My Dog is Chelsea

I consider myself to be a pretty good eater. A good eater, according to my eaters-in-crime, Claire and Ellie, is someone who eats extra fries, holds the low-cal, and never leaves a scrap behind. When the three of us lived in Chicago, we spent a good majority of our free time traveling from gyro joint to hot dog stand to Dunkin’ Donuts. A meal wasn’t complete without a pint of Leine’s Red and fried cheese curds.

Claire and Ellie argue that I am not, in fact, a good eater. I am—sin of all sins—on a diet. “Remember that time you ordered a salad?” Ellie likes to ask. She uses my salad-eating as evidence. “Yeah, but it was an appetizer!” I argue. “I ate a hamburger afterwards—the whole thing!” But to Claire and Ellie, that’s not good enough. Appetizer or not, salad is diet food.

One day I ordered a chicken gyro instead of a regular one. My meal came, and Claire and Ellie eyed my plate first with suspicion, then with disdain. “Are you dieting?” Claire interrogated. “I don’t think that’s acceptable.”

And so life was for the four cold months we lived in Chi-town. We took pride in our eating habits—we were good eaters, and we weren’t going to let some half-baked low-carb craze get the best of our appetites—although we could eat a pint of Half-Baked and then head out for dinner. I put on a few pounds that winter, which I suppose I needed for insulation anyway, and after I moved home I had to detox—all that fatty food did a number on my digestive system. Claire and Ellie would be very upset to hear that I actually dieted. To them, dieting was less of an insult to the body as it was to our friendship.

And on some level, they are right. Our friendship grew from our mutual appreciation of fine food—fried chicken and mozzarella sticks—and abandoning its basis is to reject our commonality.

A year later, when we were back in Colorado, I was deep in my thesis with no end in sight. I had read chapters upon chapters of development theory and had no clear vision for my work—I was in over my head and wanted nothing but for the whole project to disappear. One night, I arrived back from the library, tired and starving, knowing I had no food nor time to prepare it. I was panicked—the way I get when I’ve been procrastinating for too long and can’t figure out what to do next. I needed help.

And I found it, on my front porch. There were Claire and Ellie, sitting out in the cold, drinking malt liquor and eating from a bucket of chicken wings. “We brought you food!” they explained, offering me libations. But it was more than just food—it was forty ounces of Colt 45 and garlic parmesan chicken wings—and it was our friendship.

One day in Chicago we organized an “appetizer tour.” We went to various Hyde Park restaurants, ordered an appetizer, ate it, and moved on to the next—coconut shrimp at Calypso Cafe, peach chicken wings at the Cajun place, crab rangoon and pot stickers at Noodles, Etc., and spring rolls at Pizza Capri. The food was great, although Claire and Ellie were a little dissatisfied with the pot stickers, which were my suggestion—”They weren’t fried,” complained Ellie. “Are you dieting?”—but overall, we decided, we were pretty damn good at menu planning, and even better at eating. One of us suggested after the appetizer tour that we should write a book about food, or at the very least a manifesto declaring our superior eating habits. So this entry is for both of them, two of my favorite people in the world and the best eaters I know. Consider this Chapter One.