There is a particular bit of conventional wisdom surrounding food that I have never understood: save the best for last.
Why?
If there are three things on my plate and I love one of them, tolerate another, and begrudgingly accept the existence of the third, I am eating the good thing first.
Apparently this violates some deeply held principle of civilized dining.
The proper order, as I understood it growing up, was to eat the vegetables first. Get them out of the way. Then you could move on to the things you actually wanted, perhaps even saving your favorite thing for the very end.
But that has always seemed completely backwards to me.
When I first sit down to eat, I am at my hungriest. That means I also have the greatest potential to enjoy food. The first few bites of something when you are genuinely hungry can be fantastic. As you eat, that hunger gradually disappears. Eventually you reach the point where you are no longer really hungry at all and are mostly finishing the meal because there is food left on the plate.
The food hasn't necessarily become any worse.
Your capacity to enjoy it has changed.
So why would I give the best part of my appetite to the worst part of the meal?
If there is a steak on my plate that I am genuinely excited about eating, along with some carrots I would prefer not to discuss, eating the carrots first means I am giving them the prime real estate. They get me when I am hungriest. They get the moment when food has its greatest potential to be satisfying.
Then, after I have partially filled myself with the thing I didn't want, I finally get around to eating the thing I did.
What sort of system is that?
The carrots are going to be carrots regardless. I am not going to unlock some hidden level of carrot ecstasy merely because I ate them on an empty stomach.
At best, being hungry makes them somewhat more tolerable.
The steak, on the other hand, has much more to lose.
Something I really enjoy can be enormously satisfying when I am hungry and considerably less so when I am already approaching full. By eating the thing I dislike first, I am sacrificing a large amount of potential enjoyment from the thing I love in exchange for making the thing I dislike slightly less unpleasant.
That is a terrible trade.
You could reduce the entire argument to something like:
Enjoyment = how much I like the thing × how capable I am of enjoying it at that moment.
That is about as much math as dinner requires.
But I don't think this is really about food.
Food is just where I notice it most clearly.
There seems to be a much broader idea buried in the whole "save the best for last" philosophy: that pleasure should come after obligation. Do the unpleasant thing first. Get the work out of the way. Eat the vegetables. Save the good bottle. Wear the good clothes later. Use the nice dishes when company comes. Keep the expensive candle in the cabinet because it is too nice to burn.
We have an odd tendency to preserve things we enjoy until some vaguely appropriate future moment when we have sufficiently earned the right to enjoy them.
Sometimes that makes perfect sense.
Delayed gratification is real. If spending every dollar I earn today leaves me broke tomorrow, then obviously postponing some pleasure serves a purpose. If I have something important to finish, watching a movie instead may simply mean creating a larger problem for myself later.
I am not advocating a life governed entirely by whatever feels nicest in the next five minutes.
That would be idiotic.
But there is a difference between postponing pleasure because doing so creates some greater benefit and postponing pleasure merely because we have been taught that the good part is supposed to come later.
Sometimes later is worse.
That is the part I think we overlook.
A meal is a perfect example because the decline is obvious. I physically become less hungry as I eat. There is a limited window in which I can experience that food at its absolute best.
But other things have windows too.
You can save a special bottle for so long that the person you wanted to share it with is no longer around.
You can keep putting off a trip until your circumstances change and you can no longer take it.
You can spend years saying that someday you are going to learn something, make something, go somewhere, call somebody, or finally use the thing you have been carefully protecting for an occasion important enough to deserve it.
Sometimes the occasion never announces itself.
And sometimes, by the time you finally decide that you are allowed to enjoy the thing, your capacity to enjoy it isn't what it once was.
That doesn't mean we should frantically consume every pleasure available to us before the universe takes it away. That would be another ridiculous extreme.
It just means I am suspicious of suffering in advance for no particular reason.
If something unpleasant genuinely needs to be done, I will do it. If there is a reason to delay something enjoyable, fine. But I don't see any inherent virtue in making the experience worse simply because misery has traditionally been assigned an earlier position in the sequence.
I don't need the carrots to serve as an admission fee for the steak.
Likewise, I don't think every enjoyable part of life needs to sit patiently at the end of a long line of obligations before we are permitted to touch it.
There will always be carrots.
There will always be bills, chores, responsibilities, annoying phone calls, paperwork, broken appliances, things we would rather not do, and people who somehow manage to schedule meetings that could have been emails.
Those things are remarkably good at making sure they get their turn.
I am less convinced that the good things will.
So yes, I eat my favorite part first.
Not because I lack the discipline to save it.
Because when something is capable of giving me the greatest pleasure, I would rather experience it while I still have the greatest capacity to enjoy it.
The carrots can wait.
