Basket Case

At lunch today in a run-of-the-mill Midtown restaurant, a bread basket was placed on the table, as a bread basket so often is. It wasn't especially tempting: maybe six objects in all, most in the focaccia family.

I laid waste to four of them.

When will I learn? I've advised fellow weight watchers to send the bread basket away, unless it truly seems to be one of the restaurant's points of pride and labors of love. I'm all for making an exception when there's a promise of extraordinary pleasure.

But most bread baskets are pretty ordinary. And they're magnets for absent-minded, gratuitous, nutritionally negligible eating. Like the kind I did at lunch.

For some of us, such eating is all but unavoidable, unless we construct and manipulate the circumstances around us so that it's indeed impossible. If there's no bread basket there's no reaching . . . no reaching again . . . no reaching again.

The bread basket is like the bowl of nuts on a bar: we dive into it, push it away, forgot we pushed it away, and the cycle repeats itself, ad infinitum. How familiar is this ritual? And how counterproductive? It's the essence of eating on auto pilot, without even wringing much enjoyment from the act. And eating without enjoyment is a spectacularly wasted opportunity.

In the wake of lunch I had to remind myself of that, as I have to remind myself all the time of the lessons learned during a life of intermittently compulsive eating. A lesson learned is not necessarily a correction made, not unless the lesson is remembered and revisited time and again.

Why did I lunge for the bread basket in the first place? Because I erred in another way I too often do: I ate nothing between 7 a.m., when I woke up, and 12:30 p.m. By the time food was in front of me, I was hungrier for it than I should have been.

I still skip breakfast too often, as was noted by several friends and strangers who emailed me after the New York magazine online food blog, Grub Street, published an account of six days of my eating. The link, which I think I also provided in an earlier post, is here: http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/frank_bruni_succumbs_to_heat-i.html.

I read it and thought: my eating over a day isn't as paced and measured as it should be.

The effort continues.