We Called It Food

Long before we knew that just about everything we were eating contained chemicals, we ate in blissful ignorance.

I am sorry, my son.

When you were growing up a scrawny, sickly little boy, all I wanted you to do was eat something. Your frequent, nearly monthly, bouts with ear infections, sore throats, head colds, stomach bugs, and everything else that was making its way around the classroom, made feeding you difficult.

I gave you flat ginger ale and cola to soothe your tummy, popsicles for your throat, and can upon can of chicken noodle soup. You did thrive, in spite of food products loaded with sugar and salt. For that, I am grateful.

As time went by, I struggled to find things you would eat, as you had always been very fussy about food. Your grandmother would make you anything you wanted while I was working, which set up the cycle of preparing only what you would accept – fluffer-nutter sandwiches, for instance.

Frosted Flakes for breakfast, bologna on white bread for lunch, hot dogs for supper. A breakfast variation might have been bacon and eggs, but usually you only got that when you stayed with your grandparents because bacon was expensive. Nitrates were our friends, right?

When I hit on something you’d eat – like deli roast beef warmed in canned gravy over instant potatoes – we’d have that weekly. Pizza, of course, featured high on the list when cash was available. There was always a bottle of cheap soda in the fridge alongside the gallon of whole milk.

There were those early mornings when I quietly returned home after servicing a newspaper route bearing Danish pastries dripping with icing or a bag of chocolate donut holes. You’d wash those down as our dog Zeb waited patiently for his taste.

Poor Zeb. We killed him with kindness by way of M&Ms and Oreos. Remember when I caught Zeb stealthily pulling an entire danish off the kitchen table? We laugh about it, still calling his front teeth “Danish grabbers.”

Bags of cheap fried fish sandwiches or hamburgers were a weekly treat enjoyed in the yellow VW bug I dragged to the west coast and back again. Remember how the heater in that thing would burn our ankles while the rest of our body shivered? You had to use the ice scraper on the inside of the windshield while I drove down the road. I still miss that car.

You survived a childhood filled to overflowing with food that contained the newest food-grade chemicals, engineered to extend the product’s shelf life versus human life. Oh yeah, and no seatbelts, either.

There came a turning point, however. Popular science finally brought to light that we were eating poisons. Unfortunately, the damage had been done – bad eating habits are hard to break.

In my own defense, I had tried to integrate vegetables and yogurt into your diet. You turned your nose up. And you could always get a meal of artificial flavors from your grandmother. She was the queen of modern food preparation. If it came out of a can or plastic wrapper, a meal at her table was possible.

She had learned how to prepare wholesome foods from scratch. After all, her mother had been born in the late 1800s, had actually seen food grown or butchered, had soaked beans overnight for a week’s worth of offering from the bean pot, made cranberry sauce from raw whole berries, and knew how to keep a stove at the right temperature for baking bread – a wood burning oven at that.

Alas, your grandmother shunned all that bother and became a modern woman in the 1950s. She relied on Campbell’s soup, Betty Crocker, and Swanson frozen TV dinners. I’d have to learn to cook on my own, but not until I, too, used convenience over vitamin value.

I’m truly sorry, son.

Recently, you learned that you needed to lose a few pounds. In reporting this to me via text, you wrote, “Heading home to finish off all the foods I now have to give up LOL!” You included an emoji of a hamburger. No more potato bread for you, my son. Time to realize you are what you eat, especially after the age of 40.

As Americans across the nation hit the grocery aisles gathering ‘food’ for the big game on Sunday, I imagine that cheese, chips, chicken wings, and chocolate chip cookies filled shopping carts to overflowing.

Now that I’m a food snob, or should I say, more discretionary in my choice of foods, I’ll be making kale chips. You can wash those down with sparkling water flavored with lemon slices, my son, as you mourn those Hostess cupcakes. LOL!

By Marilou Newell

 

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