We all harp on how much we hate Leo’s. It’s just a fact of Georgetown life. Though it is not “home-cooked,” Leo’s can offer some foods that you would otherwise not feed yourself. Sometimes, the standard hummus-and-pita-chips or the pizza diet is lacking.
Most people already know how to use Leo’s to simply fill their bellies every week. But I want to focus on the food. No, this is not a “how to get the most bang for your buck” column. This isn’t even an column regarding the refined art of filling up tupperware at Leo’s. Instead, our goal is to finally make you realize that if your Leo’s experience is not great, you can change it! It’s “Leo’s Self-Help 101.”
Our instincts point us to an ancestral, nomadic way of hunting and prowling through Leo’s in search of food. These are all methods that can help us find the best nutrition. The difficulty in finding ingredients is like the struggle to find hunting weapons. This new way of eating at Leo’s requires extreme independence and self-reliance. It’s like the Hunger Games of meals.
What did our ancestors eat? Some argue that the answer lies in the modern Paleo Diet, which proposes that human genetic makeup has hardly changed since nomadic times, and as such we are best suited to eat a diet consisting in fruit and vegetables, nuts, eggs, and some meat and seafood. However, there is a lot of debate about this assertion, with some people calling it a mere “fad diet,” and so I would not advise anyone to go cold-turkey on mashed potatoes or pasta.
Potentially more sound advice is, “Listen to your body,” as my mother has told me a thousand times over. These are not empty words. The ancient Indian science of Ayurveda proposes just that. It is based on three fundamental concepts: the first is that food is medicine, the second that disease can be prevented and eliminated through daily habits, and the third, that each individual requires a different lifestyle based on their physical, mental, and emotional composition.
The age-old adage, “You are what you eat” is not so banal after all. After all, “ayu” means life, and “veda” means knowledge, so this practice is quite literally the science of life.
This secret has been made clear to me many times over. Here is one example: I am a vegetarian, and have been so my whole life. I tend to eat in the fashion of the Mediterranean diet. One of my friends, on the other hand, is a lover of meat and grains. She tried to be a vegetarian for quite a while, but it did not make her feel good physically. The reason for this may be in our individual body compositions and genetic inheritances.
While my ancestors were predominantly Italian, and so most likely survived on a Mediterranean diet, hers are Welsh, who historically, due to their mountainous environment, consumed much higher levels of meat and carbohydrates.
My friend’s makeup makes it healthier for her to consume a very different diet than the one that is best suited to me. This is what Ayurveda is all about: individualization.
What does all this mean for your daily Leo’s experience? For one thing, it means that not everyone should visit the pasta line every night, but also that not all people can be healthy foraging at the salad bar. After all, as Oscar Wilde once reminded us, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” The best way to hunt in the dining hall is to get a little bit of everything, and not to “eat healthy” one meal by having a huge pile of lettuce, and then gorging on fries the next.
The best Leo’s meal has balance as its main principle, in dishes like a varied quinoa salad. Variety is helpful in keeping meals healthy and exciting, and Leo’s does offer it if you look hard enough. For instance, for dinner last night I had an arugula salad with quinoa, guacamole, bean sprouts, celery, pico de gallo, artichokes, black bean hummus, and pita bread. There is variety at Leo’s after all if you look hard enough for it.
Maybe all we need to do is indulge our creativity when we make our meals, as well as our most primal instincts that encourage an enthusiastic kind of foraging. Maybe, instead of complaining about the menu at O’Donovan’s on the Waterfront, we should look at it as a challenge to employ our culinary inventiveness and problem solving skills.
