It's time to consider food neurosis.

Over Christmas, something microscopic on a waiter's hand in a diner attacked me and I didn't eat at all for four days, and then no solid food for a week. Confined to bed, I spent my days lightly hallucinating, my thoughts drifting to food.

"French fries and gravy!" I would cry out. "How I miss quince paste." I'd sink back on the pillow. "Oh, toast."

It was instructive to be in one of the richest countries in the world with a kitchen just downstairs packed with delicious free-range-type food (those chickens were beyond happy, they practically scampered to the axe) and, faced with food, shudder and turn away.

Of course we don't turn away and that's where another sickness begins.

Statistics Canada says 36 per cent of Canadians are overweight, and another 23 per cent are obese (men much more than women, by the way). I fear being rude, but since food angst is damaging our daily lives, can I be honest? Why not admit that we use food to define class? Celine Dion is not thin; she is a stick insect. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee can't admit he had a gastric bypass. The man cannot eat a meal; he nibbles plastic-wrapped squares out of a hamper six times a day, but no one will discuss it. As for those recent genteel headlines referring to those two buffet-banned Louisiana men as "large," let's face it. They were grotesque.

None of us wish to be grotesque. But do we need to disguise our blighted yearning so much? I object to the crazed, obsessive way that our hatred of our own appearance makes us talk about food.

Fuel vs fun

CBC's The Current this week pointed out that food is completely egalitarian. Even the poorest human can cook, understand and appreciate food. Yet we of relative wealth in the West are positively deranged on the subject.

We — and that includes the media as well as the guy in the next cubicle — view food as an enemy, a rapist waiting to creep out of the closet and enter our body.

We discuss our "relationship with food" with a straight face. You no more have a relationship with food than you have a relationship with your tie or your Q-Tip. They are by definition inert. Food is similarly insentient. It is essential; we are engines and food is gasoline. I regarded this as entirely true until I visited France and my husband became a brilliant home cook. I then realized that food is one of the great pleasures, after sex and loving your children and thinking of Conrad Black eating mashed fish in the mess hall with affectionate cellmate Sneggy Bloods.

Food, money and sex

After I had recovered from my illness, we went to a country hotel (it was an all-round disaster; don't do it) to recuperate and eat fancy food. I ordered marlin. What I got was "Seared Blue Marlin & Double Smoked Bacon, served with Crisp Provimi Veal Sweetbreads, Soft Polenta, Slow Greens, Cipollini Onions and a Bordelaise Vinaigrette."

There were three discs of marlin the size of toonies on the plate, each individually wrapped with ultra-bacon with a care that would tire Martha Stewart. But why? Why not a slice of marlin, sans pig, sans thymus gland? Thorstein Veblen would have been taking notes: the more value-added the marlin, the more impressive it is. It's not just fish anymore, it's an installation.

I made my husband eat the fish cylinders. I had his pheasant.

For dessert, I ordered a soufflé tasting, which I assumed was a whole bunch of soufflés, because I was still very hungry. What arrived was a dessert for elves, served in dishes smaller than an eggcup but bigger than a pillbox, filled with wet chocolate cake. Another had wet lemon cake. The sauces came in inch-high jugs. Frankly, I was embarrassed, as if I were depriving wee people of their crust.

The meal was perverse, a crossword on a plate for people bored by food. But I wasn't bored, I was legitimately hungry, a state that goes unmentioned in this roly-poly era about to get whippet-thin in a long-term recession.

You can still buy sane cookbooks in which Alice Waters explains how to make a cheese soufflé. Or you can buy Skinny Bitch in the Kitch: Kickass Solutions for Hungry Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap (and Start Looking Hot!). Which one is the bestseller? The one that is aggressively cruel to its readers.

The fetishization of food isn't new. In a way, after the mass industrial processing of Big Food, it was a needed corrective. But as in everything, we didn't know when to stop. Now we are as messed up about food as we are about money and sex: it's chefs getting famous, restaurant dining becoming grimly recreational, people trying to replicate the runner's high via dinner.

Chains gangs

On the way to the country hotel, we drove through town, past endless Double Double Tim & Wendy's Swiss McHarvey Burgerbee Pita Bells, a tragic strip of inedible ingredients that end in –ate, -hyde and –phenone, unidentifiable lumps of pale matter and meat that never knew a bone. Hespeler Road in Cambridge, Ont., is food's last stop before it hurls itself into the great void.

I know what you're saying. I am an elitist, yes. But I am not a snob. There are no words for the joy we teenagers felt when Kapuskasing got its first McDonald's, its first real junk food. Big Macs were magnificent.

It's the same joy that Twain and the locals got from the "magnificent" steamboats of the Mississippi that Charles Dickens found rather less than magnificent when he first saw them." The people compared them with what they had seen," Twain wrote, "and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent — the term was the correct one, it was not at all too strong. The people were as right as was Mr. Dickens."

Indeed, it is all relative. There has always been ample bad food in postwar North America. But now it ranges widely and does more harm. There is cheap food that tastes like the grease cup under my barbecue as well as expensive endangered fish coins wrapped in silly meats. Both we and Mr. Dickens are right. It's all bad.

The problem is, we can't come to a consensus on what is worth eating. You know what would fix the problem? Extreme illness that leaves you looking like a needle after a week without food. I did it. Wasn't happy, didn't like it. But I don't get all neurotic about food any more. I just eat it in moderation and am grateful to keep it down.

This Week

Finally Americans have come to appreciate the greatness of Rick Mercer in his This Hour has 22 Minutes days when he was still doing Talking to Americans. After the Twin Towers attack, Mercer decided to stop making jokes at American expense. Jon Stewart didn't; he's rich and loved now, good thinking Rick. On YouTube, you can see Mercer's classic interview with the heart-stoppingly stupid Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Still, it's nice that Huckabee wanted to help us preserve our national igloo. Perhaps if he is elected he will visit and share seal with us.