For Better or Wurst

I have come to grips with quite a few realizations as I shuffle into the latter half of middle age.   Most important among these are:  more protein, fewer carbs; and fiber is my friend.   Like most men, especially former athletes who ate with impunity in their youth, I've grown both shorter and wider.   It doesn't matter that I exercise like a madman.   These days, I accumulate weight like Michael Vick accumulates fan mail from PETA.

In my younger days, I had the metabolism of a gerbil.   I was convinced that if I did not consume my weight in food every other day, I would perish.   Tales of my gustatory prowess are legion.   I was a world class gurgitator long before gurgitation was a sport.   Binge eating?     Please.     Not only did I invent it, I elevated it to an art form.   Five regulation size Philly cheesesteaks?   That was dessert.   I can tell you how to spend $50 in Chinatown without getting a happy ending.   There was no stigma attached to compulsive eating as practiced by me.    My feats of eats earned me several nicknames.   At various times I was known as “Mongo,” “The Human Garbage Disposal,” or simply “Meat.”   My sisters referred to me as “The Beast,” but my personal favorite was "Tapeworm."   (My kids don't even know what a tapeworm is.   Times sure have changed.)   Don’t ask how many all-you-can-eat establishments I’ve been banned from.   NASA’s computers may be able to tally those numbers; I can’t.    People spoke of me in Paul Bunyanesque terms.   "A monster of a man he was.   Appetite like a whole herd of wolverines and gas production exceeding that of Exxon."    Not bad for somebody who entered college standing roughly 5'4" and weighing barely 130 pounds.    Didn't matter.   I could still out eat most of the football team, several of whom were close to triple my size.

And not only did I eat extraordinary quantities of food, I ate things that people no longer even recognize as food.   I grew up on the fringes of some of the last blue collar ethnic neighborhoods in Philadelphia, where people ate things like oxtails, pigs' knuckles, and sweetbreads (which were neither sweet, nor bread).   Beef tongue.   Duck's blood soup.   Scrapple.   I ate it all.  Hannibal Lecter had nothing on me.   Not only do I know what haggis is, I actually like it.   Do you know how hard it is to find good haggis in the 'burbs?

My favorite luncheon meat was, and still is, liverwurst, which the missus refers to as "wife repellent."   I knew there was a reason I liked it all these years.   As early as second grade, I was taking three liverwurst sandwiches to school for lunch every day.   I was one of the few kids in my Catholic grade school that got to eat meat at lunch (provided it wasn't a Friday during Lent).   It seems that liverwurst was the only lunchmeat cheaper than peanut butter, and nobody - I mean nobody - could spread Oscar Mayer Braunschweiger thinner than my mother.   One tube of 'wurst (about two sandwiches' worth by my current standard) was good for an entire week.   As I grew older, say fifth grade, my tastes became more sophisticated: liverwurst with American cheese and yellow mustard.    There was, however, one thing that I couldn't eat: "The Stinky" - a sandwich so vile it leaves one with no wonder why vultures prefer roadkill.   Oil-packed sardines, Limburger cheese, horseradish mustard and Bermuda onion on rye.   Rotting fish, sweat socks, and molten lava on savory bread.  Yum!  When an inch-thick slice of raw onion is the least pungent thing on your sandwich you know you have your work cut out for you.    I couldn't get it past my nose, but the old guys at my music club could two-fist them.   I'm now perplexed.   If they were two-fisting Stinkies (the plural form of Stinky?), which fist were they using to hoist their beers?

Sadly those are bygone days.   The old guys have died off.   Those neighborhoods, at least as we knew them, are long gone.   My days are now filled with whole grain and fiber.   I know more about diet and nutrition now than I did as a college athlete, you know, when I was fueling my body for peak performance.   I have forged a new existence as a quasi-vegetarian.  I eschew meat for health reasons, but I am still a carnivore at heart.   I still love to cook, and I love my cooking, but I have grudgingly come to realize that the foods I like best don’t necessarily like me back.   Don’t tell my nutritionist that I still sneak the occasional plate of greasy breakfast meat or a huge Italian hoagie with so much oil it slides off the roll.   I do take some solace in this one thought: even though I have doctors and dieticians telling me what to eat, I haven't forgotten how to eat.