Eat what’s on your plate, or not.
Jul/091
It’s almost time for supper and I am silently despondent about the outcome of our evening meal. More often than not, my wife ends up extremely upset with my daughter due to her incredibly picky eating habits. Never before have I been witness to a child so unwilling to consume even the most basic of dishes. She refuses to eat conventional childhood staples such as mac and cheese, spaghetti, and pizza, and she won’t even touch a hamburger unless it’s dripping with ketchup. In her defense, my wife and I have very eclectic taste in food, and are constantly attempting new and different cuisines, but, at the same time, we tend to shy away from vegetable-heavy dishes and meals that require uncommon, weird-textured, or gross-looking ingredients. Her complaints range from being displeased with the level of char on the hotdog, to just simply “not liking it.” This ongoing argument typically leads to her being lectured by my wife and having to sit at the table until she eats. While I understand that this is standard punishment for a child who doesn’t eat supper, I can’t help but feel a little bit of sympathy for her.
I was a picky eater myself, granted not to the extent of my daughter. My parents, even to this day, usually don’t stray too far from their familiar recipes. These recipes were also mostly devoid of anything but the most basic ingredients. This type of cooking is a godsend for a young child. For example, mom’s lasagna consists of noodles, hamburger, cheese, and marinara. There is no veggies to not like, no ricotta cheese to be grossed out by, and no strange, spicy sausage to hate. This type of diet lends itself very well to the selective eater, which, by the way, includes my mom, and it encouraged me, as a kid, to avoid new dishes.
When the occasional curve ball was thrown at the dinner table, usually from my fathers request, I found myself in much the same scenario as my poor sweet little girl. I, refusing to ingest the inedible atrocities that was served to me, had no other choice than to smuggle out said foodstuff. One of my earliest and most radical attempts was to simply smoosh the food into a liquid. It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. I don’t remember the dish entirely but I remember elbow macaroni was the main ingredient. I started there. Taking my fork, I repeatedly squashed a few pieces of macaroni. I suppose, given enough time, that it may, indeed, be possible to mash pasta into a different state of matter, but I was allotted only an hour or so before phase 2 of my dad’s punishment, The Belt, would take effect, and I was forced to find alternate methods of food disposal after about a twenty minutes of squishing.
The paper napkin was a very reliable method, permitting that you had only a small amount of supper to get rid of. Anything over a handful would draw immediate attention the moment you traversed the exposed area between the kitchen table and the trash can. Any larger sized food-filled paper napkins needed to be stored in a nearby kitchen cupboard until a more convenient time when you could return and properly dispose of it. That is, if you didn’t forget. I can still remember the disgust in my mom’s voice when she found a days-old napkin wrapped piece of chicken.
Sometimes the trash can, due to the lack of other types of garbage that is needed for covering up the food wad, was not the safest means of disposal. These items were disposed of in “the door.” “The door” was an unusable door in the old bedroom that me and my brother shared. When we first moved into the house, this door had been secured shut but not adequately sealed, mostly towards the bottom. Thus, cold air would consistently blow in during the winter potentially freezing the room’s occupants. My mom’s solution to this dilemma was to secure a piece of scrap carpet across the bottom half of the door preventing the breeze from entering. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it was fucking ugly, but it worked. It also created a sort of wall pocket that, based on the topic of this post, I’m sure you can figure out what we decided it could be used for. I couldn’t even remotely figure how much food made it’s way into that pocket, but, again, I can still remember the disgust in my mother’s voice.
Occasionally, I’ll see my daughter sneak over to the trash can and discard her dinner, and I pretend not to notice. My wife asks her if she ate, the child lies, and I take comfort in the fact that, out of all the possible places to put unwanted food, she chose the most accepted.