Symbolic Purchases

by Aja Frost

Every week for the past 18 weeks, I’ve gone to the same restaurant in downtown San Luis Obispo and ordered the exact same thing: One pulled pork sandwich on a French roll. It’s $7.82 with tax.

I have no intention of stopping or even slowing down, which means by the end of the 2014–2015 academic school year, I will have spent (time to whip out the iPhone calculator) $340.82 on pulled pork sandwiches.

That number makes me pretty proud. A year ago, I was only spending money on food with less than 100 calories per serving, which unsurprisingly, makes for a small and unappetizing list: baby carrots, broccoli, black coffee, “lite” bread, gum, low-fat cheese. You can probably guess the punchline: I had an eating disorder.

Recovering from an eating disorder involves a lot of exposure therapy. There’s no way to get over a paralyzing fear of hamburgers other than to eat them, so I’d walk into In N’ Out, literally trembling, and ask for a burger. When the burger came, it became a scene straight out of an old Western movie. I’d stare at the burger. It would stare back. Finally, I’d slowly lift it up to my lips and start eating.

Every bite was a battle, imbued with the knowledge I’d hate myself when I had finished my food. It wasn’t guilt like, “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have eaten so many Girl Scout cookies.” It’s full-blown, IamsofatIamsoworthlessIhavenoself-control on an endless loop in my head until I went to sleep that night.

This was my life for a seemingly endless series of months and meals. It was pretty miserable, but the good thing about exposure therapy is it works. Once I’d eaten In N’ Out and nothing horrible happened — I didn’t suddenly gain 10 pounds or get diabetes or find cellulite all over my thighs — I got more confident. The next In N’ Out burger was easier; the one after that was easier still, and the one after that was near effortless. Unfortunately, since eating disorders aren’t rational, eating an In N’ Out hamburger didn’t make me ready to eat all hamburgers. I had to repeat the process with Shake Shack, Five Guys, my mom’s homemade patties, and so on.

Even after I’d mastered all types of burgers, powered through spaghetti and pizza, dominated the dairy aisle, gotten slightly more comfortable with breads, muffins, and cakes, attempted (and failed) to make peace with ice cream, and redeveloped my love for burritos, there was still a food I couldn’t eat even in my imagination: pulled pork sandwiches.

It’s hard to overstate just how famous these sandwiches are in San Luis Obispo. They have a celebrity status. People snap photos with their pulled pork sandwiches and upload them to social media. The Yelp page of the restaurant that sells them has more ratings than any other dinner place in the county. Every day, starting at 11 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m., there’s a line out the door of people on a mission to eat a pulled pork sandwich.

The appeal is obvious: a huge serving of juicy, tender, rich pulled pork slathered in slightly sweet, slightly tangy, barbecue sauce is sandwiched between a toasted French roll dripping in garlic butter. That’s the kind of sandwich that makes a typical person drool and a disordered person run away as fast as possible.

So how on Earth did I ever end up eating one? It was one of the hardest nights of my life. I’d casually said to my mom, “Hey, when you drive me up to school, we should get one of those pulled pork sandwiches everyone is always raving about.”

I absolutely didn’t mean it, but it felt so good to pretend: Look at me, ma, I’m a normal person! I can flippantly suggest eating 3,000-calorie meals! Unluckily for me, she treated this like a real suggestion, and eager to do anything that would help me gain weight, dragged me into the BBQ place my first night back in San Luis Obispo.

I ate the sandwich, knowing that horrible IamsofatIamsoworthlessIhavenoself-control loop would be arriving in approximately 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I couldn’t believe what I was tasting. It was one of the best things I had ever eaten — not just after I’d developed anorexia, but in my entire life. And again, exposure therapy worked — I didn’t gain 10 pounds after eating a pulled pork sandwich. (Although I did get a panic attack in the parking lot outside the restaurant.)

A few weeks later, when my friends wanted to go to the same place, I felt brave enough to come along and order another one. This time, there were no tears, just a lingering sense of unease I couldn’t shake the entire rest of the day.

A week after that, when I was downtown, I asked a different friend if he wanted to get a sandwich with me. When we were done, the mental loop just didn’t play. Guilt had been replaced by the satisfaction of a delicious meal eaten with a cool human being.

The tradition kind of started itself. I noticed I’d eaten one sandwich each week for a month, which made me curious to see how long I could keep it up. Turns out, it’s easy — I have no shortage of friends willing to come along and eat a pulled pork sandwich with me. It’s only a sandwich, but it’s also a celebration. It’s a toast to my return to physical and mental health. It means a lot, every bite.

This is column is part of a multi-part series.

Aja Frost is a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who loves writing… and dessert. Follow her on Twitter @ajavuu.

Photo: Jerry Huddleson

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