 | ||||||
 |
  |  |  |  |   | |
|
| ||||||
|
| | | | | |
T A B L E_ T A L K To cut or not to cut: Join the debate over whether to circumsize in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Something to declare Recipes make the woman Conception by deception First Pick by proxy Time For One Thing: Fly-Fishing BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
- - - - - - - - - -
|
UH-OH, SPAGHETTIOS | PAGE 1, 2
For our nightly dinner meal, my mother demonstrated a flair for the exotic. Hawaiian meatballs made with canned pineapple in heavy syrup; lemon chicken, cooked all day in a Crock-Pot with frozen lemonade concentrate. Sometimes she served honest-to-God fresh produce: wedges of watery iceberg lettuce drowning in the dazzling gelatinous red-orange of Kraft French Dressing. In an era that worshiped brand names, our dinners were offerings upon the altar: melted Velveeta, cubed Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese, ReaLemon juice, crushed Kellog's Corn Flakes, Kikkoman Teriyaki Sauce, Wish-Bone Italian Dressing, Lipton Onion Soup Mix, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, Durkee's French Fried Onions. Capitalism was alive and well in America and living in our pantry. My mother's desserts rivaled science fair projects. She made Dole pineapple upside-down cake, sticky Rice Krispies treats and the infamous "mock" apple pie made of Ritz crackers instead of fruit. My favorite dessert was the short-lived Jello 1-2-3. Although prepared like regular Jello, this amazing product would separate into three distinct layers as it cooled: creamy top, fruity middle and plain artificial black cherry bottom. Top the whole thing with non-dairy Cool Whip and you have a dessert fit for an Apollo astronaut! I didn't care for the gritty middle layer but I was not allowed to bypass it and move on (remember those hungry tots in Europe!). One result of all the forced plate cleaning was that I forgot what it felt like to be hungry. Whether or not we felt like eating was never a factor in our mealtime plans. In truth, our schedules were related more to the TV Guide listings than to our stomachs. Our 12-inch Sony sat at the end of the white Formica kitchen table as a full-fledged member of the family. I remember the meals of my childhood in conjunction with what was on TV at the time. During breakfast we watched "Dennis the Menace," "Captain Kangaroo" and "Rocky and Bullwinkle." At lunchtime we enjoyed "Bozo's Circus" followed by "Let's Make a Deal." Dinner usually began with 15 minutes of gruesome color footage of the Vietnam War followed by a changing schedule of sitcoms: "My Mother the Car," "The Munsters," "Mister Ed," "My Favorite Martian," "The Mothers-in-Law." Looking back, I'm surprised I was a thin child. I should have been clinically obese. Especially when you take into account the overstocked candy bowl at the entrance to our kitchen. This bottomless candy bowl was legendary in our neighborhood and responsible for a good portion of my local popularity. I never left the room without grabbing a Mars Bar, Milky Way, Butterfinger or Hershey's Almond Bar. Other daily snacks included Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Suzy-Qs, Fiddle Faddle, Screaming Yellow Zonkers and my favorite delicacy, pink snowballs: globes of cream-filled devil's food cake cloaked in a thick layer of the softest marshmallow and coconut that science could deliver. A rare nod to our high calorie intake during these years was the occasional purchase of Diet Rite, a soft drink loaded with soon-to-be-discredited saccharin and cyclamates. In the late 1960s, perhaps as a backlash to a decade of chemical experimentation on the American public, the virtues of natural foods began to move into the spotlight. At first, my mother's version of "natural" was using maraschino cherry juice as a food coloring in her cake batter, but eventually we started consuming a few "health food" items such as Roman Meal whole wheat bread and tubs of soft artificially colored margarine that replaced butter on our frozen waffles. Whatever ad campaign persuaded Americans to forsake wholesome butter for these nasty polyunsaturated mixtures was a stroke of marketing genius. I'm not quite sure what the official repercussions were of ingesting all that junk food, but I don't want to play nutritional Russian roulette with my own young daughter. I wouldn't dream of letting Leah near a box of Trix or Lucky Charms and I worry that every bite of a Big Mac or sip of a sugary soft drink might take an inch off her height or a month off her life. Over the years my own metabolism has slowed down to the speed of Log Cabin syrup and it's become very difficult for me to shed any of the 20-or-so extra pounds I've put on in recent years. I know the sludge I grew up eating is partly responsible: I visualize the mutated molecules of pink snowballs jumping onto my fat cells and hanging on for dear life. I must admit to one serious infraction with my daughter, however.
Recently, out of a wistful sense of nostalgia, I brought home a can of
Franco-American Spaghettios. The moment I opened the container and got a
whiff of those sauce-covered circles, I was transported back to my
childhood dinner table circa 1965. I could close my eyes and see my
mother setting down the accompanying Tater Tots and Ball Park Franks. I
could hear the strains of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song in the
background. I gingerly placed a bowl of Spaghettios in front of my
daughter and watched her take her first bite. Her eyes grew as big as
pink snowballs and she smiled from ear to ear in a chemical-induced
reverie. But before you call the child welfare bureau, rest assured:
Whatever the current status of starving children throughout the world, I
did not make my daughter eat every bite.
Danny Miller is the editor in chief at the Galef Institute, an educational reform initiative working with public schools across the country. He lives in Los Angeles with his daughter Leah.
Drama Queen Gag me: Cast your vote for the worst meal a mother ever served. |
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
