Entry #21: FOOD

I first met Artiste my freshman year at Bennington College, in 1972. My bold friend Betsy was not intimidated by the handsome graduate student, so one evening we went and sat down to eat dinner with him in the dining hall.

As Betsy and I tucked into our spaghetti and meatballs, or whatever it was, we noticed that Artiste was eating salad. He said he was vegetarian. I was genuinely shocked. I had never met a vegetarian before. I believe my first words to the man who would eventually become my husband were, “What do you eat?”

“Beans,” he answered cheerfully. “I cook up a pot of beans on Sunday and eat them all week.” He laughed as if he were joking, but I found out later it was entirely true.

I don’t think I’d ever eaten any beans at that point, other than baked beans out of a can, and frozen lima beans. I’d never seen a lentil, or a black bean, or a white bean – just as I’d never seen Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Indian food. My parents did not believe in multicultural eating. They also refused to eat Italian food (unless you count canned spaghetti) and “Jewish food.”

My mother had no domestic skills whatsoever, and did not wish to acquire them. She served only Food of Hate. As a child I never ate breakfast at all, and at school I always purchased the hot lunches, which I thought were delicious. I have no memory of my mother ever fixing lunch for me, although she must have fed me something when I was very little. I do remember being young enough to sit up front in the grocery cart at the A&P, where she would open up a package of the cheapest hamburger meat and let me eat it while she shopped. She called it “steak tartare,” which it clearly was not. It was ground e. coli. This was another one of her attempts to bend the world to her “nothing is anything” rule, as when she dabbed cooking vanilla behind her ears and called it perfume.

I had an early start on disordered eating. I remember crawling up onto the kitchen counter, reaching into the cupboard, and eating peanut butter by the tablespoonful. I have no idea where my mother was. As soon as I was old enough to open a jar of jellied cooked chicken, I was on my own. I discovered I was able to make mayonnaise sandwiches, with white bread and mayo and sometimes a piece of iceberg lettuce. When I got a little older, I boiled eggs for myself, and as soon as I could open cans, that opened up vast new possibilities that included canned tuna and canned baked beans. I ate a lot of combinations of those foods: tuna and mayo on white bread, tuna and egg and mayo on white bread, baked beans and eggs, baked beans and tuna… you get the idea. I was not in charge of the shopping, so I was not able to expand my horizons into other canned goods.

When I switched schools in seventh grade, the Shipley School sent me the name of a student nearby who would be in my class so we could make friends. This was a very nice idea, but it was like expecting a swan to entertain a donkey. Susan – the swan – politely invited me over to her house.  She was wearing nicely pressed pants and a shirt starched at the cleaners. Later I would go through many cans of spray starch, laboriously ironing my uniform shirts at night, realizing they would never look as crisp as the real thing, but also knowing that my parents would iron my hands before they would pay for starched shirts. For my father, yes. For me, never.

Susan’s house was beautifully furnished and seemed like a museum. I had never seen long drapes before, or a four-poster bed with a pretty coverlet, or a bathroom with hand towels and soap that smelled nice. At lunchtime we went into the kitchen and there was a housekeeper who served us lunch. I was stunned. She gave us tuna sandwiches and glasses of milk. Susan didn’t realize this was anything special, but I had no idea there were human beings who would make lunch for you. It was like a restaurant!

My mother did produce one meal a day: dinner. There was still the expectation that The Husband would work all day at the office, then come home and have a cocktail and eat a meal prepared by The Wife. Since children were to be seen and not heard, they were fed separately ahead of time and then sent to their rooms.

It is difficult to do justice to how truly terrible my mother’s meals were. She would take the A&P hamburger, form it into round blobs, and burn the shit out of them in a frying pan. Generally the burnt hamburgers would be served with a block of frozen sliced green beans that had been boiled until they turned grey, and some “mashed potatoes” made from potato flakes out of a box. My middle brother shot up to a great height in fifth grade and was always starving, so he would cook himself “mashed potatoes” from a box to survive. He was so skinny his knees were knobby.

The cocktail ritual fell by the wayside when my mother started drinking before lunch, and she drank her way through preparing dinner. Often she took the cheapest cuts of chicken, put them in a pan, and smeared them with a mixture of grape jelly and hickory smoked salt. She called this “sweet and sour chicken,” and it tasted like ashes. Sometimes she would put cheap cheese on top of white bread, melt it in the oven, and call it "Welsh Rarebit." Another standby was chipped beef on toast.  She would make a kind of glue out of flour and milk, then add corned beef of uncertain origin that was so salty it was inedible. Then she would put a blob of this mixture on a piece of toast. I would eat the white bread with the white glue but avoid the inedible brown lumps of super-salted beef. Later I found out you can soak corned beef in water to get the salt out first, but that would have taken an additional two minutes.

By the time my brothers were in college, my mother would start her second round of drinks for the day promptly at 5PM. Eventually my father would get home, and the three of us would sit down in silence to some godawful meal. Having eaten many different things since then, mostly what I remember is what we did not have. There was never any salad. My father would take some iceberg lettuce, dip it in the mayonnaise jar, and call that “salad.” There was no fruit, except oranges in winter. There was greasy margarine instead of real butter. Items that never entered the house included: roast chicken, quiche, fresh fish, steak, and any type of pasta. There were no fresh vegetables, ever. There were no grains. And forget about “foreign” foods like pizza (“is that made with eggs and cheese?”) or lasagna or bagels or borscht. Both of my parents were insulted at the idea of eating food from other cultures. I tried to tell them about yogurt, but as usual they thought I was being stupid until someone else came along and said the same thing.

My father and I would choke down some bites of whatever was on the plate, and my mother would immediately start a fight about how hard she had slaved over dinner, and how we should be grateful for the time and effort she had put into this delicious meal. She would complain and complain, then cry, then leave the table in tears and go to bed. Every. Single. Night. I would go up to my room to do homework, and my father would do the dishes. That was the routine for about five years.

So when Artiste came along, I was woefully unprepared to be a vegetarian. At his apartment I saw my first fresh vegetables and actually freaked out. I couldn’t get over how beautiful they were! I had no idea there were vibrant green, red, and yellow peppers. I had never seen an eggplant, with its remarkable purple skin, or a heavy head of green cabbage, or a clove of garlic. The layers of an onion were all new to me, as were the glistening green skins of zucchini, and the undersea ruffles on red lettuce. I had never seen the inside of a cauliflower, or the way broccoli makes little trees. I never realized there were different kinds of potatoes, and that all you had to do to make genuine mashed potatoes was boil one of them. I could not tell the difference between a peach and a nectarine, or an orange and a tangerine, or a Macintosh and a Red Delicious apple. I had never heard of ricotta, or feta, or mozzarella cheese. I couldn’t get over the fact that an unassuming, inexpensive bag of lentils could turn into a whole pot of delicious and healthy soup, and that a little yellow packet of yeast could turn flour into fabulous steaming loaves of home-made whole wheat bread.

When my mother found out that I had become vegetarian, she accused Artiste of  “trying to make me fat so all my other suitors would go away.”  I think we can all agree that is an interesting take on vegetarianism. Also an interesting perspective on my control of my own destiny. She claimed there was a “secret Nellie” inside of me that actually agreed with her. It is very disconcerting to have your own mother tell when you are eighteen that she knows that you have another personality hidden inside of you, and you should let it out. Which train is the crazy train?

Once I got away from home, I realized that there are innumerable types of food to try, and innumerable ingredients to discover. I learned there is such a thing as Food of Love, and that meals are meant to bring people together and to make them closer. There are so many important rituals around food that signal “we are family,” or, “you are a welcome guest in our home.”  Going out to dinner should not be an exercise in finding the cheapest rubber chicken, but a pleasurable learning experience where you eat something new, prepared with pride, in the company of people you enjoy. Every meal is really a window into what and who you love - and Food of Love, however humble, sustains us physically, emotionally, and spiritually.