Things I Cannot Eat

Leafing through a spices catalog, one of my favorites, and I come across a recipe featuring some of the spices available from said catalog.  A nice picture of a slice of cake, with some sort of lemony icing or sauce on it.  Looked good, I thought.

Then I saw the byline under the caption.  This dessert, I was assured, is "decadent".

If there is one adjective that is almost certainly guaranteed to put me off my feed (if I may borrow from Jim Harrison), it is decadent.  It makes me not want to eat whatever was being called decadent. Seriously, cake, yogurt, I think even sauce or cheese I may have heard described this way.

Have none of the copywriters and ad folks even looked up the word in a dictionary?  I have.  And I couldn't find a single definition I would characterize as positive.  Most of them touch on some form of decay or decline.

I know the ads pitch these things as mostly in the sense of self-indulgent...but are we as a culture so focused on unmitigated gratification we are willing to look past the deeper meanings of things, to cherry-pick the one thing that will satisfy our undisciplined appetites?

I don't know.  Maybe I'm just being grumpy.  But when chocolate cake is described as decadent as if that is the only reason one would choose to make and eat such a simple pleasure, something is lost.  It's like the quiet act of eating cannot be made worthwhile unless there is a hint of sin or indulgence.  What, I wonder, is wrong with us?

"We are all pigs," Roald Dahl wrote in one of his books, "but we are, I hope, discerning pigs..." [Italics mine]

I continue to hold out hope that this is true, and that we can achieve balance with our appetites, rather than pander to their baser instincts, their childish fascination with too much not being enough.  I know I have been working to make my appetites work for me, rather than command me.

For that reason, I want my cake to simply be good, not decadent.  There is enough decay and decline in this universe that I do not need to eat it.