After relentless attempts over a single evening to make the edges of the pie nice and clean, Jackie Loomis has eaten an entire rhubarb pie this evening.
“I was going to have just one slice. A small slice” explains Loomis in a phone interview. “I guess things just got away from me.”
The rhubarb-raspberry pie with a butter crust had been made with large stalks of rhubarb that held a lot of water, which got released in the baking process, making clean slices a challenge, if not an impossibility. Still, friends remain concerned about Loomis in the aftermath of the incident.
“Nobody eats a whole pie unless something is wrong,” says longtime neighbor Sarah Birchdorff. “I know she wanted to make the edges even, but at a certain point, you’ve gotta realize you’re eating an entire pie. We just want to make sure she’s okay.”
Jackie defended her actions in a follow-up email.
“Have you ever been forced to stare at a mangled, damp pie with no edges?” Jackie asks. “It’s a jungle—it’s total chaos. I did what I had to do,” said Jackie, adding that she intended to make a second pie tomorrow.
Jackie’s husband Dave clarified that this most recent pie-eating incident was not the first time that she had consumed more than she had intended as a consequence of trying to make something neat.
“Once she ate most of a meatloaf,” remembers Dave, who had initially thought that she had been sleep-eating, until he got closer and realized that she was in fact quite awake and alert, attending to her task with precision.
“I guess it’s just my thing,” said Loomis, approaching a tray of green Jell-O with a raised butter knife. “I have high standards for what I eat and how I leave it and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
