How to eat (No, really)

(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)

Picture the plate. You have some meat, some potatoes, a vegetable, some sort of bread, a drink. It’s all very nicely and elegantly laid out, like you’re some kind of grown-up. There is a napkin. A fork on the left, a knife on the right. Y’all fancy.

Now, the question: How do you proceed? I’ll cut to the chase: If you’re normal, you take a bite, maybe of the meat, then the potatoes, then some veggies. Meat again, then bread, then more potatoes. Maybe a few peas roll into the potatoes, but that’s okay! Maybe you use the bread to sop up some potato or some sauce. You enjoy a full meal with a mix of flavors.

And if you’re a weird person who I judge harshly, you eat one food in its entirety, then another, then another.

Okay, so that’s a bit mean. But we had a chicken-and-potatoes-and-broccoli dinner last night, and my brother-in-law (he lives with us! We’re properly observing social distancing!) is one of those crazy one-thing-at-a-time eaters. He finished his broccoli, then cut his chicken up and started that. Sure, some of the chicken and potatoes met in the middle (my wife actually served the chicken atop the potatoes, so it was almost one part of the meal), but in general, Ric, as he always does, at one food, finished it in its entirety, then ate another.

I do not get it. Foods have different specific heats, and maybe he sciences it so that he eats the foods that get coldest first and saved the hot-holders for the end (last night’s meal would somewhat support that). But regardless, you’re saving some part of the meal for when its colder than you’d like, and considering what foods have what specific heats, that generally means you’re letting the best part of the meal proceed to its less delicious form.

The alternative, if you are a one-food-at-a-time weirdo, is to eat the meat or other heat-holding food first, but then you end up with soggy, gross vegetables that have gotten cold.

The solution? Eat everything!

(A sidebar: My father took this to the other extreme. He would put meat, potatoes, vegetables, salad-with-1000-island all on one fork, use a piece of bread to hold it all together, take a bite of it all at once, then use his drink — milk, always milk — to help dissolve it. Eating things in shifts is weird. Eating things like my dad used to is demonic.)

Unless you eat ridiculously fast (which I, um, generally do), you’re going to have some part of your meal colder than ideal by the end. That’s just the nature of food. But instead of saving an entire portion of the food to suffer that ignominious fate, why not enjoy every part of the meal in its ideal form, at its ideal temperature, and then have the scraps of each food left for the cold part? If you fill up, then you have still enjoyed every part of the meal and just avoided the bad portions. If the bad, cold parts at the end are unappetizing, you’ve still gotten to enjoy all the pieces of food at close to their ideal form.

In short, eat everything. Maybe not all in one bite (ew, dad), but definitely in shifts. Ya weirdos.