Tuesday, November 02, 2021

Memories of mild privation

I am well into my countdown to the colonoscopy now. I've begun drinking the gross stuff and should be getting tended to 15 hours from now. At which point in time I look forward to eating some good food again!

The food rampdown brought back some interesting memories. While trying to figure out if ketchup was cool for the prepping period, I discovered one place that had people lay off of pepper. Although UNC hadn't proscribed it, I figured I would roll with that constraint just to see how it worked. As I ate food with just salt on it, with no spice whatsoever, my mind travelled back to the Soviet Union in 1987, where there was no black pepper to be had in restaurants and only very occasionally white pepper, a very different animal. So I started carrying black pepper in an Advil bottle when I went out hunting for sustenance in the afternoons, and I remember in particular taking it in a pel'meny place -- I think it was on Bol'shaya Nikitskaya -- and having people stare at me when I put it on my little dumplings.

I also thought back to Leslie, who after having Caroline and discovering that she had food allergies, cut her diet down to lamb, rice, salt, and peaches for a little while before building it back up.

Certainly these periods of limiting what I eat remind allow me to build up anticipation of better meals ahead. But I already mentioned that, didn't I?

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