The magic pill

I had an amusing mealtime conversation recently, one of dozens of meals shared in sunny Spain with family members during Holy Week vacation. We had just concluded about 10 days of gastronomic splendor in a country where you were unlikely to stumble upon a bad meal — every tapas joint or jamon bar, reeking of cigarette smoke and littered with abandoned finger napkins, had something special, something revelatory, to offer. And I enjoyed every minute.

So why did I decide at that moment, after wiping my mouth with a napkin, to confess to my wife and assembled in-laws that food just didn’t really turn me on all that much? Why, after enjoying a gluttonous spread of ginormous beef toronado slices resting atop asparagus spears and bacon mille-feuille, did I casually mention that, as wonderful as the food had been, given the chance, most of the time I would probably prefer to simply take a pill and get the whole “eating” thing over with in one quick swallow?

Yes, the “magic food pill” debate. What if there was a pill that could handle all your dietary requirements in one tablet, like in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Who would opt for that, instead of inhaling a thousand calories at every chowdown?

It sounds a little shocking. It certainly turned my in-laws’ faces about three shades paler when I brought it up. It was as though I had made a joke about dead babies. They were visibly aghast. I think they recoiled a bit. No food? Blasphemy! During Holy Week!

So I hastened to elaborate, to qualify my views a bit. “Look, as much as I enjoy this experience,” I began, “I’m just saying that, most of the time, it would be a lot easier, and I could certainly get more work done on the average day, without troubling to feed myself three times daily.” I pointed out how our Spanish journey had begun to revolve around locating restaurants a day in advance, booking tables, planning bus routes and ways to get to those tables in time. See? Feeding one’s self can be a chore.

They were having none of it. “Well, you could have saved us a lot of euros if you had said that before ordering that huge plate of beef,” my wife pointed out. No, no, no, I pushed on: I do enjoy eating with family and friends. I enjoyed this meal immensely. Some of our best experiences in life have been at dinner tables, with great company. And truly, I love a fine meal. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn what a truly extraordinary gastronomic experience is about, so I cherish such moments.

But that’s just it. Those “moments” don’t have to take place three times a day. I argued that “great” meals should be fairly rare events in life; if we had them every day, they would quickly lose their “greatness.”

But let’s face it, I was up against Filipinos at a dinner table, to whom planning the next two meals in advance before dessert arrives is considered perfectly normal behavior. Food is not quite a religion to Filipinos, but it is a religious experience.

And we’re living in the age of Facebook, remember. So whipping out cameras and taking pictures of every single dish placed before you at restaurants has become as de rigueur as paparazzi flashing up a storm whenever Angelina Jolie dips a stiletto-strapped heel outside of a limousine. Shows like Top Chef have made everyone an amateur food detective, flexing their palates and trying to analyze the ingredients in every bite of halibut. In a world where food is a star, not to mention the explosion of celebrity chefs and molecular trends, it’s not surprising that eating is more energetically discussed than ever.

So we went back to discussing the magic pill. Well, would the food pill at least get to have a flavor, as in Willy Wonka? Or would it be purely functional and minimal, as in The Jetsons or 2001? I confessed that I didn’t really care; if it cut down some of my mealtimes to under a minute, it could be as bland as cardboard. And think of the calories you’d cut! Again, I got the dropped jaws, the annoyed expressions from my tablemates. Food without taste? Who are you? What planet did you come from?

Maybe it’s a guy thing. I heard a similar lament from a well-known male artist here who said he was constantly being dragged away from his wet canvases by requests to dine here and there. He hated it. Food, he admitted, was less than a primary concern to him. I totally got it. They think we’re crazy, these women, I commiserated. They think we should be taking pictures of food, posting them on Facebook. “Maybe we should have been astronauts,” this artist said with a shrug. At least then we’d have an excuse to drink instant Tang and pop food pills.

Finally I framed the argument with what I thought was Solomonic wisdom: it’s not like I want to cut out all meals, folks. Just the ones that don’t count. Let’s try a ratio: 60 percent of meals are just not that spectacular, so they could be dealt with by swallowing the pill. But the other 40 percent — ah, those could be reserved for special meals: I would gladly sit down for two hours at a stretch and relish those experiences, course after course after course. Sound fair?

And what would you do with all that extra time, my dinner companions asked? Well, I probably wouldn’t spend it exercising or obsessing over weight gain at every meal, that’s for sure. A calorie-less pill does have advantages, after all. But the truth is, in this day and age, nature abhors a vacuum more than it does us, and even if I had all that free time on my hands, technology would no doubt find a way to immediately suck all of it up faster than a Bounty paper towel.

So maybe it would be better to design a pill that would supply us with more free time. Yeah, that might work. Or one to eliminate the demands of technology. Either one, and I’ll happily go back to eating 2,000-calorie meals at my leisure.