Like Mother, Like Daughters (8) (Patreon)

Breakfast was so heavy it managed to tide her over for most of the day. She actually crawled straight into bed and took a nap right when she got home, too sleepy from the surge of sugar in her blood to stay awake and write. When she finally woke up, bleary-eyed and still bloated, she started writing her first ever review. Better to do it while she still felt full than tomorrow, when she would inevitably start to get distracted by hunger again.

As her stomach continued to grumble through the digestion process, she couldn’t help but feel guilty about how much she’d eaten. It was so unlike her. She’d never been one to stuff her face like that. It was the first time she’d ever ordered more than a single entree for herself at a restaurant, and the realization of how many calories she’d consumed in one sitting was unsettling to her. Was this how easy it was to slip into the kind of gluttony her mother had made a lifestyle of?

Again, she reminded herself that it was a little different. She had eaten what she had for her job, and to try and keep herself going for another few days until she could eat again. She wasn’t just gorging herself for the fun of it, and it wasn’t something she would be doing once she actually had paychecks coming in and could afford to have groceries in the house.

She told herself to let it go, once again. This was made difficult by the fact that she had to sit and dwell on everything she’d eaten for hours as she typed. Whenever she felt stuck, she poked around and looked at the newspaper’s food section archives, trying to learn the style and conventions that were expected.

The process was altogether easier than she had imagined. Veronica had never considered herself particularly inclined toward writing. She’d never struggled with it, but writing assigned essays in high school and college had always been a slog. This was… well, it was work, but it was pleasant work. She was enjoying thinking up creative descriptions of the food and the atmosphere of the restaurant. It was new to her, so the process wasn’t smooth, and she knew she would need plenty of guidance from her editor, but she felt content.

The only real problem arose when she woke up the next day and needed to finish what she was writing. Reading back over what she’d written had her salivating. She figured that was a sign she was doing something right, but in the moment it just made her hungry. She tried to finish it as quickly as she could, sending it off to Andrea and then diving into research about the next place she wanted to review.

It would’ve been easy enough to find another place where she could order an overabundance of food and just shovel it all in again. Part of her wanted to. Part of her felt like she might need to just to make it until she got paid. But she also wanted to keep her job and impress her new boss. So she looked for prestigious places–the ones the glossy food magazines and websites covered breathlessly every time they introduced some new ridiculous dish that, to a person like Veronica who knew nothing about fancy food, sounded like they were serving whipped air on a plate. As much as Veronica abstained from overindulging when she ate, she did actually like food, and the idea of shelling out hundreds of dollars to be served a couple bites of nothing was bizarre to her.

Still, this was the kind of thing people who read food reviews in the local paper wanted to know about. There was an abundance of new restaurants the paper had never reviewed. Some were Michelin-starred, even.

Not wanting to embarrass herself, Veronica decided her next outing would be to a place run by a chef who owned restaurants all over the world. He specialized in “high-concept dining,” apparently, and had a reputation for curating memorable experiences. He’d opened his latest restaurant in their city–a notable shift, given his restaurants were mostly in big cities like New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Singapore. It definitely seemed like it was worth a visit, and she figured it would be a good chance to learn more about a type of dining she had never encountered before.

She was able to book a reservation for later that week. She dressed up nicely, wearing a short red cocktail dress she almost never had occasion to wear and matching red heels. The dress had previously fitted her tightly, hugging her muscular thighs and backside. She remembered it being almost too tight. Even after her breakfast binge, though, it was loose on her. She turned around in front of the mirror as she was getting ready and looked over her shoulder. The firm soccer player’s ass she’d always had seemed to have nearly disappeared. She was grateful the dress had a pair of thin straps over the shoulders, as her bust had shrunk, too. The whole thing hung from her frame now. It was odd to look at herself and think she needed to gain weight.

Veronica felt a little embarrassed as she walked up to the podium at the restaurant. The hostess greeted her with a serious smile. “Welcome to The Swineherd, miss,” she said before showing Veronica to her table.

The restaurant was not quite what the budding reviewer had expected. It looked more like a neighborhood brewery or a nice pizza restaurant. Everything was made of warm wood and dark metals. The lighting was centered over each table, so it looked like there were spotlights shining down, the rest of the dining area left dim. When she sat down, she felt like she was onstage. “The theme of tonight’s meal is Pressure,” the hostess told her. “We hope you learn something.”

Veronica thought that was an odd way to introduce a meal, but she was entirely out of her element with no idea of what was normal. She ordered herself a modestly-priced (at least for this place) glass of red wine. There was no menu; everyone who arrived would be served the same five courses, and from what Veronica had been able to find out on the internet, it was always a mystery what it would be.

When her first course was served, she thought her eyes might pop out of her head. It was a massive steak, sat on a plate far too small for it, the juices dripping down onto the wooden table. The waiter also set an hourglass on the table. “This course will last exactly 27.6 minutes. That is the time of the average commute for an American worker.” The waiter flipped the hourglass. “It is important that you finish.”

The ex-soccer player stared down at the slab of meat in front of her. She was glad she liked steak, at least. She grabbed her knife and fork and dug in. The meat was so buttery soft she almost didn’t need her knife. The flavor was impeccable. The hourglass kept her aware of the time limit, and even though this was a meal she ordinarily would’ve savored, she found herself rushing through it, shoving slices of meat between her lips to ensure she followed the rules she’d been given.

She finished with just a couple minutes to spare. She was grateful she’d arrived hungry, otherwise she might not have been able to finish it at all.

The second course was an enormous crab, plated similarly to the steak: the plate was far too small, the fat crab legs dangling off the edge of the plate. The waiter gave her another statistic, this time about the decline of crab numbers in the Bering Sea, and flipped the hourglass again. The next 26 minutes were spent with Veronica cracking open every part of the crab and devouring its contents. She hadn’t eaten much crab in her lifetime, and every time she did it felt so visceral. Eating this immense crab with the time limit weighing on her and the reminder that crabs might not be around forever felt almost apocalyptic.

The next two courses were similar: far too much food, with that nagging time limit to go with it. Thirty minutes would ordinarily seem like a long time to eat, but there was so much food stacked in front of her and she’d already eaten such huge portions in the first two courses that it was becoming increasingly difficult. The fourth course–a pasta with potato flour noodles in a savory corn sauce, accompanied by some information about the dangers of nitrate fertilizer from corn fields leaching into the water supply–was piled so high she only made it two thirds of the way through. When the hourglass ran out and the waiter returned, he told her about the amount of methane produced by the tons of food waste produced by Americans each year.

As she waited for the last dish to be served, she actually started to hiccup. As full as she’d been at her breakfast several days before, this felt like it was on a different level. Her belly was pressed tight against the front of her dress. She was going to have trouble standing, especially in heels.

The final dish was an enormous bowl of a soy-based ice cream topped with almost a dozen chocolate truffles. The waiter removed the hourglass, and said something about the benefits of eating more plant-based foods and reducing pressure on the environment. Veronica was so full she was barely listening. She dug into the ice cream with gusto. Like everything else, it tasted incredible. The truffles–made with conflict-free cocoa and all plant-based ingredients–seemed to sing on her tongue.

Full as she was, she found herself scraping the edges of the bowl with her spoon as she finished, getting every last bit of dessert as she held back a burp. When she finally finished, she paid the bill and stumbled out. Her balance was completely thrown off with her food baby belly pulling her forward. She couldn’t believe she’d assumed she would be eating a light meal at this place.

As she wobbled to the closest bus stop that would get her home, she started writing her review in her head. The chef had really tried to make some kind of statement about excess and the ecological pressure American lifestyles and agriculture, but given what he was serving, it didn’t actually drive the point home. She found herself critiquing it all as she drove home, and still coming back to the fact that the food was delicious, if a little excessive.

When she sat down the next day to write her review, it was far from scathing, but also wasn’t glowing. It praised his food while questioning the thinking behind it, and by the time she was done, she felt she’d written an altogether thoughtful piece asking about the place restaurants have in pushing for change in an increasingly volatile world. She was nervous submitting it, wondering if it was a bit too far outside of what she was supposed to do, or if she was just dumb and hadn’t fully understood the chef’s concept.

She was surprised to get an email from her boss telling her both of the reviews she’d submitted were great, and her second was exactly what the Food section of the paper needed. “So many newbies want to fawn over prestigious chefs, and I’m so glad you weren’t afraid to challenge that.”

It was funny reading feedback like that. It gave her the same boost she’d once felt when she was successful on the field–a feeling she’d been missing for quite a while.