You can see it coming. You’ve been aware for the last several bites that you’re running out, that the good thing is finite, that there’s an end approaching that you can slow down but can’t stop. Some people eat faster as they near the end, trying to outrun the awareness of diminishment. Some eat slower, rationing, trying to extend the experience past its natural conclusion. Either way you arrive at the last bite knowing it’s the last and you eat it knowing that and then it’s gone and the plate is empty and the thing that was good is now just a memory of something good, which is a different thing entirely.
This is microscopic grief. The smallest possible version of loss, barely worth naming, the kind of thing that would embarrass you if you said it out loud to someone. “I’m a little sad my sandwich is gone.” You don’t say that. You throw the wrapper away and get on with it. But the feeling was there, fleeting and real, a tiny rehearsal of impermanence played out over lunch without your consent.
Food is unusually good at this because it’s one of the few pleasures that is constitutively ending from the moment it begins. A book ends but you can reread it. A song ends but you can replay it. A meal is consumed — literally, gone into you, transformed into something else, unrepeatable in the exact same way. You could order the same thing again but it won’t be the same sitting, the same hunger, the same first bite. The experience is singular and the last bite closes it permanently.
The people who save the best bite for last are doing something philosophically interesting. They’re choosing to end on the highest note, to let the thing close at its peak, to carry the best taste out of the meal rather than having already moved past it by the time they’re done. The people who eat the best thing first are also doing something interesting — refusing to defer pleasure, eating what they want while the wanting is hot. Both strategies are responses to the same problem, which is that the good thing is going to end and you have to decide what to do with that.
I had a really good piece of pie last weekend. I saved the point for last, the part with the most filling, the tip of the triangle. Ate it slowly. It was as good as I’d been planning for it to be. Put the fork down. Felt the small clean sadness of it being gone. Sat there for a second with the empty plate. Got up and did something else. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there ever is.