By TAMAS DOBOZY

The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.