Lent once was an entire season of fasting. All the food that would spoil during Lent (before the day of refrigerators and freezers) had to be eaten or thrown out. So a day of feasting took place the day before the kickoff to Lent. Hence Fat Tuesday. Eventually it morphed into a day to get all the sin out of your system before the fasting and repenting season which is where Mardis Gras comes from. Since we decided to start our fasting on Sunday (42 days before Easter), Saturday was our "Fat Saturday."
The nature of our experiment is to confront the issues we have with over-eating and wasting food while the majority of the world goes hungry. We do not intend to starve our bodies or punish ourselves. We just need to gain some perspective, to discover what it means to be mindful and responsible with food and even to experience the want of food in ways similar to the want of the world, the want of the poor. As a sort of nod to the culture of the child who we sponsor in India, there are a few Indian queues we will take in food choice. One of those includes eating fish and chicken occasionally and no other meat.
Having shared a love affair with beef all our lives, our Fat Saturday menu included BBQ tri-tip sandwiches, fries and soda for lunch and tacos for dinner followed by banana splits for dessert. I said repeatedly throughout the day, this is your last chance! Eat whatever you want! But the Lord had already started working in me to match my gluttonous appetite with a sadness over it's existence. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed every bite, but I stopped myself from jumping from privilege to pig.
This morning, it began. I opened the fridge, saw the leftover taco meat and immediately started coming up with excuses for why we should eat it and eat it right away. However, I realized it was that old food-crisis-anxiety welling up in me so I talked myself down and walked away. For breakfast on this Day 1, I had half of a plain slice of wheat bread, 1/4 of an apple and some water. For lunch I had a scoop of rice and a scoop of bell pepper/onion sauteed in 1/4 oz tsp of butter and a glass of water. I'm still hungry. 5 hours and counting before dinner. For dinner, I am cooking beans, reheating rice and maybe making a couple tortillas since in India they too have beans, rice and a flat, round bread. Probably nothing alike to my Mexican version, but common ground is common ground so I'll embrace it.
Realization: I'm hungry but I know I'll have another meal today. Not many people can take comfort in knowing they'll have a third meal.
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