Indefensible Appetites

My sister Deb eats spray cheese from the can. Not on crackers, not on celery — she doesn’t bother with the vehicle. She tilts her head back, puts the nozzle between her teeth, and presses the trigger. She does this at two in the morning, standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open for light, wearing a t-shirt from a 5K she did not run. I know because I walked in on her once, at Thanksgiving, while looking for the Tums. The look on her face was the look of a woman who has been discovered at something that isn’t a crime but should carry a fine — fifty dollars for First-Degree Aerosol Dairy in a Domestic Setting.

“Don’t,” she said.

I didn’t. But I watched her close the refrigerator and walk back to the guest room with the can, and I understood something about my sister that I had not understood before, which is that she is free in a way I will probably never be. Deb does not have a complicated relationship with spray cheese. She has a simple one. She likes it. She eats it. The relationship requires no therapy, no justification, no footnotes. I, on the other hand, have a complicated relationship with everything I consume, including the Tums, which I buy in the “naturals” version because the regular ones feel like an admission that I am the kind of person who eats enough garbage to need antacids, and the “naturals” version — which is chemically identical — allows me to be the kind of person who has heartburn thoughtfully.

I am forty-three years old. I own four books about the ethics of food systems. I have read one and a half of them. I subscribe to a CSA that delivers a box of seasonal vegetables to my door every other Thursday, and every other Friday I open the box and feel a wave of guilt so specific it has its own climate — temperate, with a chance of kale. The kale goes bad. The kale always goes bad. I buy it with the best version of myself and throw it away with the real one.

The French have a dish called ortolan bunting — a tiny bird, no bigger than a thumb, captured alive, fattened in darkness, drowned in Armagnac, and roasted whole. You eat it in one bite, bones and all. The preparation is ghastly. The taste, by all accounts, is transcendent. And here is the detail that belongs in this essay more than any other: traditionally, you eat the ortolan with a large napkin draped over your head. The official explanation is that the napkin traps the aroma. The unofficial explanation — the one everyone repeats because it’s too good not to be true — is that the napkin hides you from the eyes of God.

I think about the ortolan every time I eat Doritos in my car.

Not because Doritos are a moral crime on the order of drowning a songbird in brandy. But because of the napkin. Because I understand the impulse to hide while you eat. I have eaten Doritos in a parked Honda Civic at three in the afternoon with the windows up and the radio off, and I have done this with the same furtive urgency of a person committing a minor sin in the full knowledge that they will do it again. The bag crinkles. The dust transfers. I lick my fingers with a focus I have never applied to prayer. And when I’m done, I fold the bag into a small square and put it in my jacket pocket, where it will stay until I pass a trash can that is not in my house, because the house is where I keep my ethics, and the Doritos cannot come inside.

There’s a word for the cheese dust that Cheetos leave on your fingers. Frito-Lay trademarked it in 2005: Cheetle. They spent money — real money, lawyers-in-a-conference-room money — to own a word for the orange residue that accumulates on the fingertips of people who are eating Cheetos. I have licked Cheetle off my fingers in the parking lot of a Target with the same attentive thoroughness I bring to nothing else in my life.

My wife, Laura, does not eat Cheetos. Laura eats almonds. She buys them raw and unsalted, in a bag that looks like it was designed by someone who believes in restraint, and she eats them one at a time, with what I can only describe as administrative precision. Watching Laura eat almonds is like watching someone file taxes — methodical, unemotional, correct. She has never licked almond dust off her fingers because almonds do not produce dust. Almonds produce a faint sense of moral superiority that Laura would deny feeling, and that I would deny resenting, and that we have both chosen not to discuss because our marriage works partly because of the things we don’t say about each other’s snacks.

I love Laura. I also love Cheetos. These two loves occupy different rooms in the same house, and the door between them stays closed. This is not dishonesty. This is load-bearing. Every marriage has walls you don’t knock down, and one of mine is the wall between the person Laura married — a man who reads books and drinks pour-overs and once said the phrase “flavor profile” without laughing — and the person I become at a gas station in central Ohio with no witnesses and a credit card.

My mother kept a kitchen of aspirations. Williams-Sonoma catalog on the counter, copper pots hanging from a rack she’d installed herself using a YouTube tutorial and a vocabulary of profanity that would have made a longshoreman take notes. She made risotto once. She owned a mandoline. The mandoline was the kitchen equivalent of a treadmill in a bedroom — an object whose mere presence was supposed to transmit virtue by proximity. I never saw her use it. I saw her use the microwave four thousand times. She microwaved everything: leftover pasta, day-old pizza, soup from a can, and once, memorably, a peach, because she wanted it warm and didn’t want to wait for the oven. A warm microwaved peach has the texture of a stress ball and the flavor of a sauna. She ate it over the sink and said, “Don’t tell your father I did this,” as though she’d laundered money rather than fruit.

My father’s guilty pleasure was National Enquirer, which he read in the bathroom, which meant you could time his bathroom visits by the length of the articles. A short bathroom trip: the headline was boring. A long one: somebody famous had done something with somebody they shouldn’t have. He denied reading it. He denied it with the vehemence of a man denying a far more serious charge, which made the denial itself a kind of confession. “I don’t read that trash,” he’d say, while the trash sat on the back of the toilet, open to a two-page spread about a country singer’s secret family.

My brother Kevin’s guilty pleasure was — is — Olive Garden. He goes twice a month. He has been going twice a month since 2009. He has eaten enough breadsticks to build a cabin. Kevin is an investment analyst who reads the Financial Times and has opinions about Burgundy and has, to my knowledge, never once ordered the Burgundy at Olive Garden because at Olive Garden he drinks the house Chianti, which costs nine dollars and tastes like a grape that has been through something. He orders the Tour of Italy, which is a dish that contains three different entrées on one plate, and he eats it with a contentment that borders on theological.

I asked him once why he didn’t go somewhere better. He looked at me with genuine confusion, the way you’d look at someone who asked why you keep breathing when there are more interesting gases available.

“Better at what?” he said.

I didn’t have an answer. Or I had several answers — better ingredients, better technique, better atmosphere, better everything by every metric except the one that mattered, which was that Kevin liked it there, and the liking was sufficient, and the sufficiency was the thing I could not forgive, because if Kevin could be happy at Olive Garden, then the entire apparatus of taste I’d spent my adult life constructing was optional.

The pleasure is private, but the guilt is inherited. My father’s tabloid secrecy is the reason I close my laptop when someone walks into the room, even if I’m reading something defensible. Especially if I’m reading something defensible. The specific wrist-turn that closes the screen, the way the body moves before the mind decides — that’s my father, folding the Enquirer under a copy of Time.

The bliss point is the optimal concentration of sugar, salt, or fat in a food product — the exact quantity at which the human brain experiences maximum pleasure. Not satisfaction. Not nutrition. Pleasure. Someone in a lab determined the exact ratio of salt to fat to MSG that would make your brain release dopamine at a rate that overwhelms your prefrontal cortex’s ability to say stop, and then they put it in a bag and sold it to you for $3.49.

I know this. I have read the journalism. I have the information.

I also ate a family-size bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in a hotel room in Cleveland last March, sitting cross-legged on the bed in my underwear, watching a show about people who flip houses, and I’m going to tell you something that I have not told anyone, which is that it was one of the better evenings of my year. Not ironically. Not as a commentary on American excess. It was a good night. The Cheetos were good. The show was good. My underwear was comfortable. I was alone with my appetites and no one was watching and for two hours I was not performing taste for anyone, including myself.

The Cheetle turned my fingers orange and I wiped them on the hotel bedspread, which was white, and I felt a flash of guilt so brief it was almost aesthetic. And then I kept eating.

Here is a partial inventory.

I listen to a true crime podcast hosted by two women who laugh too much. Their laughter is inappropriate and frequent and sometimes lands in the middle of a sentence about a body being discovered in a drainage ditch, and I find the laughter comforting rather than offensive, which is something I would never say in public because in public I am a person who thinks true crime as entertainment is ethically problematic, a position I hold while downloading three episodes for my commute.

I have watched the movie The Holiday nine times. Not consecutively. Over a period of years. Spread across different apartments, different relationships, different versions of myself. The movie is objectively not good. The dialogue is impossible. The premise requires the audience to believe that Kate Winslet would use a home-exchange website. But the scene where Eli Wallach walks into the restaurant and the whole room stands up — I cry every time. Not watery eyes. Actual tears. The kind where your breathing changes. I am a person who has read Middlemarch and I cry at The Holiday and I don’t know what to do with that.

I own a scented candle that smells like fresh laundry. It cost thirty-eight dollars. It is a cylindrical block of petroleum wax designed to simulate the smell of an activity I could perform for three dollars’ worth of detergent and forty minutes of my time. I light it when I’m alone in the house and sit near it and feel something I can only describe as held. Not by the candle. By the idea that my life has enough margin for setting fire to thirty-eight dollars on a Tuesday evening. No one I grew up with would have spent thirty-eight dollars on a candle. My mother would have said “thirty-eight dollars?” and the way she’d say it would make the candle smell like shame.

I eat gas station hot dogs. Not because I don’t have options. I eat them on road trips when I’m alone, at gas stations in places like Breezewood, Pennsylvania, where the hot dogs have been rotating on the grill since a time that predates my arrival by hours, and the bun has fused to the foil, and the relish is the color of something you’d see in a terrarium. I put yellow mustard on them — not Dijon, not whole grain, not stone-ground anything — yellow mustard, the kind that comes in a squeeze bottle and contains no mustard seeds that you can detect. And I eat these hot dogs standing at a counter that is sticky with the residue of everyone who has stood there before me, and they are delicious, and I am happy.

The phrase “guilty pleasure” first appeared in an 1860 New York Times article describing visits to brothels. Before that, the concept belonged to evangelical theology — sensual enjoyment as spiritual failure, pleasure requiring moral justification or it becomes sin. The Puritans didn’t have Netflix, but they would have understood the impulse to close the app when someone walks into the room.

Roxane Gay wrote that she would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all, and I think about this sentence more often than I think about most sentences, because it contains a technology I need. The technology is: you can hold a standard and fail it simultaneously, and the failure is not hypocrisy. The failure is just being alive. Being alive means your library has a shelf of books about mindful consumption and your freezer has a box of Bagel Bites that you purchased because you were hungry and forty-three and standing in the frozen food aisle at eleven p.m. with no one to judge you, and the Bagel Bites were right there, at eye level — because the grocery industry places profitable items at eye level, a fact I know from a podcast I listened to while eating Bagel Bites — and you put them in your cart with the decisiveness of a person who has stopped pretending.

I used to think the gap between belief and behavior was a problem to be solved. That eventually, through sufficient reading and sufficient discipline and sufficient exposure to farmers’ markets, I would become the person whose appetites aligned with their values. I would want the kale. I would lose my taste for processed cheese and gain a taste for the kind of cheese that has a rind and a story and costs twenty-two dollars for a piece the size of a matchbox.

That person does not appear to be coming. I waited for them through my twenties and most of my thirties. I went to wine tastings. I learned the word terroir. I bought a cheese board — a board specifically designated for the display of cheese, as though cheese required a stage. I used it three times. It now lives in the cabinet above the refrigerator, where objects go to stop being furniture and start being evidence.

What happened instead is that I got better at managing the contradiction. I know that the hot dog is bad for me and bad for the animal that became the hot dog and bad for the water table in whatever county produced the animal that became the hot dog, and I know this while I eat it, and the knowing does not diminish the pleasure.

My sister called last week. She’d found a new kind of spray cheese — jalapeño-flavored — and she wanted to tell me about it. She described it with the specificity of a wine critic: the initial heat, the way the cheese flavor arrives after the pepper fades, the “mouthfeel,” a word she used without irony, which in our family is the equivalent of speaking in tongues.

“You should try it,” she said.

“I’m not going to try spray cheese,” I said.

“You say that now.”

She was right. I was saying it now. I was saying it in the version of myself that exists during phone calls with family members — the version that has opinions and standards and a subscription to a magazine about slow living. That version is not the whole story. There’s another version, the one who stood in the kitchen last Tuesday at midnight eating peanut butter from the jar with a spoon while watching TikTok videos of strangers organizing their pantries, which is itself a pleasure I cannot explain — watching other people impose order on their shelves while standing in my own kitchen in a state that could generously be called freeform.

I didn’t buy the jalapeño spray cheese. But I thought about it for three days, which is longer than I’ve thought about most important decisions in my adult life. I thought about the hiss of the can. I thought about the specific way the cheese would hit my tongue — room temperature, aerated, faintly chemical, fundamentally American in the way that only something invented in a lab and sold in a pressurized can can be fundamentally American.

Then I forgot about it, because I was busy, and because forgetting is what I do best with the things I want. Not refusing them — that would require a decision. Just letting the wanting dissolve into the schedule, the errands, the version of my life where I drink water and read the news and eat a salad because a salad was there.

Last Thursday I found a can of Easy Cheese in my refrigerator. Not jalapeño. Original. Laura said it was for the dog, that she’d read you could hide pills in it. The dog doesn’t take pills. I didn’t say this. I just looked at the can, and the can looked back, and we understood each other perfectly.