Although the quality of the food may increase the
amount I heap onto my plate, it has little effect on how much of it I can
fit into my stomach. The only variable that has ever changed that fixed amount
was France.
Don’t mistake me – I didn’t have an eye-opening, Julia
Childs, “Eat Pray Love” European culinary awakening that forever altered my
palate. I was a twenty-one-year-old on a study abroad, and although my host
family fed me the occasional lovingly prepared, multi-course French dinner, I
subsisted mostly on the output of pastry shops and crepe stands. It was the
carbs that did it.
I didn’t notice the change at first – the restaurant meals split
with friends that no longer filled me up, the crepe-venders who knew exactly what je voudraied. I
attributed my ability to polish off plates to smaller European portions, and my
endless appetite for pain du chocolat to the fact that it was the best. Then there was the late night I sat outside talking with a friend and eating those little chocolate croissants, not patisserie-fresh but from a slightly stale bag
bought at a gas station. It may have been that I was slowly but surely finishing the
bag myself, or that I was dipping the already-chocolate-filled bread into my
own personal tub of Nutella, but when he teased me about my healthy appetite it was clear that he was right. I did have a very
healthy appetite, indeed.
I was, in fact, ravenous. I would finish a mile-long
baguette sandwich and ask if you were planning to finish yours. I saved everyone’s
last bites of over-filled crepe from untimely demise in sidewalk trash cans. The
capacity of my stomach seemed to have tripled. Although I constantly craved
carbohydrates, my body began to miss vitamins, and one day I bought a bag's worth of fresh fruit and polished off each piece, one after another. Two
bananas, two apples, two oranges, still not quite full.
My travels ended not long after, and I flew home to California -- a little jet-lagged and bloated, some Swiss
chocolate stashed in my bag. I
bought Nutella at the grocery store and found things like waffles to put it on,
but it wasn’t the same. I slowly found myself able to eat less of my plate at
dinner, and gradually my appetite returned to pre-Paris levels. I still miss
it.
(20-minute class free-write. Prompt: intense food craving)
(20-minute class free-write. Prompt: intense food craving)



















