Last year I was on an evening flight from New York to West Palm Beach, delighted to find myself in first class. Across the aisle sat an older dame — 70s, maybe — in slacks, legs crossed, reading The Financial Times, which she’d folded in vertical fourths, exactly the way all the charcoal gray suits used to do back when bankers still rode the subway to Wall Street in the mornings. The steward came through with the cart, and each one of the Louis Vuitton bucket bags and the full-length foxes and the razor-thin silver laptops spilling out of the rows in front of us ordered their water, tomato juice, white wine, organic purple potato chips with Hawaiian sea salt — and in so doing, confirmed their classy virtues. The lady in seat 4F, though, the one in the light cashmere pullover reading the newspaper, she clicked the latch on her seat-back tray and said: “Double Smirnoff, on the rocks. And Doritos.”

I’ll introduce myself here — my cooking, my eating, my sensibilities about food and drink — by telling you I loved her. I felt reborn by her.

Back in New York, I could not wait to share my revival zeal with my girlfriend, Ashley. To fix her just such a sturdy drink and as sensible a snack when 7:30 rolled around. To lay on her some of the gospel of 4F. To say we were in the dating phase is an absurdity because we’d had only one date, during which we recognized instantly what an inevitability we were, and thus proceeded accordingly. But still, it was early, and I was learning the details of her. Maybe she was one of those people who’d never condescend to use a restroom at a Popeyes, let alone house a spicy dark-meat combo at one? I made her a gin and tonic and set out a dish of pristinely stacked Pringles — sour-cream-and-onion flavor. In case she balked — she herself is a restaurant chef — I also had a ramekin of Castelvetrano olives.

But Ashley got it immediately, chuckling with recognition. Her own longing for a kind of return to this approach to food — if not to life itself — stirred.