chocolate
What You Eat When Nobody’s Watching
Not long ago, I was reveling in a quiet evening at home. My husband was away on a business trip, and our infant daughter was snoozing in her crib. I had just settled down with a book when a small voice in my head pinged me: Pantry. Bottom shelf. I ignored it and continued to read, but the voice became more insistent, more wheedling: Go get it. You’re allll alone. Go. Now.
I obediently rose, made my way to the pantry’s bottom shelf, and found it: a box of pistachio-flavored instant pudding, stashed behind a bag of crushed flaxseed. In a trance, I began an all-too-familiar ritual: adding two cups of milk to the mix, which was the queasy green color of hospital walls and flecked with desiccated pistachios. Immediately, the goo thickened up, thanks to disodium phosphate and tetrasodium pyrophosphate. Then I slopped it into a large bowl, grabbed a spoon, and happily polished off three of the four servings.
I know. I know. I write for a magazine called Health, for goodness’ sake. And normally I’m a seven-helpings-of-fruit-and-veg, farmers’ market–attending, supplement-popping flexitarian locavore. But every once in a while, when I’m free of my husband’s horrified gaze, I’ve got to have that instant pudding. It’s sweet, it’s cold, and it reminds me of being a kid, when my favorite babysitter, Nancy, would whip me up a bowl after my folks went out to dinner.
I don’t know another soul who eats this flavor of pudding, but when it comes to quirky eats, I’m certainly not alone. When I started quizzing otherwise-mindful eaters on what they really ate when they were by themselves, the variety—and loopy inventiveness—was impressive.
Cornflakes with chocolate milk. Fried-bologna sandwiches on white bread slathered with mayonnaise. (This, from someone who goes to the gym seven days a week.) Vanilla ice cream topped with globs of microwaved creamy peanut butter. Canned crescent rolls lacquered with spray butter, cinnamon and sugar, and a pinch of nutmeg (“like a bad cinnamon roll,” says its proud creator).
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