Researchers say Americans are dramatically changing our eating habits. For example, did you know that only 15% of our meals require the use of an oven? And the traditional three-meal-a-day regimen is disappearing faster than a cowboy’s wages. The fastest growing segment of our new diet is just that… fast food.
Pillsbury coined a phrase to describe this new breed of eaters, they call them “Chase and Grabbits” and they currently represent 26% of all eaters. These are young urbanities who live alone or with roommates. If married, they’re childless and both spouses work. They simply don’t have the time, money or desire to eat three traditional meals at home.
It’s not just cows that graze these days as “grazing” has become the hottest trend amongst those of us who like to eat, which includes most of us. Grazing might be new to urbanites but it’s nothing new to cowboys. I’ve been on a lot of ranches and I gotta say I’ve only seen a handful of obese cowboys and I think I know why. Have you ever seen a Thermos or a lunch bucket tied to the saddle of a real cowboy? I haven’t. Most cowboys I know eat two meals a day. They might eat a big breakfast in the morning before heading out for the day or they might skip breakfast and have big noonday meal.
(Let’s get something straight right off the bat. In my neck of the woods the meal you eat at noon is called lunch but elsewhere it’s called dinner which we eat at supper, which I’ve never eaten in my life because I eat dinner. Got it? Good, I’m glad we got that straight.)
I call this trend to eating two meals a day the ‘Starve and Gorge Diet’. Neither my wife or I have ever been fat. My Doctor said that a man my age (73) should weigh what he weighed in high school, which was 155 pounds and that is what I weigh now. One of the keys to my being thin is I spent a lot of time at my Grandparent’s home and my wonderful Grandma, bless her beautiful soul, was not what you’d call a great cook. Her three favorite ingredients were salt, ketchup and burnt. I swear she sometimes served up meals that would have killed a hog and I attribute this as to why my Grandpa and I were thin our entire adult lives.
As for my wife, she’s always maintained a fabulous figure and she does it by watching her carbs and skipping breakfast. And sometimes she even skips dinner if she has eaten a large meal at lunch. She doesn’t snack during the day and by following this diet she is in perfect health.
The Indians are also sporadic eaters and they say that we English uninvited interlopers are the only people on earth who look at their watch to see if they are hungry. They make a good point. How many times have you promptly sat down to your evening meal when you just weren’t all that hungry but your wife had set the table for two with food for five and you had to eat every crumb or else your wife got hurt because you “didn’t like her cooking?” And the next day when you weighed yourself the scale groaned.
I used to travel with a guy who lived by the Starve and Gorge Diet and he usually ate only one meal a day that he usually got some poor sucker to pay for. (Me, in most cases.) Although he was skinny the proprietors who owned the all-you-can-eat buffets that are popular in New Mexico cringed when they saw him coming and tried to hang up a closed sign before he could enter. One such owner said that my buddy was the 12 best customers he ever had. He’s the only person I know who ate the 72 ounce steak at the Big Texan in Amarillo thereby getting it for free.
I thought of trying to do the same thing one time when I was in Amarillo and was so hungry I could eat a saddle blanket but my frugal nature prevented it because if you don’t eat the steak and all the fixins in one hour you have to pay for all of it.
