Thinking About Egg Salad While Listening to Auden

Not long ago, trying to find some journal bits for an essay, I began to realize how many lists of food I had scattered throughout random pages of paper notebooks and digital files. Sometimes they were as simple as a few words jotted down in the margins of other notes. Like “egg salad,” which I wrote while I was listening to a lecture about W.H. Auden. 

It must have been what I had for dinner that night, and something about it—the amount of mayo I used, or how much I ate—was troubling me. I had to get it down so I could go back to concentrating on the image of the poet sitting “in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street” as “Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth…”

Just as Auden wrote different kinds of verse, so I wrote different kinds of lists. None of them ever looked like the sample meal plans you find at the back of diet books, with their ridiculous specificity and stingy portions, like “2 tsp. margarine” and “1/2 cup fruit cup.”

Here’s a list that might be labeled Food I Threw Away, which I often did in the middle of a binge:

½ pound cheese

Some corn muffin

½ can of Annie’s soup

I still remember that day well: sitting at the table, getting up to toss the muffin and cheese in the trash, then pouring the soup down the drain even as it was warming in a saucepan on the stove. I knew that if I didn’t, I’d keep picking at the yellow dough, breaking off corners, and shaving off pale slices of the hunk of cheese until it was all gone. 

I could write a dissertation about the cheeses I’ve bought, the cheeses I’ve binged on, and the cheeses I’ve thrown away. Everything from a decadent triple-crème, its delicate rind carefully swathed in cellulose-based cheese paper, to workmanlike blocks of Cracker Barrel wrapped in gaudy foil packaging. They deserved a category of their own:

No more cheese ever.

I will (I hope) NEVER eat cheese again. 

If I were “good,” I never would have eaten cheese and Triscuits after class

Nibbling an extra bit of cheese like a mouse, insatiable, voracious, and what was up with the hummus, which you don’t even like anymore.

If Cheese merited its own category, then Olives did too. 

I found the list below scrawled on a program from the 92nd Street Y, where I’d gone to hear the author Colum McCann in March 2020, on the eve of the pandemic lockdown: 

Yogurt/apple

Hummus, chicken salad, crackers, olives, olives, olives

I must have been going through my olive phase then, when I would binge on takeout containers from the olive bar at Fairway, our neighborhood supermarket. I could go through half a pound in a sitting before desire turned to despair. By then, I’d been bingeing on them for several years. I know that because I found an even earlier diary entry, dated February 8, 2017:

½ lb. olives

Brie

Bag of pita chips

Hummus/carrots

I’m going to die.

You have to tolerate being

Uncomfortable.

She was warned.

She persisted.

Those last two lines I borrowed from Mitch McConnell, who said, after silencing Elizabeth Warren on the floor of the Senate: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” 

Her cause was noble—to stop the nomination of a noxious senator to be attorney general of the United States. Mine, not so much. It was just to stop the binge eating, yet I knew that for whatever reason, I would persist.

Then there were the Pretzel-themed lists:

May 2019: 

I promise I will do this: I will never eat unclean food again except for sugar in coffee. No chips, pretzels, white flour crackers, very little meat or cheese. 

August 2016: 

When the flight attendant came around with little bags of snacks – three-quarters of an ounce, 45 calories for pretzels, 100 calories for wheat thins, I felt rich. Taken care of. 

March 2007: 

Well, big screw up – 4:30, 80 pretzels.

When I found that last one, I couldn’t believe I’d actually eaten eighty pretzels. How did I even keep track? I must have been scarfing them down in increments of ten or twenty, logging the number, then going back to the bag for seconds, thirds, and fourths. 

Each binge eater has her own methodology. Mine involved sitting at the table in our little dining room off the kitchen, bags, bowls, and containers on the countertop near the fridge, and, on the far side of the stove, under the window sill, our panda-shaped garbage can. 

I’d get up, sometimes while still chewing, holding out my plate, Oliver Twist-style, and go into the kitchen for…more. Except I didn’t have to ask anyone. Only thrust my hand into the crinkly plastic bag or ladle another heaping spoonful from the dish, all the while thinking, I’ll never eat that again, which constituted a category of its own. 

I usually wrote these lists when I was already sick to my stomach and the binge was over. They were typically worded as edicts or admonitions to myself:

Spring 2023: 

No cashews almonds chocolate tortellini chips + hummus 

Summer 2013: 

Last day of my life I’ll eat sweets

Winter 2010: 

Leftover arugula salad, mushrooms (portobello) parmesan cheese from Nick’s. 2 horrible rolls – never going there again!!! 

That last statement, by the way, was ridiculous. Nick’s was a reliably good red-sauce joint just two blocks from our apartment—an unimaginable luxury even in restaurant-rich New York City—and we went there all the time. 

Related to the genre of Foods I’ll Never Eat Again was a sub-genre, Promises to Myself. Here are a few from the beginning of 2009:

January 18: 

Tonight I had my last binge.

January 19: 

Tonight I had my last binge.

January 20: 

Rules. No eating while standing. No seconds. No peanuts.

January 27: 

Today I had my last binge.

And then there were what you might call the Existential Cries of Despair:

May 19, 2013: 

I had some cheese. Not too much. What a waste my life has been. I also had 3-4 cashews.

I seriously doubt I meant “3-4 cashews.” I can’t imagine ever eating so few. If behavior is inherited—and I believe it is—then certainly I got this from my mother, who used to call me up late in the evening, after coming home from a party or a few glasses of wine, and say in the most plaintive voice, “Oh, honey, I got into the nuts tonight.” 

On the same page I also pasted a fluorescent green sticky note with this order to myself: 

No more cheese ever. Mayo is a bad idea. Ice cream is a bad idea. So are cupcakes. You do the opposite. No more nuts till Stan gets home.

The next-to-last sentence was a reference to something a friend once told me—to break a habit, do the opposite. As for Stan, my husband, the worst of the binges always happened when he wasn’t around.

Since I’ve been a binge eater since high school, I must have written thousands of these lists though the only ones that have survived my many moves are from the past twenty or so years. Sometimes the list was the only thing I wrote that day. Sometimes I scribbled them in the margins when I was working on a story. Sometimes I doodled them when I was talking on the phone.

What’s the meaning of them anyway? Were they a litany of my sins, an implicit vow to reform, a plea for help? If the latter, then to whom? I’ve never shown them to anyone. I’ve never talked about them with my doctors. Though I’m not Catholic, they do strike me as being most similar to the ritual of confession, at least as it’s portrayed in the movies and on TV. 

You go into a booth, confess your moral failures to someone barely seen behind a screen, do your prescribed penance, and emerge feeling cleansed. Like in Moonstruck, when Cher admits to the priest a couple of minor infractions, then slips in, “Once I slept with the brother of my fiancé.” Though my actions involved food, not sex, they did feel unholy. Mea culpa, mea culpa. Forgive me, someone, for I have sinned.

Were they an attempt to impose order on chaos, as if by writing down what I’d eaten—sometimes while still in the process—I could make it stop? As if the very act of writing could magically turn off the valve and chart a new course for the next day?

Lists are powerful. Once you write something down, you don’t have to think about it anymore. They help you compartmentalize and get on with your life. They express intention, desire, the triumph of reason. What else are the Ten Commandments but a glorified list of stuff we shouldn’t do? 

On a typical day, I’ll make at least three: a shopping list, a to-do list, and movies to stream on Netflix. If I take the first to the grocery store, and it has fifteen items, I’m almost sure to come home with twelve or thirteen. Maybe even fourteen if I walk really slow down the condiment aisle. 

The food lists, on the other hand, were a complete and utter failure, unable to stop me from eating the wrong things at the wrong times in exactly the wrong amounts. And yet, I kept making them, day after day, year after year, for decades of my life. Which is weird. If you drove a car and the brakes never worked, and you couldn’t ever get them to work, then eventually, I think, you’d stop driving.

So maybe they were a break-up letter, expressing the desire to be done with food altogether?

I want to throw away the mayo, the sucky mayo, the raisin bagels, the canned salmon that tastes like cat food, the shitty wine, the cookies without gluten, the fucking cashews and almonds. All I want to eat is air. 

Or were they, in fact, a love letter to food? I had to think there was some pleasure in the writing, just the endless cascade of words, the sheer act of cataloging all these seductions and delights. Like if Moses, while diligently inscribing Thou shalt not commit adultery on those unforgiving stone tablets, began to think, “Hmmm…adultery! Maybe I should give that a try…” 

If I wrote, no sugar/desserts/cake/cookies/ice cream/pie/torte/mousse/chocolate, which I did, was I perhaps vicariously experiencing the joy of eating those things? Maybe just thinking the word “tortellini,” putting it down on paper, was a thrill.  

And it’s true—I’ve always loved to write about food. Diners are a favorite topic. Also Jello-O and dim sum and regional cookbooks and mid-century recipes that call for canned cream of mushroom soup. But usually I write about it in the context of a story. 

The lists, on the other hand, had no larger plotline, no beginning, middle, and end. They were an inventory, almost biblical in scope, of names—for fruits and vegetables, meats and dairy, nuts and grains, raw and processed, devoured and discarded, but dissociated from any grand narrative—just a recursive loop of recrimination and desire. 

There was a time, though, when I didn’t make lists, when eating was still normal, when I didn’t frantically write down everything I consumed in a day. A kind of Paradise Lost when food, for the most part, was shared in public, with family and friends, at backyard barbeques and bar mitzvah receptions, not in solitary, isolated spasms of sadness.

Though it’s true that in our family, among the five children, I was known as the one with the gezunteh appetite, Yiddish for “healthy.” The phrase was usually said with a touch of sarcasm, a roll of the eyes, to imply that I actually might be a chazer, the Yiddish word for “pig.” Still, in those days, I didn’t consider my eating to be transgressive. I didn’t compulsively, anxiously, make lists of all the food I consumed. 

Quite the opposite: my fondest memories of childhood revolve around our dinner table, which glowed at night in the warm yellow light of our pineapple chandelier as darkness pressed in against the windows, Dad at the head of the table in the tweed Brooks Brother jacket he’d worn to work, Ma at the other end, presiding over an oven-scarred, burnt-orange Le Creuset casserole dish like some latter-day Mrs. Ramsay.

Time was suspended. I savored the almost erotic sensation of being weighed down by the food, as if it could crush my anxiety, tamp down the nervous energy, silence the noise in my brain. But inevitably, the meal would be over. Ma would brush the last crumbs off the placemats and stack the plates. My sisters and I would rise from the table to do the dishes while my brothers swept the floor and took out the garbage. Only then would my parents settle into their worn leather armchairs in front of the fireplace to read their towering stack of newspapers and magazines and find out what was happening out there, beyond the backyard hedges, beyond the buckeye trees, beyond the low buzz of the streetlights on South Church Street, out into “the bright and darkened lands of the earth.”