A Pilgrim’s Digression

There’s a little restaurant here on Capitol Hill popular with the lunchtime crowd because it offers a very good take-out buffet. There are two buffet tables, one for vegetarians and one for the rest of us.

The vegetarian buffet has lots of multi-hued, cold pasta and bean salads with unappetizing names such as “Avocado and Black Bean Salad” and “Asparagus and Red Pepper Salad,” all mixed together with that staple of vegetarian buffets, tofu.

Tofu. Bean curd, or whatever tofu is made of, has to be the most unorganic looking product every devised by man to fool himself into believing he is eating responsibly in regards to his health. It looks like nothing produced in nature and tastes even worse.

But I digress, the real point is to draw a contrast here. On the other buffet, from which I make my plate of take-out, is the real food: beef, turkey, vegetables, gravy, a whole side of salmon…and Chinese food.

Oh yes. Some of the best Chinese food I have ever had. Beef and broccoli, GeneralTso’s chicken, and some of the greasiest, most delicious vegetable spring rolls you will ever eat.

So, as I was piling my take-out container with this fare, along with some green beens and red peppers, I overhear a few words between a couple at the vegetarian buffet.

“Isn’t it funny how we never go to the other buffet?” The young woman tittered cheerily.

“Yeah, I’m glad we don’t,” the young man said, probably lying.

Both the man and the woman were very well dressed, but very young, probably low level Congressional staff. They were not quite young enough to be pages, nor were they wearing the distinctive uniform of pages.

It’s easy to see why Congressmen get themselves into sexual trouble so often. They always hire these young, beautiful people to sit behind the desk in the reception room of their office…and then have to fire them because they start a blog about their sexual exploits, sometimes involving the Senator or Congressman himself.

Well, as the two young people continued their way around the buffet, I looked at their take-out containers and was not a little amused to see that in the man’s case, he had piled his so full he could barely close it. It was like he was packing food for a week-long hike in the Rockies. Or perhaps he thought that because he was eating healthy, he could be a pig.

The young woman, meanwhile, must have been hoping to eventually audition for Nicole Richie’s replacement on The Surreal Life, because she had only a handful of beans and a strip or two of red peppers in her container.

Or perhaps she forgot that Lent was over and was still fasting.

Who knows.

I have witnessed this phenomenon many times, however. When a man and a woman go to lunch, whether there is any chance of romantic possibilities or not, they always eat differently than when they eat alone, or after they get to know each other well. For all I know, the woman may have wanted a Philly cheese steak sub, and the man may have preferred a burger and fries.

But they couldn’t eat what they wanted. They had to appear superior, at least to each other. But the man just couldn’t quite pull it off…thus, his heaping, bulging container of mixed greens, beans, rice, and tofu.

I remember standing behind a man in line at this same buffet, once. He had a platter of salad that looked like it took three illegal immigrants and a fresh manure-producing cow to grow. And he had drenched it with Thousand Islands dressing. Meanwhile, the woman accompanying him had what looked like a small corsage of greens on a saucer, with a quarter-size dab of Ranch (fat free no doubt) on the side.

I felt like asking the man, “At what point does a salad grow so large that it can no longer be considered healthy?”

Maybe a salad is never unhealthy, no matter its size. Maybe these people know something about healthy eating habits that I am missing. In the meantime, I just had some sweet General Tso’s over white rice, green beans, red peppers, and an oily, delicious vegetable spring roll that was about as digestible as a day-old, re-microwaved, gas station hot pocket.

But damn, it was all good.