Enlightenment Through Bacon, via cycling

"An army marches on it's stomach." - Napoleon (supposedly)

Around 2007, I found myself going through a dramatic period in my life, involving the dissolution of one relationship (the death of my parents) and the commencement of another (my engagement to a lady) all within a period of months.  I've found my mind wandering back to this unique time in my life recently: how it felt, what I was thinking, what I did to deal with it. What I did then is what I do now -- I go for a bike ride. But back then it was on a much grander scale to befit the size of the emotions I had to deal with.

I went biking. Not just up over the GWB to New Jersey, or a hard day-long push to Montauk. I purchased a custom folding touring bike, geared up, flew out to San Francisco, and attempted to ride my way back home. Starting at the end of August, I was aiming to be home for Thanksgiving.  The idea of "Lagom" guided me -- enough is as good as a feast -- so when I got about 2/3 of the way home,  I hopped a train at Carbondale Illinois and made my way home to NYC via Chicago. I had no regrets about ditching then, and looking back, I'm glad I did end it there.  It was the right thing to do.

I kept a blog. It was a really good tool to keep my friends and family up to date on what was going on with me, in whatever amount they were wanting to consume. It gave me a sense of purpose to bee-line to a public library in every town I hit up, and made me think about all the new stimuli that was bombarding my senses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I reread the blog last week from start to finish (as well as the private handwritten journal I kept as a companion piece, which I wrote about all the darkness and sadness that was also with me at the time.) I realized "ah, this is why I bothered with all this -- it was a message in a bottle to myself, in case I ever found myself in similar dire straights: here is a road map." Not so much a map across the nation by bike, but a road map to just....feeling my feelings. And eatin'.

I realized last week that before my bike trip, food was nice but not particularly central to my life. After the trip, I would go on to culinary school, work in restaurants, start a knish business, and in later years bring all this focus into changing my diet fo' real. But it was the new idea of eating and thinking about that really got introduced to me on this trip.

Because an army marches on it's stomach, a cross-country cyclist rides on bacon. Starting in Colorado and stretching through Kansas, Missouri and Illinois, I took a secondary route that may have been a big deal 50 years ago, but the coming of the interstates had rendered this 2-4 lane ribbon very off the beaten path. The small towns I'd visit rarely had more than one restaurant, and when there was one, it was some riff on a diner. Even if I was hungry, my stomach would be tight from riding all day -- however in the morning,  a heavy breakfast was always welcome.

Pancakes or waffles, and always bacon. I've eaten bacon most of my life, save for an ill-begotten time as a vegetarian and vegan, so it was comforting and familiar. However, because I was so hungry for that familiarity, I started to notice how different the bacon was. Not just different from the industrial thin-sliced stuff I was used to, but how the bacon actually differed from town to town as I pedalled across this great land of ours. Levels of smokiness, the different flavors of smokiness, saltiness, fatiness and level of marbling, thick or thin, fresh or embalmed. It was like my mouth gained it's own eyes, ears and nose on top of the ones I already had.

Then there was the encounter with a rye bread in Colorado. I wrote a piece about it that was published an a hyperlocal publication called the Grand Street News, here's an excerpt...

It took a loaf of bread in Ordway, Colorado, to make me realize that I missed the Lower East Side. After hitting the local library for internet access, I ventured into the only grocery in this small town to stock up on the fuel of a bike tour—lunch meats, bananas, sports drinks, chocolate, peanut butter, and bread. In the bread aisle, alongside the Wonder and various square loaves, was a plastic-bagged oval loaf with "JEWISH RYE" across its front. I may have doubled the Jewish population of Ordway that day. My parents and I have gotten rye bread countless times from Moishe's on Grand Street, but never thought of it as specifically "Jewish"—Eastern European, maybe, Lower East Side, definitely, but "Jewish?” Is there any other kind of rye? Perhaps Presbyterian? That rye made me feel far from home.

And from there, how could you not go the full Woody Allen?

Bagels are a universal travesty in all the hotel breakfasts I encountered across the country, but it was in Missouri that I found a "Kosher pickle," sold in an individual baggy. Opening it, the oddly yellow brine spilled out and stained the sides of the sink. One bite and I was an extra thousand miles away from Essex Street. I live in a place with arguably the best pickles and bagels in the world, and here I am hunched over a hotel sink with yellow-stained hands and a limp, mushy pickle.

My bike tour of personal transition was bookended by two memorable meals, for two very different reasons. When I arrived in San Francisco, I was greeted by a cousin I don't see often enough and her kids. She's a serious vegetarian, and they took me to a well regarded upscale vegetarian restaurant on the bay. The food itself was good, but most notable was how far in contrast it would sit to just about everything else I would eat on the rest of the trip. A vegetarian meal and/or a meal that costs more than $10 was just not something you encountered on most of the route I plied past western California.

The other meal was at the town I hopped a train, Carbondale, Illinois. This was the very first college town I was rolling through since San Francisco (hence services like a bike shop and an Amtrak station.) For dinner, I went to a pizza joint but skipped the pizza -- I had spaghetti and meatballs. In some of the larger towns I passed through, you'd get the occasional crappy pizza joint, but pasta was usually hidden. Here, this was the first pizza place that had pretensions to being "Italian". The spaghetti and meatballs was strictly in the lens of Chef Boy-r-dee, and I immensely enjoyed it. I always considered the Italian-American food that some call Italian food to simply be American food, but that afternoon in Carbondale, Illinois, I felt like I was at a little out-of-the-way cafe in Naples or Rome, eating authentically with the locals. When pizzeria spag n' balls become that intense, you know your perspective has been shifted enough and it's time to go home and see how different things will look now.
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Next week, weigh in. Not sure what to expect....a tiny little gain or....a big wopper of a gain? He he.
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WEEKLY AVERAGE:2451

Didn't work this week, not completely by choice but hell, I needed the time off to just be. Unfortunately, being tossed into so much unstructured time made it harder to keep the reigns on the eating, but looking at these entries, it could have been much worse. Friday, I tumbled hard and Saturday was a bit of an eating mess, but Sunday I was able to pull back and feel a bit normal. Glad to be going back to work on Monday.

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MONDAY COUNT: 2265

SLEPT: 8pm-3:30am, 7.5 hrs
Ikea with the youngest in the morning, solo trip to Costco in the afternoon, honoring MLK. Mindlessly ate some leftover nugget's of my kids meals, after the fact checked the label for calorie count and was shocked to find I grossly underestimated, blowing the budget. Only 65 cal, but still.

AM SNACK: 3:45 am, iced green tea, 0 cal

BREAKFAST: 7:30am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9am, steel cut oatmeal, 410 cal

LUNCH: 12pm, falafel, tomato soup, health salad, pickles, 850 cal

PM SNACK: 2 pm, momma salad, pickle, 110 cal

PM SNACK: 5pm, house salad with dressing on side, +/- 150 cal
Out with Edie for dinner, she had a slice of pepperoni pizza and bread, I ate the salad with 1/2 of the dressing it came with.

DINNER: 6:15pm, mahi mahi, asparagus, kimchi, 450 cal

EVENING SNACK: 6:45pm, 3 kid's chicken nuggets, 135 cal

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TUESDAY COUNT: 3275

SLEPT: 8pm-4:30am, 8.5 hrs
Good night sleep, with Lil' Edie curled up next to me. Is my sleep coming back to me? I sure hope so. Yep, I fell off the wagon today, but I'm not too concerned. Several factors came together at once: on top of not working this week to keep to a normal schedule, the huge snow storm shut down Edie's school early and the baby sitter needed to split so I took over the kids 4 hours early and had to skip out on plans to yogacize and other helpful me-centric things. Cooped up alone with 2 energetic and attention-requiring (but happy, healthy and lovely) kids was a bit much. Looking at the day's eating, I see where the worm turned -- the carby Graze Box snack was so delicious, I wolfed down the other 3, which meant that the train had left the station. I could have handled the carby snack at work, but at home while being on lock down with the kids, it was a mistake. A mistake not to be repeated. So even though I fell today, I learned something and have no worries that even if tomorrow isn't a clean day (and I suspect it won't be due to scheduling), I'll still be using some good discretion.

AM SNACK: 5:15 am, iced green tea, 0 cal

BREAKFAST: 7:30am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 8:30am, Fage whole yogurt with agave, almonds, vanilla, 310 cal

LUNCH: 12pm, sardine & avocado on whole wheat toast, steamed string beans, pickle, 585 cal 

PM SNACK: 3:30 pm, momma salad, "British BBQ" crackers from Graze Box, 220 cal

PM SNACK: 4pm korean chili rice crackers, fruity mango chutney and habas tapas from Graze Box, 320 cal

PM SNACK: 4:15pm, cashews, 160 cal

PM SNACK: 4:30pm, cheetos, 300 cal

PM SNACK: 5pm, peanut M&Ms, +/- 400 cal

DINNER: 5:30pm, Stouffer's french bread pizzas, 820 cal

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WEDNESDAY COUNT: 2240
SLEPT: 8pm-3:30am, 7.5 hrs
Technically I busted the budget, but close enough. This was a day out and about, visiting people and taking care o' bidnezz, far from a typical, orderly, scheduled day -- it could have gone a lot worse.

AM SNACK: 3:15 am, iced green tea, 0 cal

BREAKFAST: 7am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:30am, steel cut oatmeal, 410 cal

PM SNACK: noon, momma salad, 100 cal

LUNCH: 1:15pm, 3 tacos, tossed salad, chips & guac, +/- 750 cal

PM SNACK: 7:45pm, cashews, 160 cal

DINNER: 8:30pm, shirataki stir fry with shrimp, shitaki mushrooms and oyster sauce, 360 cal 

EVENING SNACK: 9pm, cheetos, 300 cal

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THURSDAY COUNT: 2025 cal

SLEPT: 9:30pm-4:15am, 6.75 hrs

Good weight session in the morning, out for chores, home for working around the house, then out for my first open yoga class in over 4 years. Kicked my ass and I peace-outed about half way through, but got a lot out of it. Considering a weekly practice, if I can somehow fit it in my schedule. 

AM SNACK: 4:45 am, iced green tea, 0 cal

BREAKFAST: 7am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 10am,  fruit smoothie, 410

LUNCH: 1:45pm, chicken breast, roasted brussel sprouts, pickle, momma salad, 620 cal

EVENING SNACK: 5:30pm, cashews, 160 cal

DINNER: 7:45pm, Subway 6" veggie burger sub, chips, diet coke, 675


1/2 brus= 175

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FRIDAY COUNT: x cal
SLEPT: 11:30pm - 5:30am, 6 hours
Plans fell through, too cold to ride, ended up wallowing on the couch with food n' tube. Haven't done this in years, actually felt good....to visit, though I wouldn't want to live there.

AM SNACK: 4:45 am, iced green tea, 0 cal

BREAKFAST: 6:45am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2:  9:30am, Fage whole yogurt with agave, almonds, vanilla, 310 cal

OFF THE WAGON