​
​Recommendation: Make Your Own 'Best Of 2024' List​

​

​
On my year-end list of “Best Meals of 2024”: a steel mug of maple-walnut instant oatmeal with a glob of peanut butter melted into it, eaten at a picnic table next to a not-quite-two-year-old kid eating his own bowl of oatmeal, next to his mother (also, of course, eating oatmeal).

The campsite was nothing spectacular, really, just the first one we found open that May afternoon, but it was important: It was Jay’s first camping trip. He survived, and perhaps more importantly, his parents survived. He slept through the night in a down suit, surrounded by the walls of an enormous MSR car-camping tent I swore I’d never have a use for but was now quite thankful for. In the morning, he was his usual joyous self. And so we ate oatmeal. Which was also nothing spectacular, but: Notable. So I put it on my “Best Meals of 2024” list.

You are, I assume, probably quite familiar with the “Best Of [INSERT YEAR HERE]” lists, as your newsfeed and email inbox begin populating with them around December 1. This is when news organizations, independent writers and artists, and other publishers start curating them, partly because they’re easy as we’re all trying to wind down the year by doing less real work, and partly because the end of the Gregorian calendar year is a good time to look back.

Hilary and I have always done a “Company Holiday Party” in December. We’re both self-employed, but always work together, editing each other, running ideas by one another. It’s nothing big, just going out for dinner somewhere, just the two of us. During the first Company Holiday Party, we each listed off our favorite moments of the past year—sunsets, feelings, funny things, best days of best trips, et cetera. A few years into it, we started noticing that many of the “moments” involved food, so we switched to listing the best meals of the past year.

We’re pretty food-centric people, but the definition of “meal” is pretty broad for us—it could be a cup of coffee (one year one of mine was an affogato), could be a big sit-down thing, could be really expensive, could be a single item off a buffet (that bread at that place in Jordan!), could be a beverage. One year, one of mine was a half-gallon of chocolate soy milk from the Safeway in Estes Park, where my friend Chris and I had driven directly after finishing a climb of Pear Buttress and not bringing nearly enough water for the hot afternoon.

The “quality” of the meal doesn’t matter that much, and the location doesn’t really matter that much either—just the memory. See this conversation between Mikey and Tina in The Bear, Season 3, Episode 6, about why Mikey continues to run a restaurant even though it’s not that fun most of the time:

Mikey: "I know it sounds like bullshit, but I think if you really consider the special moments of your life—celebrations, good times, cheer—they always happen around food."

Tina: "You believe that?"

Mikey: "I think I'm starting to."

So we make our own list of the special moments of our lives, and run through them, each a very brief story about something we ate. It’s not earth-shattering, but all those “best of” lists I see every December are always things other people did—which I maybe witnessed (“The Most Important News Photos of the Year,” “Our Best Humor Stories of the Year,” etc.), but didn’t take part in besides that. Which is fine, but what about the stuff we did?

As I put together this year’s list (which I hand-wrote so I could keep my phone in my pocket at the Company Holiday Party), I came up with 19 moments. Out of those 19 “meals,” all but four of them represented moments I shared with other people. (And one of those was an entire Pequod’s deep dish pizza to myself, and I could make an argument that that specific pizza was actually a friend in that moment, so let’s say three out of 19.)

I’m certainly not telling anyone how to live their lives, but at the end of the year, before we get all carried away thinking about our big plans and dreams for the upcoming year, I strongly recommend taking a few minutes to look back and have a bit of nostalgia about all the fun you had over the past year. Whether or not it has anything to do with food.

--