Names for Extra Meals Beyond the Taco Bell-Coined “Fourth Meal”

Bleal
This is short for “bloody mary meal,” which is when you order a bloody mary that comes in a giant goblet, topped off with “surf and turf” skewers. After eating two bacons, 8 olives, 2 weird shiny onion balls (?), 2 shrimp, 3 cheese cubes and 1 artichoke heart, you’re suddenly unappetized for your upcoming order of flapjacks. Bleal is a particularly healthy meal because it contains little sugar and plenty of salt to keep the veins pumping away. Typically, bleal is followed by a tiny glass of whatever beer the bartender hates most as a sort of digestif.

Sudden Pizza
This is a meal that leaps out at you seemingly out of nowhere. One minute you’re sitting there thinking about how you ate 3 squares like a normal, self-feeding grown up and the next minute there’s a pizza in front of you. Maybe you went to an evening HR training session featuring special guest Papa John. Maybe you didn’t know the Project Runway party would be “catered.” Either way, there’s a pizza you hadn’t planned for, and you’re gonna eat it.

The Boyfriend 15 Meal
This is when a young woman gets a man friend and thus enters his daily ritual of living on coffee all day and then gorging at midnight. Unable to sit dormant during rotating courses of cereal, frozen pizza, chips and licorice, the young woman accidentally eats a meal well past the time when Cosmo recommends putting the stomach to rest.

The Sampler
This meal happens when you go to a fancier grocery store than you are used to and there are samples everywhere. Care for some bread dipped in olive oil? Don’t mind if I do. How about some birthday cake? Thank you. By the time you and your shopping mate have left, you’ve both consumed an entire meal. Don’t talk about this fact as you cook a meal with your newly bought groceries.

Tour de Fridge
This is when you go home to visit your parents and you become shocked at the contrast between their fridge and yours. While your fridge holds leftover salad, whiskey and sprinkle cheese, theirs has ridiculous items of delight you forgot existed. What is that, wasabi orange jam from a craft fair? How keen! Calorie-free Jello? How frivolous! Oh and they have a freezer downstairs full of meat? You stopped buying meat when you replaced the words “cooking for one” with “Lean Cuisine.” An exploratory session is necessary, even if it becomes it’s own extra meal.

–Becky Lang

Photo by sally_monster