One of my big executive function struggles is feeding myself.
I live alone (apart from the cat). I lose track of time when I’m involved in a project, and I don’t feel hungry so much as tired a lot of the time, which tends to lead to the wrong solution.
I hate taking five minutes to make myself food. If I have energy, it feels like I’m wasting time that could be spent writing or researching or whatever. And if I don’t have energy… FUCK. Even peeling a banana is beyond me.
When I drove to work, pre-pandemic, this often meant Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast, Burger King for dinner, maybe head over to the bakery for a sandwich at lunch. I’d try not to do all three on the same day, but… I never had the patience to make food.
But now I work from home in the suburbs. There’s not a lot of places in easy driving distance, and only a few of them deliver. Food I get through Uber Eats or Grub Hub arrives cold. Always. I’m signed up to one of those weekly meal delivery services but they keep raising the prices and now I’m down to 4 meals a week.
I’m not asking for money, btw. I can afford to feed myself, I just don’t have the energy.
Now, in today’s society, this is considered lazy. Inefficient. How many times have we seen people saying working class people waste their money on fast food, and don’t they realize it’s cheaper to buy and cook healthy fresh foods? And you can say over and over again about the cost of exhaustion, but there’s still this sense of “no, you should be able to do this, just like everyone always has, this generation is just lazy…”
Not just from other people. Got that voice in my head, too.
And whenever it starts to get abusively loud, I just remind myself:
Working class apartments in Ancient Rome didn’t have kitchens. Apartment blocks (insulae) had shops on the ground floor, especially bakeries and places that sold quick hot food you could eat on your way to work, maybe with a few seats along a bar where you could rest for five minutes on your break.
Not just a few. These were goddamn EVERYWHERE.
We’ve known for two thousand years that people who work all day don’t have the energy or resources to cook for themselves. Longer, because Rome didn’t invent this, it’s just well-known there cuz Rome.
Anyway. I think if as a society we just accepted that “people don’t have the energy to cook but still need healthy food” is a real and valid issue, we could find some affordable fucking solutions. And step one is to stop blaming people (and ourselves) for not having that energy.
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