About 14 years ago I gave up eating all meat aside from fish. The official term for this is Pescatarian.
It’s about as annoying as being Vegetarian or Vegan in terms of being able to just eat food. Everything has animals in it. Yes even McDonald’s french fries.
(I really love McDonalds French Fries, sue me.)
When I decided to quit meat I was overweight. It had nothing to do with food but more to do with the fact I was living off of vodka and Squirt soda or vodka and orange juice or Newcastle beers. I was dating and living with a self admitted Stoner Dude and he cooked as such. Loads of BBQ, potato chips and microwave burritos, etc. Even though I didn’t smoke with him, I ate with him and we ate like stoned ass frat boys on Spring Break.
I’m 5’2” and I got up to 175 pounds at one point. It was physically exhausting to be me so I thought, LETS BECOME A PESCATARIAN!
At the time I was working in radio, which is a lot like having an office job. You get the ability to have an hour lunch, maybe a two hour lunch, you can eat at your desk, you have the time and agency to feed yourself with whatever diet you’re on and it’s not a life or death matter, like there is no time frame set on your nutritional intake. You can even eat in the studio. You can con listeners into bringing you food. You don’t have to think about it, food is your personal business and you can just go have it whenever.
Fast forward to the last time I got canned from radio. I spent about 11 months trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I still had the time an energy to give a shit about my diet’s ethics. I mean all I was doing was riding the bus around town, trying to get a job doing something, getting coffees and cooking for my ex-husband and our roommate.
So for 8 years I got to tend to my diet and ethically choose what I ate and consumed…
Enter the hospitality business.
I some how got a job a hotel. I was shocked and surprised I had bullshitted my way through the interview well enough to get a job at a fairly high end boutique hotel. I’d never had a job in my life where I had to wear a name tag or fuck, even pants to work and now I was catering to rich guests and learning a whole new skill set including…. the dreaded 30 minute lunch break.
The first hotel I worked at is on this street in SLO that we call Hotel Row basically. There is nothing within walking distance that resembles food from the first hotel I worked at. It became very clear I would either be packing my lunch every day without the aid of an employee fridge. There was a fridge in Housekeeping in the basement but upstairs, nah, we were on our own.
I don’t drive or own a car so I couldn’t even do what some of my coworkers did, just pop over to Franks or wherever for food. My lunch breaks were either spent in the basement watching novellas with the Housekeeping staff and being offered delicious food because every day was a pot luck and eventually those carnitas start looking really good when you’re starving and stealing hard boiled eggs from the breakfast room or there was the gas station next door.
Let me tell you, even if you really love animals like I do, a tuna fish sandwich or an egg salad sandwich from a gas station sounds like barf in a box.
I lost a lot of weight working there until I just sucked it up and dove into that Housekeeper pot luck one day. A gas station turkey sando isn’t that bad either. If you only have 30 minutes to handle your business, you’ll eat anything.
Four hotel jobs, a couple of professional cooking jobs and a grocery store career later, you might find me just eating Black Forrest Ham out of a bag in the store while I pull the shades down on the dairy cooler before we close. I sincerely do not give a fuck anymore. My lunch breaks are sometimes me sitting in the stairwell with a bag of gummy bears and a Red Bull. Nutrition and ethical sourcing of food isn’t my top priority when I’m broke and busy.
I applaud people that can keep up a healthy diet and actually think about their food and stick to what they believe in. However I also applaud my fellow feral Trash Pandas out there, eating their meals over a trash can on their 15 minute break or behind a dumpster in a parking lot. Big ups to all of you who have to hide in a freezer and eat whatever the hell the universe handed you before the next customer shows up.
On my days off now I eat royally well because my boyfriend Dan hates to see me not eating and cooks for me and provides me with really phat meals and sometimes I think his cooking and attention to food’s details carries me through the rest of the week, when I’m sneaking beef jerky out of my pocket into my face under my mask in the middle of bagging the groceries of 15 customers on three registers at the same time. He makes sure I don’t forget to eat and takes care of my stomach when I don’t have time to worry about it.
(This is Dan, he feeds me food.)