Perfection is Subjection
En route home from a trip this past winter teaching avalanche classes, I waited bleary-eyed outside a dark Starbucks at the airport in Anchorage at 5:49am. They opened at 6, right when my flight boarded. Inwardly, I was fiending for coffee, while outwardly I tried to project “I’m totally chill” and also “Don’t you dare try to order coffee before me.” Absolutely no one approached me to chat, despite my casual, absolutely not-deranged vibes. Weird.
When they finally opened and I ordered my coffee (with extra shots of course) and realized it would be several hours before I landed in Seattle, I snatched some nuts, a banana, and a protein bar out of the refrigerated case, a popular, ‘perfect’ kind that I’d seen around but never tried before. Generally I don’t choose the bar option, but my flight was boarding. I panicked.
Recently, I heard the term “ingredients household,” and I knew right away what it meant, having grown up with cupboards of nuts, raisins, and canisters of oatmeal and grains. As a kid, when I inevitably wailed “There’s nothing to eat!” to my mom, she would answer (lovingly), “You must not be hungry then, because there’s plenty of food.”
What she meant was that I had to put some effort in—slice an apple and cheese or make a PB&J. What I meant was that all my friends seemed to have cupboards teeming with purchased, packaged snacks from Costco, like Chips Ahoy and Doritos, and why couldn’t we have that too? She would shrug cryptically and go back to what she was doing, and I would fend for myself, left to fix what I considered to be a decidedly peasant bowl of plain yogurt with homemade plum jam. I know—poor, poor me.
On the plane home from Alaska this winter, when I bit into the packaged bar, I was flooded with nostalgia. It was exactly the same taste as the Peanut Butter Playdough my mom used to make when I was a kid, and sure enough, contained the same main ingredients: peanut butter, milk powder, and honey. I’ve since made and inhaled this concoction on mountain adventures and expeditions as an adult, like on a two-week backpacking trip in New Zealand during study abroad in college, and also on a ski mountaineering trip to Pakistan when a pre-trip miscommunication meant we had brought no actual food for on the mountain except dehydrated meals and cardboard-y energy bars. Luckily, I had brought a large jar of emotional support peanut butter, plus powdered milk for coffee, and our base camp cook had honey, so we survived off this combo for three days in a storm above 23,000 feet.
The taste of that bar—food from my ingredients household childhood, found in a convenient package—reminded me yet again that life these days is a lot less “either / or” and a lot more “yes, and.” Perfection is subjective.
I’ve spent years detangling my self-worth from what I eat, which I’ve written more about here among other places, and while I’ll no doubt spend countless more, I can confidently say that I no longer see food as good or bad, “clean” or dirty. I’m a middle-grounder now, embracing both ingredients and also packaged snacks. My approach these days is more Marie Kondo: Does it spark joy? Does it taste delicious? How do I feel when I eat it? And also, sometimes, is it edible and right in front of me? Because life is busy.
Thanks for reading!
Should you find yourself with some ingredients in your household and want to make a copycat Perfect Bar, here’s my mom’s Peanut Butter Playdough recipe.
A thought-provoking article from the New Yorker about the Revolt Against Expertise
An Emmy-winning director’s cut film about my friend and TNF teammate Kaytlyn Gerbin and her friend Jenny Abegg completing the FKT on The High Route in the North Cascades (link to 49 minute Youtube film).
—Ingrid
