Of Cantaloupe, 12-Grain Bread, and the Claw of the Sea Puss

The landlord at my current address is a bit of a food freak. This seems to be a particularly California thing. The Golden State: The Paradise of the Picky Eater. I mean, hell, there’s more stuff in the grocery section of my local hole-in-the-wall convenience store than in all the supermarkets in Maine put together.

Of course, Maine doesn’t grow anything but lobsters, blueberries, moose, and rocks. The tourists get most of the lobsters and blueberries. And the moose are protected. For the tourists. Or is that from the tourists? Anyway. Maine used to grow potatoes, but the Atkins diet craze, and Idaho, put paid to that. So it’s not much of a wonder that Maine food stores doesn’t have all that much on their shelves. You can’t eat what you can’t grow. Or import from California. Stone soup, anyone?

So I’m staring at this guy’s refrigerator. Half of it’s covered with recommendations from various food activist groups. Organic this. Fair trade that. Local farms t’other. No information on whether the local farms practice organic agriculture or accept subsidies. Eat 12-grain bread. Cantaloupes. (He’s single. Guess he didn’t have any luck.) Sweet potatoes. Spinach. Broccoli. Bran. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Nutrition? Sure. Not. It’s all a power trip. I’m convinced of this. Hey. You lived in New England in the days before air-freighted bananas, and you ate what you could catch, or coax out of the boulders during the 17-day growing season. Or else. There’s a reason the Mayflower was supposed to be sailing to Virginia. And why the Industrial Revolution took hold in New England first. Factory profits buy food. Twelve-hour dangerous workdays beat the hell out of plowing granite.

Choice is power. And we all know what power does to a soul, do we not, Mr. Bush? When you have a lot of choice, you get it into your head that you can have everything just so. Like sodas that have neither sugar nor corn syrup nor chemicals, so that you can drink a tanker-truck-ful a day and get the satisfying sweet tingle without getting fat or one of 73 varieties of bowel cancer.

Somewhere deep in the corner offices of the marketosphere, people are laughing at the merry sound of ka-CHING, ka-CHING. And meanwhile there are plenty of untouched scraps for the people on the streets. The ones who are pushing shopping carts around, raiding dumpsters, and sleeping on concrete.

And I’m thinking all this, and my parents show up. No, they didn’t knock on my door. You know what I mean. In my mind, they showed up, if you need it in words of one syllable. And yes I have a stiff neck. They’re not always easy to carry up there. They aren’t weightless. Or at least my mom isn’t.

My father was a picky eater. Used to drive my mother to distraction. Only about three items in the entire universe of comestibles were acceptable, and he mostly shoved those around the plate. Mom tried to hide him from us kids at the dinner table. Naturally, he had firm muscles and six-pack abs well into his fifties. You needed a microscope to read his cholesterol test score.

Mom? Cakes, pies, roasts, potatoes of all sorts, vegetables, salads, cranberry garnishes. You name it, she cooked it. And ate it. Wonderful stuff, hardly ever had a failure. Unless you asked her about it. Round? You kidding? Not disabled round, after all she had an awful lot of dashing about to do, after three kids, and later after various classes of hospital patients. But round enough. With cholesterol readings somewhere in the vicinity of the solar orbit of Jupiter.

Oh. And they both smoked. For awhile anyway. Then Dad quit. Mom hasn’t.

Dad died some years ago. Lung cancer. Wasn’t yet sixty.

Mom’s in her mid-seventies. Takes more pills than the entire Union army in 1864. But she’s still very much with us.

And you thought, with your eating habits, that you were in control of what?

     The claw of the sea puss gets us all in the end. - James Thurber

- O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.