Pittston Dispatch // PD Columnists // Ed Ackerman - Optimist

Sunday October 04, 2009 | 01:00 AM

I try to stay away from fast food restaurants, but it might surprise you to know it’s not because I think the food is unhealthy. All the medical experts claim it is, and maybe they’re right, but that’s not why I stay away.

And it’s certainly not because I think the food not palatable. Au contraire. I love to sink my teeth into a Double Whopper with cheese or a Big Mac.

And the fries. Don’t get me started on the fries.

No, what turns me off about fast food restaurants is not the food at all. It’s the fast.

I don’t know what it is – maybe the power of suggestion – but every time I eat at a fast food restaurant I eat fast. I mean really fast. I wolf down a burger in three bites and stuff my mouth with French fries like someone is going to take them away from me.

It’s sick, I know. But I can’t help it.

I eat at a fast food place and I look like every single dog I’ve ever known at meal time and one in particular, Penny the dachshund.

Penny, a pampered pooch if there ever were one, was served her meal – a cooked meal, by the way – every day at 4 p.m. She’d prepare for it by standing next to her dish and crying for 45 minutes. Then she’d eat it in 15 seconds.

That’s me at McDonald’s.

Sans the crying.

I even suck on the straw in my milkshake until I’m either out of breath or have that godforsaken pain in my eyebrow.

I need help.

And unfortunately, not just at McDonald’s.

I’ve discovered I need help at home, too. That’s what prompted all of this.

After teaching my Monday night class last week, I walked into the house at nearly 10 p.m. and proceeded to devour the lovely meal Mary Kay had waiting for me while standing up – standing up! – in the kitchen as I flipped through the mail.

I’m too old for that kind of behavior. Or at least, one would think, too smart.

My excuse was that I was “starved” – something we Americans love to say without considering what the word really means.

I was starved, or more appropriately ravenous Monday night because between breakfast – at 5 a.m. – and my stand-up supper at 10, I had consumed nothing but a packet of six peanut butter crackers somewhere around noon.

That was my lunch.

I’m ashamed to say, that’s always my lunch.

I used to call such items “machine cuisine” but I don’t any more because instead of paying 75 cents in a vending machine I now buy them bulk at the super market and keep them in a file cabinet. It took me about five years to get that clever.

I must confess further that more often than not, I eat those six crackers without knowing I did.

I’m not kidding. I’ll reach for another one, find the wrapper empty and wonder where my crackers went. They went into my mouth without me even noticing. That’s because I was reading my email.

I don’t want to be that guy. I want to eat slowly. I want to savor my food, even mass produced peanut butter crackers.

And appreciate it.

I don’t want to be the American my friend, and Mary Kay’s cousin Joe Nicastro asked me about as we dined in his home near London a few years ago.

Somewhere between course one – which wasn’t served until Joe had said grace and given his wife a kiss, his way of saying thank you for preparing the food – and course seven, Joe said he had heard American families do not sit down together for their evening meal as his family does every night. He wanted to know if this were true.

I was embarrassed at how I had to answer his question.

I told him in most American homes, there is no such thing as an evening meal, not a regular one, anyway. And if there is some semblance of one, rarely are all family members present.

Joe found that sad.

So do I.

I’m not sure, however, anything can be done about it. Not across America and not even in my own home.

But I want to at least try. And I guess I figure confessing here in print might be the first step.

And if some of you see yourself in me, and perhaps also yearn for the days when we were kids and our families did enjoy a slow supper the way the Nicastros of London still do – a meal peppered with conversation as well as spices – you will join me in my quest.

But I have to end this now.

Lunch has arrived.

No peanut butter crackers on Saturdays at the Dispatch. I’m having a turkey club on wheat toast.

Eaten, of course, right here at my computer. My goal for today is to remember it.

It’s a start.