Oceans of food

I was out with my wife on Saturday, we went to a Chinese food court in Manchester. These food court style places are becoming a lot more popular these days.

They'll have a seating area and there's a selection of restaurants around the area for you to choose from and you can order food from any one of them or if you really want, you can order from each of them.

We've been to these sorts of places on consecutive weekends now. The first one was more spontaneous, the one this weekend was planned. My wife had wanted to go to it for some time as she'd heard good things about it so we decided to give it a go.

We googled the place earlier to get an idea of what it was all about and what was on offer. Usually these sorts of places have your standard restaurants, a burger place, a pizza place, Indian food, maybe some chicken place and possibly a Sushi place.

This one was Oriental food, so a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Korean cuisine. My wife eyed up the menu and decided to reel off everything she wanted.

There were the bao buns, the dim sum, the fried chicken, the sushi rolls, the sashimi, gyoza, the duck pancakes. She's not the biggest person in the world and she doesn't actually eat that much. She likes to be fit and healthy and tends to be quite controlled in what she eats. So when she starts to reel off everything she plans to eat, it becomes blatantly obvious that she really won't eat it all.

Worse still is that we both don't really want to waste food so we end up overeating and then consume way more than either of us actually wants.

Its a common problem, when our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. We might order way more than we need and when you really tune in, you realise its way more than you actually want.

The real problem however....is FOMO. That fear of missing out. Fear that you wont have or that you're being restricted somehow.

Its crazy because when you get that sense of restriction its very easy, almost natural to push back and try to compensate. It then leads to excessive ordering and eating.

Back to the story at hand...after my wife started reeling off all the food that she would try but not eat, I reminded her that the restaurants aren't going anywhere. They'll still be there the following week and the week after.

Its only when we got to the restaurant and placed our order, which was modified from the long list she had planned, that she mentioned what I had said had really hit home.

That's when it hit home for me as well. And maybe it will for you too. It really is important to remember that generally speaking, in the west we're surrounded by food availability. There's so many shops and restaurants, we can get so many different types of food. Yes restaurants may close but other ones open, or there's other places we can go to. We're actually surrounded by oceans of food. Now this of course doesn't mean that everyone has unlimited money and they can afford all the food they want. We may be in the West but there's still plenty of food poverty.

But generally speaking, the availability and access to food is greater than ever. We really don't have to rush. We really don't have to make out that the next meal is the last one.

It's OK to take it easy. It's OK to say to ourselves we can try some dishes another time. In fact I'd say it's more important than ever to remind ourselves that we can have food some other time.

In doing so it allows us to say to ourselves, I only need to try a little bit because I can have this food again some other time and even if its not the exact same, I can have something similar.

Remember, the food isn't going anywhere, there's no rush, we can take it easy....