Food Stroke

It is as if a third of the United States population has a stroke. Strangely, not all the time… thinking of it… yes, I am almost sure… it is when people are eating. I can see them…eating and, yes that’s it… they talk at the same time, stiffening one side of their lips to keep the food in, while trying to talk from the other side. I got it now! It is not the consequence of a severe collective embolism, only people wanting to talk while eating.

Of course, I was joking or unless I have had a recent ischemic stroke myself, which is thankfully not the case. But that was also an introduction to this ugly habit that seem to have received some educational, I mean TV commercial recognitions to become a sort of fashionable behavior.

Frightening to think that commercials are so pervasive that they literally became the point of authorization for collective behaviors, such as the stereotypical food tasting: our foodie pointing frantically downward 4 to 7 times at the food source with the utensil used to fill up his oral cavity, at the same time hastily frowning his face upward while trying to gulp some food, as time is ticking away, to finally and invariably saying “h’as greah't”. Anyway, how many performances have we seen on commercials setting strange protocols being suddenly acknowledged and followed by a large public proudly wearing the "as seen on TV" stamp of approval.

Eating and talking at the same time, besides great risk of involuntary food redistribution… if I can say so... is reducing the potential for understanding what the food, I mean the person is trying to say, taking a chance of having to repeat all over the painful mouth contortion and the peekaboo food viewing. I think another point of greater importance is that the act of eating becomes an accessory to our need to voice our opinion at any cost and anytime.

Eating is very important and highly respectable. Marginalizing the primary role of food sustaining our life is a bad communication to ourselves, as if we were reluctant to be treated right by our own conscience.

I have learned a long time ago that the so called good manners have a superior meaning as to conform to some kind of unwritten rules that grand-parents were trying to impose on our freedom of doing anything we want the way we want. Eating with respect for the food we absorb is the primary reason of not talking at the same time, not the concept of having to portray some attitude or adhere to a predefined idiosyncrasy.

Bon appétit and now shut up and eat!