You Are What You Eat--Pass the Donuts, Please!

After doing pretty well on my vegetarian, low fat, high fiber, healthy living diet, I fell off the wagon this morning.    I bought a dozen donuts—six glazed and six chocolate covered.  I kept thinking my previous night’s dinner of cracked wheat stuffed cabbage leaves and the lunch of tabouli salad and hummus would absolve me from the sin of a dozen fresh, warm donuts from the shop on the corner.  I am sure that donut shop was a factor in our finding a house in the “right” section of town!

Actually, I did not eat the entire box of donuts.  I took them with me to an early morning didactic I was leading for chaplain interns at the hospital where I work part-time . Had I known that such a small thing as sharing a dozen fresh donuts with a group of chaplains would give me such immediate esteem, I would have done so months ago.  There is something that a donut does that a cabbage roll never can.   Just try leading a session of exhausted chaplain interns, some of whom have been on call all week-end in crisis events, and offering them a tofu on whole wheat or sunflower seeds before you begin your  lecture.  Donuts are much more hospitable, if also loaded with all the toxic stuff that will clog your arteries and send you into a diabetic coma. 

I know I must have sinned by furnishing such terrible food to young chaplains and partaking of it with them.  May God and my wife forgive me.  I have confessed to God, but don’t have the courage to let my wife, the guru of good food, know of the donut indulgence.   But I hope my sin will be assuaged somewhat by the fact that one chaplain observed, after experiencing the miracle of a warm, morning donut, that the word “hospital” and “hospitality” have the same roots.   She had never noticed that what we do in the hospital and what we do in offering hospitality might be related.  

Yes, I know there are ways to be hospitable and eat healthy food at the same time.   But somehow, donuts at an eight a.m. didactic with fatigued interns just seemed to be the loving and hospitable thing to do.   I hope my wife buys that line when I tell her about the donuts.