May 21, 2015 4 min read

So, the farmer and I were trying to decide what to serve for the weekend picnic when he said what I’ve been thinking lately.

“I’m tired of food.”

Me, too. Tired of buying it, cooking it, serving it, cleaning up after it. Tired of eating the leftovers. Anymore, the time between that happy moment when the counters are wiped down at night and the moment when the sauté pan is pulled from the cabinet at 5 o’clock the next afternoon just seems to collapse.

(It’s not lost on me that this is a first-world complaint, and I erased the first couple of paragraphs three times before deciding to continue with this column. I’m grateful that I can buy and grow and cook healthy food. But I suspect that my weariness is pretty common.)

This is probably less about eating the food than preparing it. I enjoy my morning bowl of cereal as much as any meal, ever. But at around 4:30 or so, when the light outside starts to change, I get this pang in my gut, and it’s not hunger. It’s the “what-do-I-make” pang.

Four-thirty is known as the witching hour for babies, when the fussiness starts. When my kids were babies, their crankiness increased as the Earth turned away from the sun. I blamed overstimulation, or their need for sleep. Now I’m thinking it was I who was getting cranky – because it was time to start cooking.

We live in a food-obsessed culture; instead of enhancing our lives, the obsession may be making us food-averse. For every quiet, delicious recipe Ina Garten cooks for her husband, there are a half-dozen less skilled TV chefs yapping into the camera about how “amazing” their chicken is. Get over yourself, people. It’s chicken.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so tired of cooking if I were better at it. Now that my kids are older, they are reflecting back on their hundreds of dinners growing up. They remember the same meal, day after day.

“Magic chicken, brown rice, broccoli, fruit for dessert,” they say, adding, “No wonder we hate brown rice.”

Granted, not the most tantalizing dinner table, but isn’t that how doctors say we’re supposed to eat? Besides, they’re forgetting Tuesday turkey chili night.

Now, my daughter comes home from high school ravenously hungry and looking for food. Because it’s the middle of the afternoon, she has cereal and then isn’t really hungry at dinnertime. I’ll add that to my list of arguments in favor of a longer school day.

Most days, around 4:30, we have this conversation:

Daughter: What’s for dinner?

Me: Turkey burgers and couscous (for example)

Daughter makes grumbling noise – not hunger-related

I can’t say I blame her. I’m tired of turkey burgers, too.

Twenty-some years into this, dinner takes on a certain Groundhog Day feeling. Maybe I need some new recipes. Maybe I need to stop watching television. Maybe we should just stop eating dinner altogether.

Somehow, our stomachs don’t get the message that we’re tired of eating, and 5:30 will come around and we’ll be looking for something to eat. I thought about serving cereal for our weekend picnic. Wheaties, and Lucky Charms for dessert.

Actually, I suggested hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. The farmer suggested just hot dogs.

“Hamburgers are too much work,” he said.

Like I said, a first-world complaint.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.