White Castle

"You have to blog about this," says Neil. It's a little after 5:00 and we are sitting in the parking lot of a White Castle on Dixie Highway, staring at the J&J Boat and Trailer Supply across the street and sharing a Sack of 10 and an order of onion rings. We are washing it all down with enough Big Red to fill a small hot tub.

"Oh no!" I say. What kind of self-respecting food blogger admits that she eats at White Castle? Ever?

"Not just about eating here," Neil says, "but a meditation on why those of us who really like food also like junk."

I think about this for a few minutes, watching the clouds roll across the sky behind J&J and munching my little cheeseburgers. I'm suddenly shocked at my initial reaction. I am, after all, no food snob. Being a foodie means being in love with food, food of all sorts. Sometimes it means high-end restaurants and Alice Waters cookbooks, but sometimes it means corn dogs at the state fair and bags of Oreos. And sometimes, apparently, White Castle. So what am I so ashamed of?

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that fast food really goes against a lot of what I think food should be. It's processed to death. It's full of nasty stuff. Most of it contains more fat and more calories than anyone has any business eating. I have problems with meat to begin with, and that used in fast food is the worst of the worst. I feel bad, sometimes physically always spiritually, ever time I eat it. So I usually don't.

Why, then, did I call out "Ooooh, White Castle!" as we drove up Dixie Highway? We had just hiked two miles at Tioga Falls. Otis had gone with us and was conked out in the back seat. We were muddy and relaxed in the way that comes after physical exertion, our bodies loose with the unseasonable warmth of the day. We were feeling...

Uh...

As I write this I am sitting at the kitchen table. I just looked up at Neil and said, "Why did we go to White Castle?"

"Because it was there? Because it seemed like a good idea at the time?"

"But why?"

"For those first two burgers. No, the first burger."

It's true. The first burger was delicious. Not because the ingredients were good, of course. I think it was more the familiarity of it. The same was true of that first sip of Big Red; I was immediately transported back to the Friday nights of my childhood, eating dinner at White Castle with my mom before our weekly trip to Kroger. (The onion rings were, objectively, pretty good.)

Between us we could have had two cheeseburgers, an order of onion rings, and a small Big Red and gotten everything we needed from this meal.

Perhaps this is why I felt ashamed to blog about White Castle. Because it speaks of gluttony, but a worse kind of gluttony than that expressed by, say, eating a whole loaf of French bread with olive oil. Because we didn't really enjoy it, not most of it, and we knew that we wouldn't the moment we turned into the drive-thru. Fast food is not about enjoying food, it's about stuffing yourself cheaply and quickly. If you stop to think about it, if you try to savor it, if you attempt to enjoy the play of strange beef and onions and American cheese across your tongue, well... it's just better if you don't.

These are just my tastes, of course, and I imagine that there are plenty of people who might disagree with me. People enjoy what they enjoy and that's fine. But I think we would all do well to stop and think about what we're eating and why. How does it make us feel? Guilty? Vaguely disgusted? Or ebullient and joyous? I prefer joyful food.