Around the lunch table everyone seems to have given something up---dairy, meat, gluten, sugar, carbs. Only in a land of plenty could people voluntarily go without so much.

An entire aisle of cereal...hundreds of choices....Of course I had eaten cereal before. I'm not a savage....Cereal was a small, affordable luxury. An effort. A point of pride. Something special....Those crates of cereal meant that we deserved what others do not.... Here the choices that stand before me in the store aisles seem to exist only to mock me. Cereal isn't a luxury...the boxes laugh at me...Two aisles down I count 27 varieties of peanut butter....it is really necessary?