Hello, My Name Is Josh and I Am a Nut Addict

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

Well, dear readers, I am on a diet this summer. I hate to admit it, but I suspect all these months taste-testing my own fabulous recipes in the Dr. Bachelor Test Kitchen™ and an extensive travel schedule that included eating fancy meals on someone else's dime have contributed to that tight-clothes feeling.

Now, we Gunns have always been "bigger boned," and I did pretty well fighting off the resemblance to my rotund forbears until my late 20s, when I gave up cigarettes and the metabolism slowed. At 35 I've learned I cannot take even two weeks off the normal routine of diet and exercise without feeling an extra jiggle (I hear my personal trainer in my ear, "but you CAN do lunges in a hotel room, dammit!"). Sigh. I don't make enough money to routinely buy new clothes, so, it's time to add some heavier free weights to the exercise room and restrict what goes in my mouth.

For me, dieting means a month or two on the wagon doing a low-carb routine. I must forgo my beloved bourbon. I must forswear my praiseworthy pasta. And horror of all horrors, I must nix the nuts! I don't know about y'all, but I can give up the bread and booze, the chocolate and cherry cola, but weaning myself from nuts, especially the "deluxe" cashew and macadamia nut mix, is downright torture.

At 27, with an itchy nicotine patch and a partner doing the same, I kicked cigarettes without too much hassle (except, um, losing that partner to a break-up and gaining weight). But giving up nuts, oh, this truly is the challenge of the century. Last night I dreamed about desiring Brazil nuts so badly that I lodged them in my nose just so I could smell them all night. Okay, I really didn't dream that (I don't tend to remember my dreams), but I'm seriously hurtin' without my nuts. It would seem bachelors and nuts seem to go hand-in-hand; what is a bachelor without his nuts? Miserable, that's what.

Some years ago a friend introduced me to his favorite writer, Robertson Davies. Davies is a fairly well-known Canadian writer--a novelist, playwright, critic, a writerly Jack of All Trades, if you will--who has a real talent for character development and folksy humor. My having to give up nuts reminded me of a passage from his The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, a fictional account of Marchbanks' exciting personal life published first by Davies in 1947. The character details an observation that is particularly amusing:

Drug addiction is horrible, addiction to drink is pitiable, but to be a slave of the salted-nut habit is to be lost indeed. Years ago I realized my weakness in this respect, and vowed never to set tooth to salted nut again as long as I lived. But tonight I visited the home of my friend X (a prominent prohibitionist, by the way) and turned as white as a blanched almond when I saw the nut-dish at his elbow. It was obvious from the dry, salty tone of his voice that he had been hitting the cashews pretty hard, and as we talked he ate bowl after bowl of the insidious dainties. His wife (in rags, and barefoot, for their home and fortune had been ruined by this vice) patiently filled the bowl whenever it was empty. Once, however, when she attempted to take a fat filbert from his hand, he struck her brutally across the mouth. I walked home sadly, determined to urge the government to take over the salted-nut industry - vile traffic! - not for profit, but for control. (from The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks [Toronto: Irwin, 1985], pp. 11-12)

Forget gun control! Nut control is what we need in this country! Tell Obama! Tell McCain, it's the nuts we must contain! Just think of all the bachelors slavishly pouring handful after handful of salty nuts into their gullets! Now that I think about it, I have probably guzzled gallons of mixed nuts from all these summer parties, set brazenly about on coffee tables in bright blue plastic bowls. Don't people realize how irresistible these things are? Don't party hosts understand the caloric damage caused by these sumptuous and salted, crunchy-a-ma-bobs?

Let's face it: nuts are the new crack. We should mount a campaign for beginning dieters everywhere: Just say "not now!"