Thoughts on Eating While Fasting in the Quarantine

I can’t be the only near-60-year-old coot who remembers this stuff.

Wrapped up as I’ve been over the last few years with 1960s television shows and how media and its messaging was presented then, I recently came across something in some half-century old memories of mine regarding the concept of “in-between-meal snacks.”

This is strictly from my memory. I’m surprised no one at Fat People Hate on Voat or the anti-fattie chan boards has brought this up, but in-between-meal snacks were a thing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and at the time—and for some time before that—they were frowned upon. I remember distinctly as a child that, unless it was a special occasion such as a birthday party or holiday function, one simply did not eat in between scheduled mealtimes.

It was one thing to be a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but to be caught so as an adult was shameful, a step removed from keeping a flask in your coat and drinking from it when you thought no one was looking. You had a problem. Depending on who saw you, you were either contemptible or pitiable. As most people fear catching your weakness like the disease they subconsciously perceive it to be, mostly the former. Ugh, what a pig! No self-respect whatsoever! Can you believe it?

After you’re done laughing at the ridiculousness of these food descriptions on these fake flyers from 4chan, keep in mind someone spent a lot of time Photoshopping all this. The border decor is zany beyond Zen.

The commercials I saw sought to justify those in-between meal snacks, quickly re-branded as simply “snacks.” You can justify eating anything if it’s healthy. And so it came to pass I was munching on granola bars as a 14-year-old grooving to his Who records in 1976. It was so long ago, it was years before the term “granola head” or “Lola Granola” became pejoratives for airheaded neo-hippies.

And it was a semi-radical thing, as semi-radical as getting yourself a soda pop and drinking it in the middle of the afternoon like you didn’t care, because you didn’t. That was 44 years ago, as of this writing. I remember the commercials in the late 1960s with cheery jingles indicating it was okay if you drank Dr. Pepper at 10, 2, and 4. (There were even promotional clocks given out with the times highlighted. There was one in the barbershop my step-dad dragged me to for my monthly Peter Gunn-style head-shave in 1970.)

The Pepsi Generation, “Comin’ atcha, comin’ strong” drank whenever they wanted to. Soon everyone was drinking pop when they wanted to. Why not have a bag of chips with it? What was it with this hang-up about drinking and eating whenever you want, anyway? Stupid, cranky, bossy old fools...and, to be honest, that’s all they were, for the most part. It wasn’t so much about concern for anyone’s health as it was “Because I said so, that’s why!” 

“Chicken captchas” gives the game away. Meanwhile, my addiction to peanut mud was a major contributor to my Class 2 obesity back in the day. Hey, but peanut oil is healthy!

And so it came to pass that those old folks passed, and in-between-meal snacks, once regarded at best as “treats,” became a regular part of their children’s and grandchildren’s diets. Now, what was once the Tattooed Fat Lady of the circus sideshow is the new normal. We’re here for reasons, like ‘em or not. 

Will we ever go back to way it was? I doubt it, not in my lifetime. It’s just something I think about whenever I pride myself for fasting for more than 16 hours. It’s only in this most recent age that food is so cheap and abundant and attitudes towards day-long grazing so relaxed that not eating has become an achievement along the lines of eating 60 cheeseburgers in one sitting. “Yeesh, what a freak! It’ll be a miracle he doesn’t kill himself doing that one day.”

If I do, I’ll certainly leave a better looking corpse, one that neither requires a grand piano case to be buried in, nor risks sending an entire crematorium up in a white-hot human grease-fire. It’s the little things that truly distinguish a fella.

All of 3.4 lbs away from normal BMI, and 17.4 from goal. I’ve been stalled out here for a month now. Apparently I’m going to have to cut back more during that window when I do eat, given that I’m eating enough to cover these 16-hour+ fasts. It happens.