"None of Us are Going to Starve to Death"

Something about me: I grew up feeling like my family was poor, but we really weren’t. My dad went through some surprising job changes, and my mom was incredibly anxious, but at no point was it even a question that I would have enough to eat. In fact, I often refused to eat the food I was offered - I was a very picky eater, and the rule in my house was that you either ate what was offered, or you didn’t eat. And I remember, even as a pretty small child, thinking, “that works for me - I’ll see you at breakfast.”

I have a strange relationship with food - which, honestly, I think many, many people do - but food insecurity has never come into play for me.

That’s still true, absolutely. Even though I can’t just waltz into a grocery store whenever I want and have the full cornucopia of the world laid out before me, my cupboards and my fridge and the two freezers I own are all full. It’s something I’ve said multiple times to my husband as a way to address anxiety: “none of us* are going to starve to death.”

But, three paragraphs of disclaimers aside, I can’t help but notice how much safer and more comfortable and more light-hearted I feel today, after having made a grocery store run and stocked up on food for the next two weeks. Today, I can eat whatever I feel like eating - yesterday, when I down to the heels of my last loaf of bread, I felt it, even though I knew that I was getting groceries today, and then even if I didn’t get bread, I would get *something*. A number of really big dominoes would have to fall for me to not be able to have bread, but something way back in my caveman brain picked up the scent of me not having a particular thing to eat, and starting ringing all sorts of alarms.

Tonight, I get to have scrambled eggs and toast for dinner, and sometimes that’s my fallback too-tired self-care dinner. But I bet tonight I’m going to really *feel* how lucky I am, and enjoy how delicious it is.

*In this case, by “none of us,” I mean me, my husband, and my husband’s parents who live next door. I’m definitely conscious of the fact that there are people constantly starving to death all of the time, and probably more in this crisis situation. And I hate that.