Deep, Dark Secret #423: Uncontrollable Cravings

Food and eating are often on my mind. I hate cooking, but I love food. All kinds of food, from cheese grits at Waffle House to fancy fish at Le Bernadin, are equally valued by my mostly undiscriminating taste buds. From street food to gourmet, all I require to enjoy what I am eating is that it be yummy.

Thus when Suebob wrote up an observation she made at work about food and eating, I was aghast at the situation. To wit:

I was at an all-day work meeting and a box of See's Candy was being passed around.

The woman next to me carefully selected a piece and took a bite.

"Oh, my God, that's good!" she moaned.

She then put the other half of the piece on a napkin, where it stayed until the meeting was over 4 hours later.

She never ate the other half.

I don't get this at all. First off, just reading the post made me want.chocolate.right.now. My salivary glands went into overdrive. All I could think about was what kind of filling the piece of candy had. (I don't know why I assumed it did, but there you go - strawberry creme? caramel? coconut? I'm generally not so crazy about coconut, but sometimes it hits the right note...)

Next, just as most of the other people who left comments on the post did, I wondered who the hell takes a bite of a piece of candy, exclaims how magnificent it is, and doesn't finish it? I don't even take bites of chocolates like that. I shove the whole thing in my mouth, and if it is not good for some bizarre reason, I spit it out because I am infantile. Then I grab another one. And if it was good, I have to fight with myself not to eat more than one. (Or two. Or three.)

Now I will admit something completely repulsive, which may or may not distract you from the morally vacuous admission I will make next. To avoid eating too much of something good at home, I often throw a portion of the food away. However, there are times when I want it back so badly that I actually retrieve it from the trash. I'm not so depraved as to do so if there are nasty things in the garbage, but if the item I want is on the top of the pile, maybe on a clean-ish napkin, I may find myself eating it. Seriously.

Anyway, as I was eating dinner last night (an Amy's Organic Indian tofu and spinach wrap - yum!), I read the day's newspaper. An article in The New York TImes reported on a current case against a guy who is accused of brutally beating his stepdaughter to death a few years ago. The whole thing is a horrific tragedy, and it shook the city to its roots when it happened. So I'm reading this sad article and it mentions that it has commonly been reported that the guy beat the girl to death for eating a yogurt without his permission, but in fact, the snack item that triggered her murder was probably a container of Jell-O pudding. Immediately, I intensely craved pudding. Chocolate, vanilla, tapioca, rice pudding. The desire to eat pudding haunted me for the rest of the night.

Sick, isn't it? Cravings are scary. It's a good thing I never plan to be pregnant. I can't imagine what those types of cravings would do to me, given my current level of patheticness.