Inching Toward ... Truthiness.

In yesterday's NYTimes column,

the young black writer replacing David Brooks and Paul Krugman for the day suggests that in his personal journey from "ashy to classy", he might have stumbled upon an inconvenient truth:

His journalistic colleagues, through no effort of their own, are being served up ... overfilled plates of daily bread, in the first place.  That's what -- translating -- I think  Ta-Nehisi Coates is tiptoeing toward:

The waste exists because when it's not a buffet-kinda culture, or one where "you kill what you eat" (not literally always), some are taking way more than they ever could consume simply being overserved:

Whenever this particular incarnation of the culture wars erupts, I think back to my earliest experiences with my august employer, The Atlantic. On the scale of ashy to classy, I was more the former than the latter. But my relationship with the magazine often put me in the dining company of men and women who were not unused to nice things.

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann’s to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants. My new companions had other beliefs, a fact evidenced by our divergent waistlines.

They organized dinners featuring several small courses, most of which were only partially eaten. The general dining practice consisted of buttering half a dinner roll, dallying with the salad, nibbling at the fish and taking a spoonful of dessert. The only seconds they requested were coffee and wine.

I left the first of these dinners in bemused dudgeon. “Crazy rich white people,”  I would scoff. “Who goes to a nice dinner and leaves hungry?”

In fact, they were not hungry at all. I discovered this a few dinners later, when I found myself embroiled in this ritual of half-dining. It was as though some invisible force was slowing my fork, forcing me into pauses, until I found myself nibbling and sampling my way through the meal.

And when I rose both caffeinated and buzzed, I was, to my shock, completely satiated.

Trite, but true ... sometimes less is more.*

Make it a great Saturday yourself out there,
whatever you're putting on your plate to satisfy your daily needs.
-----------------------------

* Know thyself -- always like that one myself too...