By “literally” I mean “figuratively.” And by “you” I mean “I.”

1. Apple Fritter

A fun story that explains a good chunk of my childhood:

I was on a road trip with my family through Labrador, because that was a thing my mom wanted. The first and last time my dad joined us for a road trip. (Other years: “My job. Stuff to do. Need quiet. You go. Take kids.”) We stopped to get gas in a small town and my mom gave me $2 to get a snack we could all share from the bakery next door. I walk into the bakery and lo, they sell gigantic, dinner-plate-sized apple fritters.

They were the perfect kind of fritters. Crispy on the outside from a heavy glaze and a hard deep fry. Chewy dough on the inside with chunks of apple, and I think raisins. And, again, huge.

The fritters were a day old and they were on sale. 50 cents each. I had two dollars.

For the next six hours, I ate apple fritters. My mom, dad, and brother each had a bite or two of theirs, then said “yup, great. Good job.” Then I said “if you’re not going to eat it…” And I took my reward.

I pretended not to notice the looks of disgust. With me, with the fritters. I pretended not to feel ashamed. And at first I wasn’t. But really, no person alive could eat so much apple fritter and not let the hatred creep in after a while.

I was a pudgy kid, not really fat, and I grew to be a fairly trim adult. I don’t want to describe my family’s attitude as “fat shaming,” which is a loaded term and a lot of people have it worse than I ever did. But it got borderline, and I ate an amount of food that kept true obesity on an uncomfortable horizon for those inclined to predict my future. This was the moment that my parents had their greatest opportunity to manifest their anxieties, in both words and stink-eyes. A road trip through Labrador gives a family a lot of time to talk about feelings.

I’ve had maybe two or three apple fritters since that day over 20 years ago. Like my parents and my brother, I enjoy it for a bite or two. And I mean, I really enjoy it. It is truly the perfect food. But after a few bites, if I eat it slowly enough to pause for a moment of reflection, I have to deal with my feelings. More often, those feelings start bubbling up even before I can bring myself to purchase a fritter in the first place.

2. Aperitifs and Digestifs

I love cocktails in concept. Elaborate alcoholic drinks, delicious, made from artisanal products some of which can be made in the home and given as presents to loved ones? What’s not to love.

Well, it’s hard to love them when they just don’t fit into your life. What kind of person has a spare hour before dinner to sip a fancy, expensive artisanal liquid product with no redeeming nutritional value, presumably while speaking with other adults and not, you know, working and raising children? What kind of person has an hour for that after dinner? Italians, ok. Alcoholics, sure. Old people. Underemployed but financially stable adults without children, if such things exist.

I do not fall into any of those categories. I have a cabinet full of liqueurs and whiskies and other nice liquids--hey, I’m rich!--and I never drink them. I look at my cabinet and I think, you lunatic, who the fuck do you think you are.

3. Profiteroles, Eclairs, Boston Cream Doughnuts

I must have been eight or nine, bored stiff watching my brother’s little league game with my dad, when some parent showed up with two dozen doughnuts only to find there were but five or six of us watching the game. “Well, help yourselves, I guess…”

As I approached the box for my fourth cream-filled doughnut, my dad said “Hey, come on.”

That’s as close as he’s ever come to writing a novel.

I don’t feel any shame about this. Good lord, did I really need to be told? Does anyone? Who eats four doughnuts--cream-filled or not--in one sitting?

Off the top of my head, I can think of three other times in my life when I’ve eaten four or more doughnuts in the space of an hour. To be fair, one of them was a doughnut-eating contest, which I lost badly after eating only ten, and then I threw up and went home.

Cream-filled pastries, though, any kind. Boy, what a combo. You got the fried dough. You got the chocolate coating, usually. You got the fucking vanilla pudding inside.

The difference between cream-filled pastries and apple fritters is that with apple fritters, I’m blocked by a twinge of shame I feel over the person I used to be and the way I was made to feel about being that person. There is no such external force required to make me hate myself for eating a chocolate eclair. I just no longer have a body that can process an eclair without bloating and building fat stores and wheezing as it steps onto an escalator.

4. Funnel Cake

From the movie Snowpiercer:

Like an aquarium (or, as the movie posits more seriously, the earth and human society), your body requires a balance of nutrients. Especially as I get older, fried, sugary, starchy foods are to my body as sushi to the aquarium.

Like many young men, I played some high school sports and the odd pick-up game and exercised now and again well into my twenties. By twenty-eight, I’d gained thirty pounds against my full-grown weight of ten years earlier, and it wasn’t muscle. Moreover, I couldn’t just randomly join a pickup game of basketball without warming up and stretching and being careful not to roll my ankles. My muscles and joints just couldn’t handle any kind of disruption without sending pain signals into my brain: “hey, idiot, you have to treat yourself better.”

And my digestive system was the same way: of course, as a kid, I could eat almost anything (see above). Maybe I would gain weight, but that never bothered me, maybe not even as much as it should have, given that I never connected my physique and loathsome eating habits and manners to my failure to attract women. But alas, I am older now and in addition to understanding basic human behaviors a little better, I’m much more in tune with my digestive system and my digestive system is much more temperamental.

In other words, when I eat fried, sugary, starchy foods, I get that same message from not just my stomach, but my entire body and my brain itself: “hey, idiot…” My brain feels like it’s been awake for thirty straight hours watching superhero movies. (Which are dumb and repetitive and fascist. Fight me.) My stomach feels like it’s about to blow stew chunks out my butt, which my butt does. And the rest of my body feels like, well, not moving.

And yet, sometimes these foods, like funnel cake, are worth eating because they are really fucking delicious. Delicious enough to be worth feeling a lot of unpleasant feelings, I guess. At least, in the moment before you swallow, it feels that way.

Here’s the thing: it takes a lot of “treating myself better” to get myself to a place where I think my body can handle a funnel cake well enough that it’s worth however I’m going to feel after that. It takes consistent, diligent exercise and healthy eating habits to feel like you can indulge that way, even for a moment. (There are entire nutritional systems, a.k.a. Diets, built around bringing you to this feeling, this place. It’s called having a “cheat day.” Cheat day diets are for people who exercise more regularly and intensely than I’m able to, and can eat far more strictly than I can. I have a job and a child, I can’t control my life that way.)

Off the top of my head, I’d say maybe once every couple of months I feel capable of eating a funnel cake. And I’d say maybe once every couple of years I’m at a carnival or amusement park or some other place that serves funnel cake. How often do the two line up? About as often as one eats sushi from fish grown on a damn train.

5. French Fries

Two differences between french fries and funnel cake: (1) no sugar, and (2) french fries are culturally unavoidable.

I can’t give up on french fries. What would I eat with my grilled beef products? It’s inconceivable.

I can, however, limit myself to fries once a month. So far that restriction has been pretty liveable.

6. Steamed Broccoli

Sigh.

Just kidding. Eat that shit up, big boy.

7. Factory Meat

It’s awfully tempting to buy pork roasts for $2 a pound, or steak for $4 a pound. And it can be really delicious meat, too! Really fatty. But there’s a reason it costs five times as much at the farmer’s market, and it’s not “animal welfare,” which I’m not sure is intrinsically valuable.

Questioning the ethics of our meat consumption is a dark path.

The reason meat costs five times as much at the farmer’s market is that raising animals safely, without the use of dangerous chemicals, costs a lot of money. And paying workers a living wage costs money. There is no responsible way to grow meat and sell it at the prices charged by low-end supermarkets.

I know there are millions of people who can’t afford quality meat. Heck, I eat a lot of eggs, sardines, tofu, and beans...and also meat, because, again, rich. So I try not to begrudge anyone individually for making the choice to eat that garbage.

As a society, though, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. As a society, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. It has a nice ring to it. So true, for so many reasons...

As a society, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

Foods So Good You Literally Cannot Eat Them