That term: “pancakes make me hungrier” appears nowhere on the Internet as a phrase. Until now.
I had pancakes for breakfast yesterday, the second time in about a week, at a place that New Orleanians seem to adore called the Ruby Slipper. It’s a brunch place, but doing brunch all the time, and breakfast is normally my thing. It’s also the closest breakfast place to my work, which is convenient on mornings when Alex has to drop me off at 6:55 AM because she needs the car that day. I’ve been regularly opening my office at around 7:45 after having breakfast – going in at 7:00 foodless would be doubly problematic. So it’s the Ruby Slipper for me, so named to honor those who returned to NOLA post-Katrina because (you guessed it) there’s no place like home! It’s a neat place.
The problem is that I’ve been rolling around the menu, a very rare habit for me (I’m the find one thing I like to eat and stick with it type) in the quest for my one thing at Ruby. The quest is made difficult by the fact that most things come with breakfast meats and the only reasonable substitution is usually potatoes and the potatoes at Ruby are just not my thing. Which is crazy for two reasons – 1. potatoes are always my thing and 2. the potatoes are too burnt. Two wouldn’t be a crazy thing for anything else, but “too burnt” isn’t really in my vocabulary as an eater. I always want things crispy and overdone and burnt, especially bread and potatoes. Honestly, if they were hashbrowns, they’d be perfect, but instead they are these charred little nuggets of homefries that honestly seem like someone took day-old homefries and stuck them in the fryer for an hour. They just taste like char. I dunno, maybe it’s a Southern thing.
Well last Thursday, I landed on my one thing at Ruby. The full stack of pancakes with fresh fruit. They’re filling and delicious and fresh and sweet and everything you want from a pancake. Even crispy on the edges! And they’re cheaper than a lot of the menu and the fruit-for-meat substitution is already a given option (I often get tired of always asking for exceptions) and there are no little burnt nuggets of potato to have to push around the plate. And I only let a tiny bit of me worry about what would happen to my stomach long-term with that much pancake in it.
I should have been more concerned. Right on cue, around noon, the bottom fell out of my stomach and I started getting ravenously hungry. There is a type of hungry I get occasionally, and got much more often when I was younger, that makes me feel like I’ve become a diabetic overnight. I call it “panic hunger” and it involves a cold sweat, an immediate need to eat, a craving for bread products specifically, and extremely sudden onset of the hunger. I’ve experienced it enough (say, 50ish times) in my life to be able to identify its taxonomy and traits so that its sudden hitting doesn’t actually make me panic anymore. The protocol in my late youth and early adulthood for this was to go to the kitchen (it disproportionately hits late at night), eat two slices of bread, put two more in the toaster, eat the toast, and then eat two more slices of bread. As fast as I physically could consume all that. Only by slice #6 does the panic start to subside and then I just wait for all the other bread to hit my stomach like the filler it’s designed to be.
But I was on a work call on Thursday when this started happening and I was quickly losing the ability to functionally respond or be a person. And I had to walk a mile to get to a purveyor of bread, Panera. By the time I got there, I ate a grilled cheese sandwich, asiago cheese bagel, cinnamon roll, and tomato soup in minutes.
Pancakes are one of two foods I’ve identified in my life that usually, and definitely increasingly, cause this or a similar level of sudden hunger relatively shortly after their consumption. The other food, which behaves almost exactly the same way, is injera, the spongy bread that is served with Ethiopian food. If you think about it, pancakes and injera are pretty similar foods, with lot of air-holes in the middle and that same general fluffy texture. For some reason the heavier utthapam, the South Indian savory discs often described as pancakes, don’t seem to elicit the same reaction.
This is problematic because 1. I love pancakes and injera and 2. I can’t seem to find anyone else who has this issue to be able to relate to it. For years, every meal of pancakes or Ethiopian shared with someone has prompted me to discuss how these foods make me hungrier afterwards and I only get blank looks in return. Injera specifically is noted on the Internet and personal testimony for its filling nature. Injera works so quickly on my stomach that I have joked that I could literally eat infinite injera for the rest of my life because Ethiopian meals are usually leisurely enough that I’ve started to get hungry again by the time we’re wrapping up the meal – I’m the guy who orders another small entree and another plate full of injera in hour two, or used to until I realized it could be an infinite loop.
A quick Google search for “pancakes make me hungry” yields 14,600 results, but almost all of them are people writing salivating comments on foodies’ Instagrams about how their fresh-made hotcakes are making them yearn to eat. And, as mentioned up top, changing that last word to hungrier yields a phrase that, until Google indexes this post, doesn’t exist on the Internet. Am I the only person in the world that feels this way about pancakes and injera??
It would feel less isolating if it were just a feeling, although part of that is a testament to how we belittle feelings in our society while making the body of paramount concern. But it’s a physical reaction that I can’t control. Granted, my behavior around food is typically unique – no one else agrees with me that food can never be “too dry”, for example – but this is actually just a type of food affecting my physiology in the opposite way it affects everyone else’s. It seems troubling. There should be at least one other person out there who experiences this!
The best explanation I can come up with for this physical reality (remember that I’m not much of a sciencey guy, so if this is laughably wrong, go easy on me) is that these spongy breads are designed to absorb water. Just look at how quickly pancakes drink up any syrup you add to them. And at any given time, because I’m a constant water-drinker, a ton of my stomach’s contents are water. And that water, as water does, gives me an artificially inflated sense of being full. In comes the pancakes/injera and it sops up all the water very quickly, draining my stomach of its normal contents. Enter the panic-hunger.
This process seems to make sense physically and certainly works with the given timelines – it’s not like I’m hungry 5 minutes after eating pancakes. The average time for pancakes is probably about 3 hours or so and injera closer to 2. Which seems like a reasonable time for the given food to travel to the stomach and start soaking up all the water it can find. I’m not sure that explains why the hunger, once the requisite time has passed, is so sudden and so extreme, but it’s the start of a theory. And I guess it explains my uniqueness with this phenomenon – I probably drink more water than most others.
That said, the main impetus for writing this post was to find the other person(s) who feel this way. It is just crazy that no one has imprinted our web with the words “pancakes make me hungrier” until now. Or “injera makes me hungrier” (also unprecedented). Where are you, people? Have you figured out this phenomenon for yourselves? What’s your work-around? Or have you just given up on those foods unless you’re trying to jump wrestling weight-classes?
Inquiring stomachs want to know.
