Welcome to the United States of Anxiety: Observations from a Reforming Neurotic Read online

  You’re welcome, America.

  The beauty of “AT” (not a thing yet, but I’m trying to make it happen) is its calming emphasis on the topping rather than the panic-inducing bread. I add a poached egg and smoked salmon to mine, in an attempt to ingest the exact amount of protein that makes it possible, nay, necessary, to drink mimosas all afternoon.

  The way AT blew up, I fully assumed that it was the only thing millennials ate, until I made a few millennial friends in a stand-up class at the Second City theater in Chicago. While they were each tremendous avocado fans, they explained that they can’t possibly consume them for every meal, what with their desire to pay rent. Yet, inevitably, every one of their sets included an avocado toast reference.

  Cultural. Freaking. Touchstone.

  It was clear to me that these millennials were caught in a sort of trap—the need to broadcast familiarity, affinity, and intimate interaction with the little green orbs, but also the paradox of lacking the responsibility and wealth that avocados require for full societal immersion. It’s like their Tamagotchis had been reincarnated into a soft-fleshed fruit.

  I mostly consume avocado-based dishes when I’m dining out. I hate buying them at the market. Bringing an avocado into my house feels like holding a live grenade—too much anxiety over when it might detonate. Plus, the whole pit-to-flesh ratio is unnecessarily stressful. There’s precious little more troubling than a fruit that’s all hat and no cattle.

  Once I forgot to make guacamole for a party I’d planned, and consequently found myself with twelve avocados, each achieving peak ripeness at the same time. For a two-day period, I turned into the Bubba Blue of avocados because I didn’t want to waste the approximate cost of my college tuition, circa 1985.

  You know who loves avocados?

  Vegans.

  In fact, no one loves avocados more than they do. I should have invited a whole pack of them over, but I’m not sure I would have been able to make it through the night with my sanity intact.

  Truthfully, if you are what you eat, if you identify yourself by that which you consume, if you tell me you’re a vegan before you mention your first name, we’re gonna have a problem. By “problem,” I mean, “I shall quietly roll my eyes at you inside my own head,” as I am a GD adult who’s too polite to hurt your feelings over that which has zero impact on my life.

  Eat whatever you like, because it’s none of my organic beeswax. Anything entering or exiting any orifice on your body is your choice. I don’t get a say; I don’t want a say. It’s that simple. (Unless you’ve been elected to Congress, apparently.)

  My stand-up instructor was newly vegan. But, honestly, she wasn’t a miserable pain in the ass about it. During our breaks, she’d snack directly from a bag of raw spinach, hand-to-mouthing those leaves like they were Cool Ranch Doritos. She encouraged our class to open sets with whatever obvious facts existed, to eliminate the potential for distraction. Like, if you hobbled onstage in a cast, you’d acknowledge it with a joke immediately, just to get people to stop obsessing about it. Otherwise, the audience would become uncomfortable. She practiced what she preached. Well aware of how weird her grazing looked, she quickly called herself on it, and we simply accepted her behavior as the norm.

  If only we could all be less smug about our self-imposed dietary restrictions. No one is handing out medals for refusing a Diet Coke. I suspect the recently restricted are often self-righteous because they’re trying to convince themselves that things like brie are no longer delicious.

  Good luck with that.

  So if dietary choices are nobody’s business, why are our individual diets such a source of collective interest and anxiety? Why does it feel like it’s everyone’s duty to determine whether the vegetarian at the table takes in enough protein? My friend Quinn has been a vegetarian since long before we met. Ergo, Quinn’s been nourishing herself her whole adult life. Yet, I still must stop myself from pointing out the pastas and salads on the menu whenever we’re out together.

  She knows; she can read.

  This free-floating food anxiety I’ve noticed may be partly due to our newfound indulgence of defining ourselves by what we eat. Per Bon Appétit, there’s a trend toward values-based food purchasing. Sophie Egan explained, “We have always been concerned about how food affects our health, but today we want to know how it affects the health of the planet, plus the well-being of the people who grew, harvested, and prepared it.”12

  To me, the dotted line is “I buy with virtue; thus, I am virtuous.”

  Suddenly, we’re all living that Portlandia skit, enquiring about the life of Colin the chicken.

  You know who never even saw an avocado? My father’s WASPy parents, Nanny and Gaga, who’d been raised entirely on British fare. I can’t confidently say the same for my mother’s parents, though. As Italian immigrants, Noni and Grampa’s diet consisted of whatever washed up on the beach in Sicily. Later, once they’d settled in Boston, their culinary repertoire expanded to include the weeds they picked in the yard and the small animals they trapped in the attic. (I wish this were a joke.) Avocados might well have worked their way into Noni and Grampa’s freegan diet. Environmental conditions were favorable in the volcanic soil around Mount Etna.

  Please note, I’m still stewing about having the only Italian nonna on earth who cooked badly. Noni, who deceptively looked like the kind of woman you’d see depicted on a jar of Prego,13 passed down her disdain for meal prep to my own mother. I’ve repressed most of my memories of meals at Noni’s house, largely due to PTSD, but I do recall her “cookies,” sugar omitted, baked to the consistency of masonry with blackened bottoms. Her Sunday gravy, studded with indeterminate bone shards, was best described as “pointy.” I didn’t know Italian cuisine could be palatable until I got a job at the Olive Garden; I didn’t know it could be transcendent until my first trip to Rome.

  My good grandparents, on the other hand, approached every dinner like a culinary masterpiece, each dish made from scratch, served at precisely five thirty. Nanny’s sour cream chocolate cake caused me to believe in a higher power, such was its divine inspiration. I recall steaming platters of roast beef, fork tender, the ideal proportions of brown and pink. Her vegetables, never too soft or too al dente, were the stuff of legend. Served upon her delicate Noritake china, the brilliant green of the string beans and the traffic-cone orange of the carrots epitomized freshness. Plus, Nanny used a spice so exotic, so delicious, that even at five years old, I demanded to know its name.

  Salt. It was called salt.

  Food, for my family, was never a source of anxiety—even when my mother decided to cook. My father had grown up in an environment where there was a predictability to it, a strict adherence to a schedule. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were served at the same times every day, and that approach was pretty much universal across the country; that was the norm. Meals were square, and snacking was still a figment of our Cheetos-dust-covered imaginations.

  Choices were limited in his childhood. Cooking habits had been dictated by food rationing during World War II. Due to shortages, Americans were encouraged to become more self-reliant by planting victory gardens. They were allotted ration coupons for items that have become the foundation of our (okay, my) diet now—coffee, sugar, bacon, butter, tea, eggs, cereal, cheese, and processed/canned food. If a person ran out of coupons, too freaking bad. They went without, yet they didn’t complain, because they felt they were purposefully sacrificing for the greater good, in solidarity with the boys overseas. So families had to carefully plan their repasts; they had little choice but to eat fresh and avoid waste.

  The uniformity and practicality led my father’s family to have a much less stressful relationship to their kitchen table. The generations before mine didn’t have the same issues with food allergies that we do in present day, largely because they were never exposed to much variety, per Joanna, my college roommate, who’s been a dietitian for almost thirty years.14 Spoiler alert? Everyone ate peanut butter back then. Now, everyone has a problem with something, and ordering a meal is like auditing a chemistry lecture.

  Recently, a group of my friends met for a birthday dinner at a cool molecular gastronomy restaurant. There were ten adults at the table, and every one of us had something we couldn’t—or wouldn’t—eat. My husband, Fletch, said no to snails. Karyn drew the line at “cute” animals, like bunnies and lambs (screw you, ugly pigs), Gina wouldn’t touch avocados, and Lee ate nothing but fruit, vegetables, and fish. Some avoided dairy due to lactose intolerance, others steered clear of nuts. As for me? I once had a bad experience with a beef heart, and now my motto sounds like an Ayn Rand philosophy—Offal Is Awful.

  After we’d narrowly navigated dinner, our server gave us a tour of the kitchen, largely because we were a fun group, despite our dietary proclivities. He showed us their sophisticated order-input system, designed to protect customers with allergies. Each diner was assigned an emoji depicting what they couldn’t ingest. Those who eschewed beef got a cow with a slash through it; those who couldn’t do peanuts got a squirrel with an X over it. People with multiple issues had the emoticon of an angry guy covering his ears and screaming. There were a lot of screaming-dude emojis at our table. I still feel sorry for that lovely waiter and kitchen staff, but our collective guilt resulted in a massive tip. I hope his stress dreams aren’t about us.

  Since 1990, British hospital admissions for food allergies have increased more than 500 percent, and one of the causes is that our diets have changed and expanded to include more processed foods.15

  When I was a kid, my family once took my father’s aunts out for Chinese food at the Hunan Palace outside Boston. Great-Aunts Arabella and Caroline were both in their eighties and had never tried Asian food before. They sang with deligh
t as they sampled their way through meats and vegetables seasoned with chili peppers and garlic. Coming from England by way of Nova Scotia, they had palates shaped by the rationing of both world wars; they had no idea that Asian flavors existed. They weren’t stressing themselves out over whether a menu was “keto” or “raw” or “vegan”—those classifications didn’t yet exist. Access to diverse food was still a novelty.

  In less than one hundred years, we’ve gone from the necessity of my Italian grandparents stuffing anything not still wriggling into their maws to specialized emoji systems and preachy Facebook entries on the ethics of line-caught tuna. While this is certainly our right, perhaps even our responsibility, I wonder how the undernourished of Burundi, 73.4 percent of its population,16 would react to some of our social media shares. If they’d be clamoring to hear more about the audacity of not being served pasture-raised eggs.

  In defining ourselves by our diets, we’ve replaced the stress of not having enough to eat with the need to demonstrate how much better we eat than our peers, while still harboring the deep-seated guilt over exactly how good we have it, what with all the eating. No wonder we get snappy when someone’s sustenance credo differs from ours.

  Social media plays a huge role in our food intake anxiety. There are far too many media out there begging us to share our repasts—built entirely upon the assumption that we will. And not in a Jesus-fishes-and-loaves, agape-love way, I mean featuring shots of our ramen like we’re the paparazzi and it’s Bennifer in their heyday.

  At a sushi restaurant last winter, I watched a gorgeous young couple spend their entire evening photographing their meal. Were the plates stunning? Absolutely. I’m talking orchids tucked between the maki and sashimi, lying on a bed of banana leaves. (Everyone knows flowers = fancy.)

  I’d chosen that restaurant because they had a reputation for quality sushi; the presentation was a bonus. At no point did the two seem to appreciate the freshness of the fish or the ideal consistency of the rice. There I was, savoring every bite of my dragon roll like a sucker.

  I tell myself that I enjoyed the meal more, yet I have no proof that this is true. Those young Adonises could have derived far more satisfaction from their visual feast and (likely) public broadcast. The reality of social media is that I’m the saber-toothed tiger; I’m the one about to go extinct, not those with their cameras in hand. The masses insist that dinner must be ready for its close-up. Chef Ned Bell of the Four Seasons Hotel in Vancouver said, “It affects me when I see a bad review. But it affects me more when someone takes a bad photo of my food. I worry about what my food looks like on the social media world.”17

  Per Ehab Shouly, director of the Tea Terrace on Oxford Street in London, “Today’s dining experience is no longer just about having great food and drink. It’s all about creating unique experiences that our customers can document on Instagram and social media.”18

  Maybe the emphasis is on the experience because millennials spend 44 percent of their food dollars on eating out.19 This trend makes me think about airlines before regulation. The cost of flights was the same across the board, so airlines differentiated themselves through customer experience—the finest amenities and dressing their stewardesses in hot pants. It stands to reason that, if diners can get their avocado toast fix anywhere at a similar price, chefs had best make their presentations stand out.

  After my first stand-up class, my friend Gina, another Gen Xer, and I had a late supper with Sami, a tattooed millennial in combat boots and fishnet tights, and—wait. A word first? If you’re looking to feel past your prime, if you’re hoping to find a way to remain terminally unhip, if you want to revel in the joy of being a painfully suburban dinosaur, then definitely keep the stasis of your current life. But if you seek growth and change, join a group where almost everyone’s twenty-five years your junior. And a smart-ass.

  Enrolling in the class was not my idea, it was Gina’s—a friend I suspect might be a vampire because a) I never see her in daylight, b) she doesn’t age, and c) she’s always drinking red “wine.” Anyway, Gina and I had recently started a podcast together. She’d been through Second City’s improv program years before—possibly decades because, vampire. She rationalized that we could improve our comic timing by learning to perform stand-up. We were well into our second bottle of “pinot noir” when she suggested it.

  Taking a comedy class was something I’d always wanted to do in theory, but I’d never intended to follow through; talking about it was enough. We’d been friends for more than a decade, so Gina knew that I’d agree to anything, given enough vino. She wasn’t wrong.

  In our new class, I felt like Jane Goodall, observing the millennials in their natural habitat. Sure, I’d seen them at a distance, but I’d never interacted with one up close, save for one junior publicist who thought that sending me on a book tour to Michigan during an ice storm was a capital idea. Once, she’d emailed me twenty-six separate times about how to ship a box via UPS, perhaps concerned that I was recovering from a traumatic brain injury and not an Achilles rupture. Of course, misspelled press releases were her home-run swing. For a long time, I assumed that she was representative of her entire generation. Fortunately, she wasn’t.

  I couldn’t believe how open my millennial classmates were, happy to share all the intimate details of their lives with a room of near strangers. Introductions were peppered with instructions on which pronouns they used and a frank discussion of sexuality, whereas I don’t even pee with the door open and I’ve been with my husband for half my life. One woman neatly explained the duality of her identity as a fourth-wave feminist and a professional stripper. Another kept stepping out of class to use his vape pen. I was the only middle-aged, married, straight, white, suburban woman in the room. Dressed in head-to-toe Eileen Fisher, paired with reading glasses, I was a stegosaurus.

  We each had to tell a funny story after the introductions. I recounted an experience I’d had with my college roommate Joanna. We had an (old) girls’ night, attending the opera, then staying at the Peninsula hotel instead of heading back to our respective burbs. At three thirty in the morning, sober and wide awake, I realized my choices were to either drive home or stanch Joanna’s snoring with a pillow. I chose the former.

  What I’ve learned over years of early media calls on book tours is that regardless of how fancy the hotel is—no matter what, at three thirty in the morning, every person leaving the hotel is an escort. Fact. This truth culminated in the desk clerk thinking I was the oldest, fattest, most successful call girl she’d ever seen. The punch line involved my reading glasses. The class of U-neck-T-shirt-wearing whippersnappers laughed, and I discovered that comedy can bridge gaps.

  I was hooked.

  One kid performed a set about giving up animal products after watching a documentary on the dangers of cow farting. He spent three days informing everyone on social media why consuming meat and dairy was bad before he fully understood what telling everyone he was vegan would entail: actually being vegan. He eventually ended up a vegetarian, straddling the comedic fence by mocking both vegans and carnivores. The lesson I learned was, if you’re going to be a jerk about something, make sure you’re funny.

  Anyway, that night, the three of us sat down at Corcoran’s, across the street from Second City. Gina and I did our usual dining out dance—starter salads, wine, whatever entrées caught our fancy. Sami ordered fish tacos off the appetizer menu. Immediately, I spouted a line about “lesbians and their fish tacos,” then winced. The ’80s are over and I’m not the Diceman. Hell, even Andrew Dice Clay is no longer the Diceman; he’s moved on to taking roles in Academy Award–nominated movies. My dining companion’s sexual preferences should not be fodder for my punch lines.

  I quickly sputtered, “I’m so sorry, I’m old and I’m an asshole.”

  Right before class ended, we had covered the Second City credo, which asserts that improv and comedy should be open to everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Considering that my generation had no issue with the movie Soul Man, in which a man applies blackface to secure admission to Harvard—let that sink in for a second—it occurred to me that I might not be the arbiter of contemporary humor. While I’d been up in the suburbs, dicking around in my rose garden, the world had totally changed.