When I was a kid, my parents would get me to eat by saying in their southern Italian dialect, “The more you stare, the more there is.”

I stared at my mother’s (amazing) food, elbows on the table, my head held in my hands. Were they right? There’s so much food already. How can I eat all of this?! I think I just saw my bowl fill up with even more pasta! There’s no way I’ll be able to get through all of it.

It was a nightly routine of “finish your plate” or face the disappointment of an Italian mother. This is a family in which an aunt broke down in tears because I was “skinny”; and an uncle gave my sister bananas—for years—so she could gain weight. It’s not that I didn’t like my mother’s cooking. Quite the opposite. The problem was that there was too much of it, and I couldn’t see the finish line over the mountain of gnocchi. Faced with an insurmountable task, I would default to inertia.

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