Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual The Romanian Air-Force Diet An entry in my journal of roughly five years ago reads: “I learned that my cholesterol count is a very fine 185. Must carefully cross all streets. It...
...My father,” I can hear him say, “was a man well in control of his life, as witness his cholesterol count of only 185...
...5. Remember that the diet craze is chiefly an American obsession...
...eat vast quantities of life-threatening foods...
...6. Establish a clear goal...
...Every day is the ides of March, and I await the knife—the knife not of the assassin but of the surgeon...
...I talk a big game but, wretched truth to tell, live rather a small one...
...Cheating on a diet, like cheating in love, is unsatisfactory if one goes only halfway...
...The Romanian Air-Force Diet has a few simple rules: 1. Avoid dining with vegetarians, terribly earnest dieters, or anyone who tends to confuse the categories of gastronomy and personal virtue...
...To get some numbers on the table, I am 5’7” and weigh 130 pounds...
...My own goal is to reach the age of 75, so that, after what will then be a 35year hiatus, I can once again begin smoking cigarettes...
...Maybe I ought to order the whitefish...
...I am the man who coined the phrase—not yet in wide currency— “entree envy...
...I call it The Romanian Air-Force Diet...
...In youth, my idea of a nightcap was four fingers of salami, a dozen chocolate-chip cookies, and a pint of butter-pecan ice cream, after which I slept the sleep of the just...
...4. Think about the reward of longevity that awaits if you don’t eat life-threatening food, longevity that is more or less likely to end in: one of the multiplicity of cancers, dementia, nursing homes with a roommate plainly not of your choice, not many laughs...
...Order that third glass of red wine...
...This will give you that inflated sense of goodness that allows you really to plunge when the opportunity to do so next presents itself...
...I anticipate the procession: chest pain, stress test, angiogram, bloody blade, interior lanyards of arteries, quintuple, septuple bypasses leaving a thorax looking like a highway map around the city of Ypsilanti...
...Each meal poses the question: Is it better to enjoy one’s food and die younger or live longer with considerably lessened pleasure...
...Joseph Epstein...
...It would be a shame to die with so splendid a cholesterol count...
...I hope he will not mention that he often remembers me glancing down upon my plate at yet another boned, skinless chicken breast and looking gloomy at the prospect...
...Much help is provided here by the New England Journal of Continuous Bad News, with its regular reports of some new food freshly discovered to bring about cancer of the nasal passages, known to occur in especially high incidence in men under 5’8” and 140 pounds...
...My natural voraciousness conflicts badly with my growing desire for long life...
...On the other hand, it might give my son a talking point at my memorial service...
...A further confession: I use a Nordic Walk-Fit, treading its inclined track to oblivion for at least half an hour every other day...
...Entree envy denotes that moment in a restaurant when the waiter brings out everyone’s main course, and you look around the table in the hope of discovering that no one has ordered a more enticing dish than yours...
...I used to go to a restaurant in Skokie, Ill., called The Original Big Herm’s— The Hermitage, as I prefer to think of it—which served an Italian beefandsausage combo sandwich with sweet peppers that required three hands and fourteen small paper napkins to manipulate and consume, and then afterward there was the dry-cleaning bill to consider...
...I grew up in Chicago on a diet of corned-beef sandwiches, hot dogs, sausage pizzas, steaks, chops, chopped liver, and rare roast beef, served in a series of restaurants that, if Jane Brody had anything to say about it, would be compelled to have at least two full-time cardiologists on the payroll...
...The quickest way to get one’s mind off the dangers that food presents for heart attack is to linger on the possibilities of cancer...
...Buon appetito...
...With these dour thoughts in mind, I have organized a personal diet I feel I can live with...
...I don’t know if Romania even has an air force, but if it does, I feel confident it’s likely to be as inefficient and riddled with corruption as dieting itself deserves to be...
...After thinking about all this, order the cheesecake...
...In my case, entree envy includes the hope that no one’s plate has more food piled upon it than mine...
...one doesn’t, after all, invite a woman up to one’s room just to neck...
...So far as we know, Europeans, on a much richer diet than ours, seem to be living no less long, while smiling more...
...2. When cheating, don’t dabble...
...3. Go a day or two every so often without eating anything that has been declared bad for you...
...I am, I suppose, fit as a fiddle, an odd simile since the same cannot be said for most of our contemporary fiddlers, Perlman, Zuckerman, Stern, enviably happy, chubby chappies all...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 2
