OBC Food Rules Day 60: Treat treats as treats

There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.  This is another case where the outsourcing of our own food preparation to corporations has gotten us into trouble:  It's made formerly expensive or time-consuming foods-everything from fried chicken and french fries to pastries and ice cream-easy and readily accessible.  Frying chicken is so much trouble that people didn't use to make it unless they had guests coming over and a lot of time to prepare.  The amount of work involved  kept the frequency of indulgence in check.  These special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures in life, so we shouldn't deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.  One way is to start making these foods yourself; if you bake dessert yourself, you won't go to that much trouble every day.  Another is to limit your consumption of such foods to weekends or special occasions.  Some people follow a so-called S policy:  "no snacks no seconds, no sweets-except on days that begin with the letter S."