my experience tonight at the outback steakhouse

today tara and i went out to eat at the outback steakhouse. when she menstruates, she craves blood and warm, rare red meat. she is not the only girl i have known to crave red meat when menstruating. someone i dated a while back claimed to be a proud vegetarian 29 days of the month. during the other days she would eat a pastrami sandwich. so, based on these two experiences, females craving hemo iron is not unheard of to me. as far as iron absorption is concerned, iron from meat is a far better and easier choice than getting iron from plant sources, but discussing that is not the point of this blog. i will talk about that some other day.

tara likes her fillets warm, but rare. and so she ordered steak but i did not. instead, i had two cesar salads and steamed broccoli (salad has cheese and anchovies flavoring, broccoli is in butter). while watching her eat piece after piece of her red raw steak, i was able to reflect on why i ate steak in the past and why i started getting the urge to order a steak for myself during the meal. at once point a few years ago, we ate at the outback several times a week. often after eating steak my stomach felt slightly heavy and my body felt a tad slow, but that is nothing unusual considering the amount of rich foods i consumed. i heard somewhere that during digestion, thirty percent of our energy gets devoted to digestion, thus we become tired. but anyway, my mouth tells a very different story than my body does. the pleasure of having warm, fatty red meat that melts in my mouth is amazing. it truly is a delicious culinary sensation. the simi-raw fatty meat does not need chewing. the juicy fat lubricates the pieces so they can slide down my throat with ease. but instead had my way with cold, crunchy romaine lettuce, creaming dressing with black pepper spice and a side of brocoli. while both were good, they were pale in comparison to the pleasure of warm red, rare meat in my mouth.

as tara ate her last bite, i had a realization.

here are the key i spoke of: sensation and pleasure. for me, eating meat is hedonism.

alarmingly, the kt tunstall song “suddenly i see” played on the over head speakers. that song is about self-realization and empowerment. the video for that song has kt looking and touching at her reflection in a standing mirror. and so i too had a realization at that very moment: i ate steak because of the pleasurable, physical sensation in experience in my mouth. the calorie and nutritional reasons are secondary.

is pleasure good or bad?

i wonder.. what if i choose to give in to temptation and ordered a steak for myself? that song surely would have still played on the overhead speakers at the end of our meal. what would i have thought then? suddenly i see that simply eating steak is ok? or would i still have the epiphany that eating steak is about hedonism?

note: tara received mild stomach problems, food poisoning from the outback steakhouse. this has never happened before, but is always a risk when eating food.