Eating on the edge

Perfectly edged.

You know when you haven't blogged in so long that Squarespace makes you sign in again? Yes, that? Well, guess what? I'm still not blogging. I've been writing like crazy, just not here. One day soon, I will blog again here. It's just that the muse is elsewhere, and I figure as long as the muse is musing (or amusing, ha, sorry), you follow her where she goes, and you don't ask too many questions.

Instead of writing a blog postabout not blogging, though, what I'm actually here today to tell you is that I wrote something else for somewhere else. Psych! This week, I'm blogging over at Interfaith Family, about my own family's perfectly charming inability to just cut a piece of cake and eat it, for God's sake:

To the untrained eye, to the casual outside observer of our family rituals, it would be tempting to assume that edging is a way of pretending that we aren’t actually eating dessert even though we are. And there may be some very slight truth in that. After all, a sliver of Bundt cake or a corner of a pecan flan has, objectively, fewer calories than an entire serving. But that’s only part of the story. Look, we’re not trying to fool ourselves, and we are not stupid: None of us actually imagines that a long, narrow strip of brownie is calorie-free, nor are we unaware that a pie consumed in 63 Tetris-shaped chunks still contains exactly the same number of calories as a pie cut into a dozen normal pieces.

It’s just that we like to eat our desserts this way. Edging is the way that we’ve always done things. It’s what feels comfortable. You know you’re home, with family, when you can walk by that plate of cookies and break off a chunk and pop it in your mouth, and everyone will think that that is a perfectly reasonable thing. Take a whole cookie and just eat it? On a plate? That would be uncouth. That’s not what we do.

Read the rest over at Interfaith Family. And happy edging.