors left in the pan. A sparkle can be seen in their eyes! They were supposed to be for good luck and wealth, a spoonful upon the start of the new year but why have a spoonful when you can have the whole pan, with cold tomato sauce from a jar in the fridge or lemon or mayonnaise or everything all at once, made into an unidentifiable paste and thrown into the stomach to cement the seafood into place. 🤢 Pigs would be offended if given this pile of stodgy muss but certain humans were happily munching away while doing a little money dance.