Food Fight
Nov. 27th, 2005 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanThis is actually a part of my Nanowrimo project, but I like it so much I'm putting it here for general distribution.
One of the things that I constantly fought with my parents about was food. Coming from an Irish immigrant family meant that there were two kinds of meat and four vegetables and that was pretty much it. And “cooking’ meant either boiling or frying. Usually boiling. Add this to the fact that my mother seemed to have some weird control issues surrounding food. For years after we discovered that carrots were actually pretty good raw, she still insisted on boiling them until they were flabby mush. The shelves in our kitchen were regularly packed to bursting with cookies, candy and pop, but I could rarely find anything to make a sandwich with.
I have been a picky eater all my life. Some of that, I think, has to do with the fact that I have a very sensitive sense of smell. I am also strongly put off by certain textures. As an adult I’ve been able to train myself to like certain things I hated when I was a kid (like string beans) but when I was growing up the usual parental response was to try and force us to eat the food anyway. When I was younger that meant getting hit until I ate, crying and gagging until I puked and then having to finish my meal anyway. When I got older I grew more impervious to being hit, so I spent numerous long nights sitting at the kitchen table in front of a cold lump of something completely inedible until my father would finally get out of bed long enough to chase me away from the table.
Having a dog was like a godsend to us. Our parents never wanted to sit for hours while we picked at our food, so they would usually threaten us with dire consequences if we didn’t finish and meal and get up from the table to go do something else. The second their backs were turned we were sliding snacks under the table to Scratch, who had no reservations whatsoever about the ingredients or the preparation. However that idyllic solution didn’t last long and we had to come up with another solution.
When we lived in Scarborough, we resolved this very simply. The kitchen table where we ate was directly next to the stove, so whenever the parents weren’t watching, we simply flicked the unwanted vegetable directly behind the appliance. They never caught on to what we were doing, although they probably wondered why we fought over who got to sit on the inside of the table.
Keep in mind that we lived there for six years. We developed a bit of a vermin problem later on, which drove my mother crazy. Rodents weren’t so much of an issue what with Fluffy the monster cat in the house, but we were getting a lot of bugs. I remember one particular incident where my mother saw something grey scuttling around the corner of the kitchen door. She naturally assumed it was a mouse and flicked on the hallway light, looking closely at the area where she had seen the movement.
It turned out to be a four-inch centipede. She shrieked in horror as it dove for the shadows and leapt into action, stabbing at it with the tips of her shoes while she screamed, “TOMMY!” to my father.
My father was in the living room, absorbed in his book. He called out, “What?”
My mother managed to catch the end of the centipede, squishing it into the floor. The remaining half wriggled frantically for a second, then detached itself and ran down the hallway. My sister and I yelled and screamed in delight and excitement. My mother shrieked again. “TOMMY!!”
My father, “What?”
She chased that thing down the hallway, screaming the entire time until she had finally managed to corner and kill it. Then she ran all the way to the living room, still screaming.
My father looked up from his book at his hysterical wife. “What do you want?”
A couple of months later my mother was cleaning the apartment in preparation for our imminent move. She pulled the stove away from the wall and several years’ worth of discarded vegetables tipped slowly over onto the floor.
We didn’t try to pull anything like that again for several years. Then we moved into the town house. My mother is big on redecorating, but for the first couple of years that we lived there she didn’t get around to doing the kitchen. And the wallpaper in that room happened to be gigantic yellow sunflowers. I was poking at the wilted and soggy carrots on my plate one night, when I realized that they were the exact same colour as the orange centres of the flowers. So I grabbed a slice and stuck it on the wall.
It stuck And it really was the exact same colour. I carefully mashed it flat into the wall, and then repeated the process with all the rest of my carrots until they were gone.
My sister and I resorted to this solution on a pretty regular basis, waiting until my parents were out of the room to get rid of our unwanted carrots. Eventually we ran out of sunflowers we could easily reach, so we mashed new ones on top of the old, making sure to stay inside the centre of the flowers. They never noticed.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table one day talking to my grandmother when she was visiting. She leaned back slightly and her shoulder brushed the wall. Tiny dried orange chunks pattered onto the floor beneath her chair and I held my breath, trying desperately not to burst out laughing. She was holding forth on the ungratefulness and inferiority of modern youth and never noticed my purpling face.
Eventually my mother brushed against the wall when she was walking past it one day and spotted the dried carrots that fell down in her wake. Busted.
The wallpaper in the kitchen was promptly replaced. I spent a lot more time sitting at the kitchen table until the wee hours of the morning after that.
One of the things that I constantly fought with my parents about was food. Coming from an Irish immigrant family meant that there were two kinds of meat and four vegetables and that was pretty much it. And “cooking’ meant either boiling or frying. Usually boiling. Add this to the fact that my mother seemed to have some weird control issues surrounding food. For years after we discovered that carrots were actually pretty good raw, she still insisted on boiling them until they were flabby mush. The shelves in our kitchen were regularly packed to bursting with cookies, candy and pop, but I could rarely find anything to make a sandwich with.
I have been a picky eater all my life. Some of that, I think, has to do with the fact that I have a very sensitive sense of smell. I am also strongly put off by certain textures. As an adult I’ve been able to train myself to like certain things I hated when I was a kid (like string beans) but when I was growing up the usual parental response was to try and force us to eat the food anyway. When I was younger that meant getting hit until I ate, crying and gagging until I puked and then having to finish my meal anyway. When I got older I grew more impervious to being hit, so I spent numerous long nights sitting at the kitchen table in front of a cold lump of something completely inedible until my father would finally get out of bed long enough to chase me away from the table.
Having a dog was like a godsend to us. Our parents never wanted to sit for hours while we picked at our food, so they would usually threaten us with dire consequences if we didn’t finish and meal and get up from the table to go do something else. The second their backs were turned we were sliding snacks under the table to Scratch, who had no reservations whatsoever about the ingredients or the preparation. However that idyllic solution didn’t last long and we had to come up with another solution.
When we lived in Scarborough, we resolved this very simply. The kitchen table where we ate was directly next to the stove, so whenever the parents weren’t watching, we simply flicked the unwanted vegetable directly behind the appliance. They never caught on to what we were doing, although they probably wondered why we fought over who got to sit on the inside of the table.
Keep in mind that we lived there for six years. We developed a bit of a vermin problem later on, which drove my mother crazy. Rodents weren’t so much of an issue what with Fluffy the monster cat in the house, but we were getting a lot of bugs. I remember one particular incident where my mother saw something grey scuttling around the corner of the kitchen door. She naturally assumed it was a mouse and flicked on the hallway light, looking closely at the area where she had seen the movement.
It turned out to be a four-inch centipede. She shrieked in horror as it dove for the shadows and leapt into action, stabbing at it with the tips of her shoes while she screamed, “TOMMY!” to my father.
My father was in the living room, absorbed in his book. He called out, “What?”
My mother managed to catch the end of the centipede, squishing it into the floor. The remaining half wriggled frantically for a second, then detached itself and ran down the hallway. My sister and I yelled and screamed in delight and excitement. My mother shrieked again. “TOMMY!!”
My father, “What?”
She chased that thing down the hallway, screaming the entire time until she had finally managed to corner and kill it. Then she ran all the way to the living room, still screaming.
My father looked up from his book at his hysterical wife. “What do you want?”
A couple of months later my mother was cleaning the apartment in preparation for our imminent move. She pulled the stove away from the wall and several years’ worth of discarded vegetables tipped slowly over onto the floor.
We didn’t try to pull anything like that again for several years. Then we moved into the town house. My mother is big on redecorating, but for the first couple of years that we lived there she didn’t get around to doing the kitchen. And the wallpaper in that room happened to be gigantic yellow sunflowers. I was poking at the wilted and soggy carrots on my plate one night, when I realized that they were the exact same colour as the orange centres of the flowers. So I grabbed a slice and stuck it on the wall.
It stuck And it really was the exact same colour. I carefully mashed it flat into the wall, and then repeated the process with all the rest of my carrots until they were gone.
My sister and I resorted to this solution on a pretty regular basis, waiting until my parents were out of the room to get rid of our unwanted carrots. Eventually we ran out of sunflowers we could easily reach, so we mashed new ones on top of the old, making sure to stay inside the centre of the flowers. They never noticed.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table one day talking to my grandmother when she was visiting. She leaned back slightly and her shoulder brushed the wall. Tiny dried orange chunks pattered onto the floor beneath her chair and I held my breath, trying desperately not to burst out laughing. She was holding forth on the ungratefulness and inferiority of modern youth and never noticed my purpling face.
Eventually my mother brushed against the wall when she was walking past it one day and spotted the dried carrots that fell down in her wake. Busted.
The wallpaper in the kitchen was promptly replaced. I spent a lot more time sitting at the kitchen table until the wee hours of the morning after that.