Red wine smoothies

by Andrew Gordon Middleton

I had the pleasure last Saturday night to have dinner with a very beautiful and witty woman. This perhaps a minor detail to my story here. What is less apparently incidental is that I found I had wine left in my glass come morning. I can never throw good wine into the sink or very well feed it to my rosemary, so I added it to my morning smoothie.

It was incredible.

And I don’t mean to pretend that 2 ounces of over-oxygenated red wine gave me a buzz through the pint of frozen berries, two eggs, hemp seeds, whey powder and dash of maple syrup that constitute my favourite and squarest meal of the day. No, it was just that good.

It is amusing that when people ask the classic dinner guest question, the question that is all that is left to the passive consumer of a presented fare, ``What’s in it?’‘, people ask if the eggs are raw. Well, yes. I think this disproves the mantra that there is no such thing as a stupid question.

Incidentally, one of my most certain memories of my (paternal) grandfather was that you could never answer him this question truthfully, there was so much he would not eat. He was the classic passive consumer of food; if the answer was not to his liking, he had little choice but not to eat. He was, even into his eighties, still so traumatized by having to eat the horrible fare at his residential school as a child that he exercised this option frequently and without hesitation if the ingredients of the food were the slightest bit unconventional. (I forget the punishment for not eating what was presented but that there was a punishment is no small thing.) He is hardly alone these days in using food as a locus for even unrelated anxieties. It, along with sex, is largely how we control how others interact with our bodies.

Let’s call this the `morning after’ question, the question of whether there is greater pleasure in the moment of or the steady recline. It would be a mistake to assume that choosing long term pleasure over short term bliss is any definitive measure of hedonism—-certainly this level of abstracted thinking is found in animals and small children to various degrees. So while it is senseless to try to prioritize levels of maturity as regards types of pleasure (and one might add that the pleasure found in places such as the S & M community superficially turns many of these measures on their heads), it is worth noting the variations in the choices being made and asking what motivates them.

When my brother visited me this winter from Vancouver, he was quite possibly the only person to react with wholehearted enthusiasm to seeing me add two raw eggs to the smoothie. He had some questions of course, to which I have my usual answers. I don’t if them if the shells are cracked. I leave them out a few hours, usually overnight, so I can see that they still have a good gelatinous structure and they aren’t too liquid. And they shouldn’t really smell of anything, just like sushi shouldn’t smell of anything.

But, if I interpreted his enthusiasm correctly, he was pleased not so much by my admission of the almost notorious raw egg in the smoothie, as much as the knowledge that I was onside in his belief that people worry too much these days about food. Yeah, I worry that they worry. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they’re wrong. But I think the problem comes down to our roles as passive consumers.

Here though I have to detail a point where my brother has misinterpreted the available information; I just don’t know that it is really his fault.

While visiting, he was subjected to the local vegetarian buffet. (If heat lamps don’t make you run screaming from buffets, I suggest you try the food sold by the street vendors in Calcutta.) Buffet food is quite possibly the natural predecessor to modern fast food, aesthetically speaking. This was unfortunate because I’d wanted to take him to my favourite restaurant in town, the vegan Aux Vivres on St. Laurent, but he’d had enough of vegetarian food for the day. We managed to find a nice place, a Tibetan restaurant, Om across from my regular Chinese green grocer. Once there, sitting before his plate of yak substitute, he made the comment that he didn’t think vegetarians like food very much. Having been the family vegetarian since I was 15—-in a family that definitely likes food—-I had to point out that most people don’t like food that much. Not if you judge by what they eat.

It’s just that vegetarians—-collectively—-can be described as a group of people who have decided to do something about their food, but not necessarily because of how it tastes. Bringing another grandparent into this discussion, I will pass on my (maternal) grandmother’s quip that, ``Vegetarians don’t live longer; it just feels that way’‘. The only thing is, as a vegetarian, I am more of a hedonist than most meat eaters that I know. And I don’t think that I am alone in this.

I don’t know that I want to include the numbers of people who eat processed mock meats (there must be something wrong with this on some cosmic level) but I do think that the very act of choosing what one eats, deciding rightly or wrongly based on a variety of aesthetic criteria—-not necessarily taste but perhaps also aftertaste, texture, the feeling in the body or mind the moment after, the morning after, as years go on—-is essentially more hedonistic than eating something based on only one aesthetic criterion.

But I think the question of whether a cardboard and sunlight diet is somehow more self depriving or shows less enjoyment of the food—-or even in the consumption of the food—-is one of those arguments designed to keep bar stool philosophers (and possibly the other kind) in business till the Earth’s magnetic field reverses itself.

The next question to pose and never resolve is what Epicurus would have thought of spending time on the yoga mat and having a protein shake afterwards.