I've been worrying a lot about nutrition lately.
Since I moved off campus at the end of last term, I've cooked for myself 18 out of the past 20 days. I've shopped at Grand Union quite a bit, and I've discovered that better produce is available at the Food Co-Op.
I never thought I would compare produce. Or clip coupons. I never realized it could be so fun to save 35 cents on two of the same or lesser sizes.
I haven't mastered this cooking business yet, but I have learned some unpalatable lessons.
I learned that a chicken breast shouldn't be cooked with vegetable oil in a frying pan, because it will turn into a slimy, rubbery piece of bleached white meat.
I know that if you put too much oil in the pan while cooking macaroni and cheese, the macaroni and the cheese won't stick together.
After making such basic errors two nights in a row, I decided to stop being so fancy. I decided to do what men do best: sear animal flesh over an open flame.
But returning to my caveman origins didn't help much. After stoking the charcoal fire (having borrowed matches from the woman next door), I laid out two lovely boneless chicken breasts. Cooking time: ten minutes.
Ten minutes later the fleshy cluckers still hadn't started cooking. The fire wasn't hot enough. So I put them in the frying pan and made myself some rubber that smelled like lighter fluid.
Several of my friends have asked me why I haven't invited them to dinner. Now they know.
But I still haven't figured out how to have a guilt-free, non-fat, low cholesterol meal. The reason for this is a new labeling system that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration introduced a year ago.
Everything I buy has an itemized explanation of how much junk it contains. I can read, for instance, that the 1.74 ounces of Peanut M&Ms I just consumed supplied me with 25 percent of my day's allowance of saturated fat. I know that pasta is low in everything, but if I have my usual two ice cream bars afterward, I've probably sent my daily cholesterol count through the roof. And that doesn't even count the two eggs I had for breakfast, which gave me 148 percent of my cholesterol allowance for the day.
I don't actually calculate these things in my head. I usually look at the little box on the package and think, "Hmm, that's a lot of ascorbic acid," before I pop two of the little critters in my mouth. But these little infoboxes have become such a part of my life now that I looked for nutritional information while I was dining at Subway last night -- just to assure myself that I was consuming a week's worth of sodium and not enough riboflavin.
Sure, the "Nutrition Facts" thingie is better than what used to be there -- just a listing of numbers, without any percent signs. But the FDA would make my life easier if they'd just itemize food products according to how many days they subtract from my life.
For instance, instead of those tags that say, "Generic brand: 60 cents, compare to national brand: 62 cents," they could advertise: "Generic brand: one hour, compare to National Brand: two hours, LIVE LONGER buy generic" and then you'd know you'd know which choice to make.
Cooking for myself also makes me worry that I'm missing out on something.
I read in The New York Times the other day that most farmers' fields have only a half-pound of boron to the acre, when they should really have a whole pound. What foods, I thought to myself, have boron, and should I eat twice as much of them, now that I know about this crisis in American farms?
I've shied away from the Betty Crocker Dinner for Two cookbook (1956 edition) my parent sent me, because it includes such instructions as "baste in lard for 10 minutes before turning" and "cut fat from beef side and use it tomorrow as grease for the morning's pancakes."
Of course I don't eat pancakes, because syrup, a crucial component, doesn't have any nutritional value.
Last week I left my School Street apartment for a long run. Halfway out to the golf course, I knew one lap around Occom Pond would be more than I could handle. I wasn't out of shape. I just hadn't been eating enough thiamine, I told myself.
Just last June, I didn't even know that these things existed. I took it for granted that the Thayer, Collis and Home Plate chefs knew what they were doing and gave me just the right dosage of vitamins and minerals in my two-slices-of-pizza-to-go-please dinner. What ignorance!
As a Dartmouth graduate, today I know better. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, wondering whether I had enough of some unpronounceable mineral and thinking that maybe, if I get up now and steam a little broccoli, I'll be able to maintain that careful balance.
