“One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work.” This was William Faulkner talking, 1956, an interview with Jean Stein for The Paris Review. He was reminiscing about his early days living in New Orleans and working, he said, as little as possible. Faulkner was wistful about it. He’d have preferred to do other things than paint houses or write during his waking hours. It was unfortunate, he said, that “you can’t eat eight hours a day.”

You can’t? I am the restaurant critic of The New York Times. I eat out six or seven nights a week. I eat in restaurants for lunch. I eat in restaurants for breakfast. In between restaurant meals, I test recipes and eat the results. You add it all up, the numbers start getting big.

I’ve had double lunches in a day, double dinners. I’ve had days that began with lard-fried doughnuts and ended with torchons of foie gras followed by steak, with double-cooked pork and slick dumplings in chili oil in the middle for lunch. There were tastings of ham and oysters as snackish reporting stops along the way. There were failed stews and epic pasta tastings. There were tasting menus: 3 courses, 8, 16. I’ve taken wine and beer and coffee with those meals, had my just desserts, stared down glasses of grappa, amaro, Armagnac, whiskey.

And here is, truly, one of the saddest things: Eating like that is spectacularly unhealthful. Being a professional eater is complicated, for both the body and the mind. First, you take in a lot of calories. Add to that the fact that restaurant food has more fat in it than home-cooked. It has more salt. More sugar. This is why we like restaurants. And once you begin to eat restaurant food all the time, it’s all you ever want.