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love McDonald’s. When I was a kid, that’s how my parents showed me they loved me after they were divorced. Who took me to McDonald’s the most? That’s who loved me the most.”
    I pondered this as Sabra checked on her garlic bread. How much of this was about the food? Or did that trip to McDonald’s mean time alone with her parent, forced to focus only on her as she swung, slid, and ran around the colorful play area?
    As part of the kitchen visit, I asked each volunteer to prepare a lunch or dinner, something that they routinely ate, so I could get a sense of their kitchen skills and eating habits. Could they hold a knife? Did they taste as they cooked? What kind of portions did they serve up? Frozen dinners were Sabra’s go-to dinners. Breakfast involved toaster pastries and half a can of Red Bull. “That’s because I don’t drink coffee,” she explained. The Cup Noodles was her midmorning snack. She hit McDonald’s for lunch. Throughout the day, she consumed a few soft drinks. “And there’s the constant grazing on a lot of chips and popcorn. There’s always a bowl of something on my desk,” she added.
    Red Bull for breakfast isn’t as unusual as you’d think for someone her age. It has roughly 70 percent of the energy-drink market, a narrow but influential wedge of consumers between ages fifteen and thirty. At age sixteen, Mike’s niece, Michelle, lived primarily on various energy drinks for three months. The caffeine gave her energy, while the high sugar content—roughly equivalent to a glazed doughnut—kept her from feeling hungry. She drank several every day. Her doctor commanded her to quit. “You’re not getting any nutrients,” he said. “You’re starving yourself.”
    Sabra offered some bright spots. The guy at her liquor store introduced her to a woman who supplied fresh eggs from a nearby farm. As a downside, Sabra warned me that she didn’t want to spend more than twenty minutes making dinner. “If it takes longer than that, I’ll just get fast food.” Plus, there was her devotion to Gold ’n Soft.
    We sat down for lunch. To me, the lasagna had a vaguely sweet tomato flavor. The “garlic bread” was an exercise in blandness. I asked her how she liked the lasagna. “Well, this brand has really good deals, like, you can get four for ten bucks sometimes,” she started.
    â€œNo, what I mean is, do you like its taste? The flavor, I mean.”
    She thought about it. “I don’t know. I like it better than some of the other frozen lasagnas.”
    â€œBut how does it compare to homemade lasagna?”
    She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. I like it, but I mainly buy it because it’s cheaper than the other ones.”
    Later, I calculated that over the course of a typical day, Sabra consumed a cup and a half of sugar. Sabra’s food choices were motivated by money, ease, and that refreshing live-forever mentality that grips so many of us in our twenties. Who has to worry about their diet when they’re so young? Isn’t youth enough to overcome a high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt diet? She represented the dark side of “taste memory” that comes from the early adoption of unhealthy foods such as fast foods. Everyone has their comfort food, that flavor that harkens back to a time in childhood that they felt safe and loved. This explained her fondness for Gold ’n Soft and McDonald’s. But it was clear that she put more thought into creating cocktails than into developing dinner.

TRISH
    Our next stop offered insight into a whole different generation. Trish was a sixty-one-year-old psychologist living in a modest condo on the edge of the affluent Madison Park neighborhood. She fretted when Mike and I showed up with a small video camera in hand to record the proceedings.
    â€œI’m