Mal Appétit

It was around this time last year that my appetite and taste buds decided to follow in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, the Continental Congress and Che Guevara:

Revolt.

If you were to ask how it started, I - after taking a long drag from a cigarette, then coughing madly because who the heck smokes these things?!? - would have to point at least one finger to a batch of eggroll cabbage soup. It was a recipe that sounded good, and probably turned out good, but which I could not stomach...almost literally. We made it with some sausage created by the butcher from whom we'd bought part of a pig, and from that moment on, I could not even bear the thought of eating that same batch of sausage, no matter its form. Heck, sausage in GENERAL became dicey for a while.

In a separate purchase of part of an animal, we bought some beef in various forms - steaks, roasts, ground...ings? Groundations? I'm struggling for the noun form of the past tense of "grind" here. Anyway, I struggled there, too. The ground beef, in particular, didn't appeal to my taste, which was weird because I typically love ground beef in all its forms: tacos, burgers, soups, stroganoffs, and so on. But something about this ground cow wasn't doing it for me. Still, overall, I was the same hungry and willing-to-eat-just-about-anything-put-in-front-of-me old me.

Then I got COVID-19. Bam. So much changed.

I wasn't as hungry. Overall my appetite was dramatically reduced. On top of that, some things I used to LOVE lost a good portion of their appeal to me: steak, lasagna, gyros, pizza, crab legs, baked potatoes, burgers. BURGERS! Burgers had theretofore been always atop my list of favorite "I could eat one any time, any day" foods! And gyros? Reader, gyros had for years been in my rotating top-3 list of favorite sandwiches.

In at least some cases I could point to a specific meal where the turn-off happened; in others, it was just a general loss. We kind of joked about it a bit - maybe it's that Lone Star tick whose bite makes one allergic to red meat. Maybe it was still that one part-cow we bought. But it really started to mess with Tamara's meal preparation planning, which had gone into full-speed-ahead mode when she discovered a real love of cooking and finding new dishes to prepare during the pandemic. Reliable meal plans were now in the "iffy" category, for no other reason than I just wasn't feeling it that particular week.

The upside was that I ate a lot less and lost a fair amount of weight. That, plus moving to a particular medication for diabetes, means that for the first time in years, when I stepped on a scale the other day the number was under 250. That's not happened since shortly after I got back from my church service in Russia.

From 285 to 235 in 2 years flat

But man, that really wasn't worth having to see disappointment on Tamara's face when she made something she was excited about, only to see my face react as if I'd just been serviced sewer rat hash with moldy bread.

I've started to feel like I need to make weird requests when it comes to some meals. When she asks if I want to go get pizza, even Shakespeare's (a local Columbia place that's my favorite), I add the caveat "as long as I don't have to eat the leftovers." When she wants to make burgers, I ask her to make them thin. When she makes vegetables, I want as little seasoning on them as possible. And crab legs? I just deal with it because I know that's one of her favorites.

Who says no to these? (Unless you don't like them as a rule)

What do I do? How much of this is mental and in my control, and how much is out of my hands? How do I go from walking in at home, smelling dinner and immediately feeling nauseated, to sucking it up enough to at least not grimace or wince when I take a bite? How do I tell myself to like what I get, to eat it and be happy for having it and at the hands of someone who genuinely cares about me?

Tamara will be the first to tell you that not every recipe she makes works out. Some are absolute bangers, some are just okay, some are "we're pitching this and never looking back." That's independent of my stupid and bizarre appetite. That's just the price of trying new things in new ways, sometimes.

She has been the best sport. Even when she's disappointed that I'm not all in, she doesn't get on my case or make me feel bad. She really is the greatest.

But it guts me when she's really stoked about something, and my reaction is less than lukewarm. And it shouldn't be sometimes! Sometimes the food has things I like, things I love, things I feel like I can and should devour with aplomb and delight! But.....I can't get there. My stomach can't. My nose can't. My brain can't.

I don't want to go into mealtime with the mindset of "I just need to get through this" or "man, I hope there aren't many leftovers" or "keep it down, gag reflex."

Reader, it's sometimes downright infuriating.