Fancy foods, those that are expensive because exotic or rare, and thus considered valuable, wouldn’t be that if we had access to them all the time and weren’t pricy or difficult to obtain. Those foods still mostly fall under the animal protein category – caviar, oysters, foie gras, expensive meat cuts or types, lobster and what have you.
Besides meat, sugar and spices were also among foods during medieval and Renaissance times that could only be enjoyed by the upper classes. Mincemeat pie is one such strange dish, originally a mixture of lamb, dried fruit and spices, from which we have since removed the lamb to make it more palatable to our modern taste. In the not so distant past, we prepared Sunday roasts and ate little or no meat during the week because meat was expensive.
Besides the now accepted health considerations of eating too much animal protein and too little vegetables and fiber, what we can’t afford every day becomes special, while what we eat all the time becomes routine.
January is a perfect month to dial my holiday indulgences back as a reboot and to shift what may have become too much of a routine. Dial the alcohol back, dial the meat back, dial the sugar back, dial quantities back, dial the weight gain back. Last open bottle of wine will be consumed tonight as January will be dry for me. I will reduce my portion sizes starting tomorrow in order to lose those pandemic pounds, at least some of them, and swap the meat for greens and vegetables. I also promised myself to go for more walks to dial my energy up a notch and clear the Christmas cobwebs from my mind.
What about you?