Anxiety/Snacking
I want to know what the difference is between anxiety and snacking? Aren't they one and the same? Especially this past year. As we traverse this strange Covid territory. Lives and worlds have been devastated. We have been frightened in ways not ever known or registered.
We have a snack shelf. It appeared long before Covid. My husband, Robert, has filled it, but I too participate. It is one of those shelves that glides in and out on expensive, stainless steel runners. Our architect said we must have some, and I am forever grateful each time one of them slides silently from within to reveal mason jars of rice or beans. Or on another, the baking shelf, there is cake flour and chocolate chips, cardamom pods and honey. But the most unexpected and elaborate is the snack shelf.
A few years ago, I requested the Thanksgiving poster from Whole Foods, "Tis the season for snacking." I taped it on the wall behind the snack shelf. There has been no specific season for snacking since Covid arrived to keep us indoors, and snacking seemed to pick up in direct correlation to our anxiety.
Robert requested a case of six packages of seeded flatbread. Made in Brooklyn. We discovered them at our neighborhood cheese shop. He opens a package and keeps a certain number of crackers fresh in a smaller, plastic container. The rest stay in the original package, sealed in Ziploc until the first set has been consumed. Next came the chocolate bars. Also bought in bulk with a 10 percent discount. Then food bars and licorice. For me, it was a bin of larger than life Junior Mints from Trader Joes. Initially I allowed myself one, or at most two, a day. But this wasn't enough as my anxiety about if or when or how I would contract the virus grew in direct proportion to sleepless nights and spontaneous tears.
I then discovered bags of "snacking chocolate" as I waited in an early morning line of masked seniors the first time I ventured out to Rainbow Grocery.I had decided that trips to the corner store needed to be augmented by more than enough almonds for one batch of my homemade granola. I saw many flavors of snacking chocolate. Dark chocolate with almonds and coconut, and other combinations hardly noted since anything reminiscent of a Mounds bar is definitely worth a snack. I added my snacking chocolates to the snack shelf with its giant mints, seeded flatbread and mango licorice.
Meals were barely finished before we would slide the custom-made pantry doors aside and silently roll out the snack shelf. I condoned the added sugar and calories as necessary to veer me ever so slightly from the anxiety always just out of reach. I don't think my husband would have labeled his procurement of flatbread as indicative of pandemic panic.
As the world has begun reopening and my vaccination status is complete, I wonder about the snacking. I still open the plastic tub of mints at least once a day. Robert has cut back on the flatbread, though just today he happily returned with a case of dark chocolate, toffee bars.
Now there is anxiety about variants and wondering what extra precautions we might take for two summer wedding trips, one to Chicago and one to Hawaii. Perhaps I will pack a tub of mints, and for Robert at least one package of flatbread.