Locusts. That’s probably the closest image I can
develop when I try to describe how I and my brothers ate when we were
kids. We were locusts. We loved food when we were kids. (If you look at our family portraits, you
know that we’re not starving now, either.)
While there are
people who talk about “enjoying” food, we were not those.
Those people are
enjoyers.
We were
shovelers.
We didn’t care what
we ate, as long as we had enough of it. While my mother made delicious meals of
Cajun, Italian or Tex-Mex food, Dad understood that we boys did not actually
taste our food. (Note to my mother: I love your food. Don’t quit cooking. I’m talking about Dad here. Your food is great.)
So, when Dad was in
charge of dinner—which came mostly when Mom had to work nights—we knew the
code: “frozen five high. “
“Frozen five high”
came from months of experimentation and food testing. Hormel didn’t do as much testing as we did to
come up with the “frozen five high” code.
“Frozen five high” simply meant that each boy could have a packet of
frozen hot dogs apiece, put it in the microwave on five minutes, high. Remember, this was back when microwaves only
cut out about an eighth of the cooking time.
Microwaves now could cook up these hot dogs in a quarter of the time,
but we had an old one, so “frozen five high” was the standard.
That was
dinner. Each boy got a packet of hot
dogs. Meal time. Remember, we’re locusts, so ten hot dogs with
buns was the first course. Dad could,
and did, join in the eating, shoveling in food as fast as he could. You could barely see our hands because we
were stuffing our faces so quickly. It
was great. It wasn’t healthy. It was a little scary. But for a young kid, it was great.
Dad knew how to
make food special, to create interesting concoctions for special
occasions. When it got cold in the
winter, he’d put a pot of red beans on the wood stove to cook all day. When he didn’t want us to eat, he’d make corn
bread. (his corn bread’s the worst). Every night, he’d eat cereal. I know each of us boys have eaten bowls of
cereal at 9pm, thinking of Dad.
In our house, food
wasn’t just for enjoyment, though. It
was a marker, a reason to celebrate or to have a special connection. Dad knew that, mostly because he helped
create the culture of food and love.
Out
of all those special times, though, I think I like Saturdays the best.
He’d go down to the
day-old bread store—he called it the used bread store—and he’d get a bunch of honey
buns and creamy curls. He’d come home
and put those sweets in the freezer and he’d take out the frozen sweets that
he’d bought the previous Saturday, and that’s what we’d have Saturday
mornings.
If you’re wondering
whether I am morbidly obese from these food memories, I’d say no. (The Centers for Disease Control would say
no, too.) We ate mostly healthy food
when I was young, but it wasn’t served by my father.
Mom used food to
nourish us, both in a physical sense as well as a cultural sense. We all three know how to cook and eat because
of my mother’s great work. My father
used food to nourish us in an emotional sense.
While emotional eating has gotten a bad rap lately—I always see people
crying on TV when they talk about emotional eating—connecting emotions to food
is not a bad idea.
Food--even junk food--can create intersections
between people when intersections come tough.
For Dad, feeding us
was a way of showing that he cared, but it was also a way for him to enjoy watching
us do something. If you’ve ever seen a
bunch of young boys—locusts—eat, you know how fun that can be. Even if it was a packet of frozen hot
dogs tossed in the microwave and watched them being nuked, dad loved watching us eat. And we enjoyed it, too.