A Glutton for This Love Language: {Are You Gonna Eat That?}

If you’ve ever gotten a meal with me, the odds are you’ve been privy to my secret, odd, love language. I admit it’s pretty weird, but I often can’t help myself in offering it up. It may have been conveyed in an inquisitive tone or a more direct challenge.

Sorry, not sorry that I am curious as to how much you think you can eat.

You can blame Man vs. Food or any of the other gluttony-as-currency-based eating shows I watched in a more impressionable time. You can blame growing up with a brother who excelled at food consumption, who was even better at being competitive. You can blame America’s excess or my lack of conversational skills or whatever you’d like.

Point is, I am going to ask you how many of these delicious tacos you think you could eat. Or how many more slices of pizza you could put down before needing a lot of personal space.

“How many hot dogs can you eat?” is mostly a disgusting question with a potential for mostly disgusting answers.

I don’t want to know about the things happening inside your body to make room for the food or to digest it. I don’t even really care about your specific answer. It’s not like I’m keeping a high score list of who can eat the most, like it’s PacMan. Odds are I won’t even remember the number you say, anyways. That’s not the goal.

It’s the process, the critical thinking, and the way you handle the hypothetical that are so delicious to me.

I want to watch how your brain plays with and maneuvers through the variables. I want to hear you talk it out and decide what follow-ups are worth asking about. I want the group at the table to piece it together, like the rare way that the group project came together when everyone got involved.

If you’ve ever seen the show Hot Ones, you know it’s not just getting to the finish line of the spiciest wing, but working through the journey, that is the best part. It’s all the little tangents and moments between the bites.

My questions are a mental all-you-can-eat buffet, which is the only way to come out unscathed.

I want to watch you arrive at a confident answer about a thing that does not exist and almost certainly will never exist. If you are ever going to actually eat four pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, I am already RSVPing no. Just a few minutes ago, you hadn’t ever considered if you could eat 100 cocktail shrimp, but now I get to see how adamant you are about this thing.

I’m asking because I care about your creativity and hearing your thought processes. I like seeing how worked up you get when someone challenges your answer or your fictional gluttony. Witnessing all that awesome, silly brain power is an activity in which I always want to over-indulge. They say the way to man’s heart is through his stomach, but one of the ways to my heart is through your stomach. Hypothetically.