Yesterday I remembered my first Thanksgiving away from home – in France. I was spending the year learning French, at a language institute in Aix-en-Provence, and eating my meals in the dreary university cafeteria. The meal that Thursday, as I recall, was liver and lentils. As usual, I filled up on baguette and cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) and, on the long walk back to my dorm, treated myself to a Toblerone bar, biting off each triangle, one by one, and then letting the chocolate dissolve between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, without any further contact with my teeth. That was the year I discovered the perfect diet plan: Walk a very long distance to a very bad meal and then walk back.
