"You 'Et Yet?"

        Growing up, we eat well. Mom goes shopping and brings home 40 bags of groceries and we all automatically troop out to bring them in.  Even the smallest one;  if you’re old enough to walk, you’re old enough to tote groceries.
       We have minute steak, Salisbury steak, pizza, roast and fried chicken. Spaghetti, tacos but not really Chinese. Side orders are potato chunks boiled and salted, or beans, Jell-O, Velveeta slices. We had biscuits with dinner at night, batches of Dad’s scrambled eggs and ate lots of cold cut sandwiches on weekends and it always felt like there was plenty.

          But I’m a picky eater and always was.
     
         The summer Ann turns nine she learns to make tuna casserole with crushed potato chips as a key ingredient. From then on we usually have one in the fridge and Jesus, the smell of tuna makes me want to hurl, even now. Rich likes peanut butter and syrup on waffles; this also makes me gag. But Dad’s sauerkraut is the worst; as Richard Pryor said, “The funk knocked me to my knees!”

          I ate none of it.

          The rule around the house is if you put it on your plate or bowl  you’re going to eat it, by God. And no special dispensation for soggy cereal. Otherwise, nobody pushed.


          Once puberty hit and I had unlimited access to fast food, that was my main diet whenever possible. My friends and I would come to our house and go through snack food like locusts, until the parental units locked down the good stuff. The summer Ann worked at the East Perrine McDonalds lives on in infamy---half a billion served to us and our friends, alone!

        At college in Georgia, Grandmama, Papa and the fat grannies at the campus dining hall fed me until I hit the freshman fourteen and started jiggling around. Two years later I switched to U.M., moved into a shared place with a sister and assorted friends, and starved on a diet of Co-’cola, ham biscuits from Hardees and fruit Dad gave me from his lunch whenever I went by his office. Sometimes I found sacks of chicken and turkey potpies and TV dinners stacked near our apartment door, compliments of Big Bill.

           Junior year I add a daily lunch at Ruben the Cuban’s diner on the corner of Chapman Field and U.S. 1 because Jeanne works at the hardware store and it’s a chance to spend an hour with her.

         She says, “You’ve got a teenage palate, Jane.  All you like to eat are hamburgers and fries.  It’s time to grow up, appetite-wise.”  She introduced me to cauliflower, broccoli and steamed shrimp which I tried to eat without peeling the first time I tried.  Jeanne took pride in cooking and she only used the freshest food around but paradoxically, she also introduced me to the vilest road food; microwave burritos.

       I try raw oysters only because I lose a bet.  Aphrodisiac my ass.  More like snot on the half shell. Jeanne knocks back oysters with Tabasco;   I use Triaminic since that’s how I wash my own snot down when I have a cold. 

        Bobbi and I ate cheap because we were starving grad students. Luckily she was over employed because I was underemployed and on her staff.   We ate chicken leg quarters, chops, and vegetables like asparagus and artichoke hearts.  She also ate stuff I’d never seen before like canned corn beef hash.   But our preference was meat and potatoes with diner type fare like meatloaf and pot roast.

      Judi and I went through all-you-care to eat buffet lines like Sherman through Atlanta. She also exposed me to Jewish food which is mostly disgusting except for latkes. Gefilte fish is not something that I will put in my mouth again, ever, but we ate well and often because I could taste food then on account of not being a smoke stack.

        Irma was almost as good as Marta at stretching food dollars and she’d whip up big wads of fluffy rice that came from a 20 lb sack. Almost everything she cooked started out dry and in massive bags; beans, rice, spicy corn meal from San Salvador. She taught me to love papusas at this dive called El Alacytl on Calle Ocho but she also loved milkshakes with tropical fruits I never heard of. She was a grocery store snob, though, and walked out if she thought one was dirty or cluttered or old.


       I like lobster but I eat a lot of chicken. I like t-bone steak but I eat a lot of ground beef. I eat a lot of white products like sugar, flour and salt and a lot of brown products like Coca-Cola, bacon and fried chicken legs.

      The red part of my diet is ribs or ketchup; the green is lima beans or salad and the white is Wonder bread. Fruits take up the rest of the spectrum and I spend a lot of my take home pay on junk food instead of getting an organized menu and eating at home. It’s all a cycle. I get sick of eating restaurant food and no one makes southern cooking so I have to cook.


        Then I remember how much I love home-cooked meals, especially Jane-cooked. I know my way around a spatula when it comes to making what I like.