Life & Longevity

Last night I was lucky enough to be invited to LDP's house for dinner with seven other friends. We started with steamed artichokes dipped in a curry-mayonnaise sauce, cleaned off numerous bottles of wine before dinner, and enjoyed a delicious Moroccan-inspired meal of lamb kebabs and couscous with apricots. To top it all off, our host whipped up some homemade peppermint ice cream served with chocolate-dipped strawberries. It was sumptuous dining and a wonderful time.

But I do have to admit that after every similar experience rich in flavors and even richer in calories, I'm left feeling a tiny bit guilty. Quantifying the minutes one should spend on the treadmill to work off the excess can be more than a little bit discouraging. But I'm going to take an article in today's New York Times as a sign from the universe that those feelings of guilt are unwarranted. Food critic Frank Bruni laments our culture's obsession with diet and longevity, taking the stand that he for one would prefer to truly enjoy every moment (and bite!) of a shorter life than live to be a century old through deprivation:

It's also hard to see the point of it. If living to 99 means forever cutting the porterhouse into eighths, swearing off the baked potato and putting the martini shaker into storage, then 85 sounds a whole lot better, and I'd ratchet that down to 79 to hold onto the Häagen-Dazs, along with a few shreds of spontaneity. It's a matter of priorities.

Do we really want as many years as we can get, no matter how we get them? At what point does the pursuit of an extended life — a pursuit that pivots on the debatable assumption that habit can outwit heredity, not to mention chance— become the entire business of a life? Is longevity all it's cracked up to be?

...doesn't the quality of our days matter as much as the quantity of them?

When it comes down to it, I'd rather spend a slightly abbreviated lifetime drinking wine and eating ice cream with friends than be on earth for a hundred years doing endless crunches and eating sticks of celery and spoonfulls of nonfat-nondairy-vitamin-and-mineral-infused-wheatgrass-flavored-soy-yoghurt. I'm not unsympathetic towards people who fall into a lifestyle where everything is about following rules of deprivation for the cause of being healthy--you're talking to a former Atkins-practitioner here, after all--but honestly, there's something to be said for focusing on today's pleasures instead of the extension of one's life sixty years from now. Not to mention that all the studies and recommendations seem to contradict each other anyway, so you might inadvertently shorten instead of lengthen your days. (Or as Mark Twain put it: "Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.")

Thank you, Mr. Bruni, for finally adding a voice of sanity to the issue by sticking it to those who unconditionally trumpet the virtues of longevity. Especially longevity attained through the practice of deprivation--there's more to life than counting calories.