To Drive, Perchance to Eat.(NEWS)(Column)

Byline: Natalie Neff

Eat. We're driven to do it, and maddeningly so. Call it our prime directive, the fundamental force superseding and underpinning all other life functions, a constant and all-consuming need to stuff the gullet, motivated by an evolutionarily embedded understanding that food is scarce in supply and difficult not to mention dangerousto access. In other words, our brains tell us to eat whenever possible or invite death.

(Of course, for most Americans, that's no longer true, but we nonetheless heed that fear a little too, ahem, effectively.)

And yet, just as the ceaseless quest for food burgeoned in our earliest days as hominids, the freedom of mobility must define our postindustrial identity. It is this desire for independence and autonomy, a sort of unending restlessness, that finds us ever pushing "westward, traveling the wagon trail to the suburbs and beyond, and providing the petri dish where our passion for cars could bubble and ferment.

Food. Cars. If there are any more important motivators in life, I can think of only one (but we'll leave that subject for other magazines to cover).

We find ways to weave food into every aspect of our mobile lives, guided in large part by convenience's sakethink fast-food drive-throughs, hotel room service, cupholders, vending machines . . . 7-Eleven sausage-egg-and-cheese taquitos. Nothing like a full-blown omelet built for one-hand-on-the-wheel driving.

But sometimes eating involves a good deal more ritual, and among all such meals, there is one in particular that is planned with the solemnity of a seder, marked with the measure of a tea ceremony, attended with the casualness of a luau, partaken with the gusto of a midnight pregnancy craving and recalled with ...