Food and thought.

Boy, my last post about various ways one might try to eat virtuously felt really disjointed. 

Not too surprising, perhaps.  Like lots of kids in my generation, divorced parents meant I grew up bifurcated, seventy percent in one home and thirty percent in another, and my food environment was similarly bifurcated — down to the point where I could never remember whether in this house I was supposed to split my English muffins with a fork over the sink or with a serrated knife over the garbage can.  Or was it a fork over the garbage can?  I don’t remember.  It’s nice not to have to waste brain cells on things like that any more.

So, anyway, in one house, I was raised on mostly processed food from boxes and tubs.  I would use "Kraft Macaroni and Cheese" as the symbolic archetype of the kind of stuff I ate, except that macaroni and cheese was in fact one of the things my mother did not ever  make from a box.  (She in turn rhapsodized about her grandmother, who always ate in restaurants and never cooked anything except homemade applesauce).  I ate a lot of Lean Cuisine.  I ate a lot of Pizza Rolls.  I ate a lot of canned soup.  I ate a lot of frozen egg rolls.  There were always bags and bags of candy in the house.  Always bags and bags of potato chips and pretzels and Doritos (those were for my brother) and canned jalapeno cheese dip.  My brother and I were each allowed to choose a 2-liter bottle of pop every week.  A couple of times a week my mom would cook a dinner.   Not a wide variety of stuff, but tasty.  There was macaroni and cheese, and Spanish rice, and stuffed peppers, and hamburger patties simmered in jarred mushroom gravy and served over Potato Buds.  Hamburger Helper and Tuna Helper made their appearance. 

So that was seventy percent of the  time.   The rest of the time I lived in Uber-Gourmet Land.   By the time I was sixteen or so, I’d acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of Cincinnati-area restaurants (and indeed, when a couple of friends from college settled in Cincinnati I wrote a restaurant guide for them as a housewarming present!)  (Once, as a child, I was given a tour of the kitchen at La Maisonette; the chief image I retained from that memory was a brilliant red lobster emerging, tonged, from a cloud of vapor above a glistening stainless steel pot.)  Cooking at home was elevated to performance art, with the trendiest of ingredients, and always served with a good-to-excellent wine.  I learned how to make a proper Caesar salad at age eleven, how to make a red-wine reduction for steak au poivre at twelve or so.  If I may say so myself, I became a pretty good little prep cook, mincing garlic and rolling out pie crust and such things.    I have many lovely memories of cooking at my dad and stepmom’s house, and I remember being very proud to be entrusted with the production of various dishes even for dinner parties.  I made chocolate biscotti once for New Year’s Eve.   

Oddly, though,  fresh produce never made a huge appearance at either place.   The only fresh vegetables I ever remember seeing at my mom’s house with regularity were green bell peppers and onions.   And while we used vegetables in cooking at my dad’s, with the exception of salads, they didn’t figure in very importantly and were never the highlight of the meal.  It was the eighties and nineties; pasta was king. I can still produce a sauteed-chicken-and-pasta-in-cream-sauce dish without even thinking about it.  Except I don’t want to very much. 

So when I was first dating my sort-of-farm-raised husband, I used to scandalize him by remarking nonchalantly, for instance, that I had never eaten, or even seen before me, a fresh grapefruit half until I went to college.  I had never eaten fresh green beans.  I had never eaten kale or turnip greens or mustard greens or collard greens.   (Granted neither had he.)  I’d hardly ever had a home-grown tomato.   

This background has given me a very odd combination of "comfort foods."  I hardly ever give in to them because I know better now, but the freezer case in the grocery store beckons me.  Sometimes I really crave a frozen egg roll.   At the other end is a different kind of comfort food.  I don’t get to fine restaurants (or even to celebrated holes-in-the-wall) very often because of the complexities of raising young children, and when Mark and I get a date night or when I manage to have breakfast  by myself in the Cuban joint up the road on Saturday mornings, I always get this exhiliarating aah-I’ve-finally-come-home feeling.  Yes, I’ll have another glass of wine!  Thank you!

But I’ve moved away from both those places when it comes to crafting my own family’s environment.  Vegetables and lots of them, tending more and more towards simplicity in preparation; less pasta, rice, potatoes, and corn than I ate as a child.  We exercise heavy control at the grocery store, so that mostly the stuff that enters our house is "green light" and the kids can graze as much as they want.  (They go through a lot of natural peanut butter, which is fine with me.)   Butter, milk, eggs, chickens, and about half the cheese we eat come from one local farm now; pork (including bacon and sausage) and beef from another local farm.  I tell Mark that one thing about marriage I didn’t expect is that I thought we’d eat out a lot more; but I still do go out quite a bit, mostly taking the kids out for late lunches, because I want them to be comfortable and well-behaved in restaurants.  I still do use certain convenience/packaged foods, mostly for afternoon teatime, and I still do take the kids to McDonalds once in a while, but I exert a lot of control over the choices.  The kids may have either French fries or a sweetened drink; the four- and one-year-old share a single kid’s meal plus a fruit salad.  This is America; they’re going to be exposed to a lot of fast food; I may as well teach them how to do it with moderation. 

So.  It’s all still evolving.  As I navigate mothering and teaching, it has all required a certain transformation of values.  We all want high-value food, after all.  My mom valued convenience and ease and comfort at the end of a long, exhausting workday.  My dad valued (still does) richness and showmanship and atmosphere, a good story to tell his guests and his companions and himself.    I am valuing… what?  Convenience and ease, but the kind you get from simplicity rather than from  preservatives.  Richness and a good story, but the kind you get from whole foods rather than from the niche-boutique foodie store.