More on comfort foods

I talked a little about this earlier

I found a Mexican pasta ("La Moderna") brand that actually makes alphabet noodles. I bought a bag and brought them home and cooked them up.

Wow, noodles need a LOT of butter to taste the way they did when I was little. I felt kind of guilty about how much I put on.

You know? They're not as good as I remember. I think I like the wagon wheel pasta I had been using better - the alphabets are really small and they get kind of starchy just by themselves.

I also have to admit I like the Lipton's chicken noodle soup - the dried kind, that's basically chicken bouillon with noodles in it - it's totally artificial and the kind of thing that makes food snobs recoil in horror. But I'm not a food snob, and there's something comforting about boiling up a couple cups of water, dumping the packet in, and having hot soup in five minutes.

(I also have to admit I like the pre-packaged Swiss Miss pudding cups. I like pudding but never seem to have the energy to actually make it from scratch. Yes, I know how. Yes, it's not that hard. But it takes time, and often time is not what I have).

And I've already mentioned my fondness for Cup O Noodles. Yes, I know. It's loaded with salt. It's a dietary nightmare. But, to me, it means a particular sort of comfort - it's easy, it doesn't require thought, it's warm, it's noodles. I didn't eat these - or Ramen - for years, because of fear of the salt content. But several years ago, over Thanksgiving, I had to make an emergency trip overnight on the train - my father was having an emergency heart catheterization, with the possibility that he would have open heart surgery. So I got (by some miracle) train tickets up and back, and had to ride overnight in coach on a very badly delayed Amtrak (I was supposed to get on around 7 pm; I finally got on around 1 am. That wait in that tiny, crowded, overheated station was the most miserable and lonely six hours of my life.)
Anyway - I was on the train, I was exhausted, I was hungry, it was roughly lunchtime, the snack car was out of most things I'd consider eating. But they had Cup O Noodles. So, with a sigh, I said, yeah, I'll take a Cup O Noodles.

And you know, that was exactly what I needed then - something warm and uncomplicated, something I had eaten as a child. I've started eating them (very sparingly - not more than once or twice a month) again, and you know - there is something comforting about them.

(And my dad turned out to be okay, what showed up on the stress test was nothing major, certainly nothing requiring open heart surgery).

Another thing I like - and you can hardly ever find any more - is good cider. REAL cider. Not "apple juice." Real pressed apple stuff, with pulp and extracts from the peel and all that. (Of course, it's all pasteurized now - which is probably for the best - but I don't like the "clarified" stuff). I found a new brand - it's one of the "Simply Orange" line but it is "Simply Apple" that is close enough to being cider to satisfy me; it's not got that strange pallid cast that "apple juice" has.

(Actually, where I live now, it's hard to get good apples at all. Apples, apparently, don't grow here. Which makes me sad. A fun fall outing, when I was a kid, was to go to an apple orchard and buy a peck or so of good "keeping apples" for eating and applesauce through the winter, and maybe getting cider and donuts.)

It occurs to me now that a lot of the fun, nice, good things I remember from my childhood were fairly simple - and fairly inexpensive for my parents. I remember the apple-orchard trips, and also going to pick strawberries when they were in season. And if we were lucky enough to be visiting my grandmother at the right time, we'd go pick blueberries.

And we went hiking. And there was an inexpensive "revival theater" near my dad's campus that showed old Disney movies (and other "all ages" type movies).

My mom would bake with me - it was a big deal if she'd let me make "cutout cookies." (I still do make them, but only at Christmas - now that I have to do the rolling and the cleanup I realize what a big production it was).

And we kept a garden, and my brother and I were given little plots to plant what we wanted to try (pumpkins - which I always wanted to grow - never worked out that well; we usually went to a "pumpkin patch" to get ours).

It occurs to me that a lot of the good childhood memories revolve around food - cider and donuts, or baking cookies, or popcorn at the movies. I suppose there are some who'd roll their eyes over that, who said our parents raised us wrong, that we're "too attached" to food now, because of it.

I don't know. I get very tired of the "foodists" and the people who would convince their fellow Americans that chocolate cake is a weapon of mass destruction. I don't see food so much as the enemy; the enemy is the wrong attitude towards food.

When I was a kid, no food was "forbidden" - oh, we didn't get cookies BEFORE dinner, and we were expected to eat what was on our plates - but there was nothing that was made more attractive to us by being told it was off-limits. What was more, we were never forced to eat something we hated. (I had a friend who actually was grounded, because she threw up at the table after trying to force down Brussels sprouts. My parents asked us to TRY but if we just couldn't down the food, it was "no harm, no foul.")

I was a pretty picky eater - didn't like most vegetables (and found, in fact, that some of the really disliked ones from my childhood - like celery - I actually have a food intolerance to and should not eat). However, as an adult, I'm slowly adding things. I never liked sweet potatoes or winter squash as a kid - now they are two of my favorite things and I eagerly await for the "new crop" to come into season. And I'd never touch red cabbage when I was younger, but I like it now. Even the kind that comes in a jar, for when I don't have time to make my own. And salad. While I won't claim that salad is my Favorite! Food! Evah! I can and do eat it pretty regularly.

(Still can't do Brussels sprouts though. Not for want of trying. I do think I'm one of those "supertasters" - many of the things they are purported to hate, I hate. (And I can't stand meat that's too fatty, or salted olives unless I rinse them off first, or things that are too sweet).

I do like green tea though (but make it weaker than recommended) and spinach - well, raw it's okay; I can't do it cooked.

But I don't think my parents screwed me up too badly re: food. Yes, I'm kind of fat. But I don't THINK that's because I eat more than most people, based on my observations of colleagues and friends - perhaps I eat more calorically dense stuff, true (I like chocolate. So sue me.). But I do think there's a body-type issue, also - both my grandmothers were heavy like I am, and my dad is. (And, ironically - my mom is tiny and slim, and she's the only one in the family with elevated cholesterol).

I do think that a lot of the food-fear that's being promoted in the name of "protecting children from obesity" or "fighting the obesity war" is misplaced. I just fear we're going to raise a generation of anorectics, or conversely, a generation who binge on "forbidden" foods because they are "forbidden." Or that we'll have foods banned, or taxed out of people's reach, in the name of "protecting people from themselves."

I don't "forbid" myself chocolate; I can buy a bar of Green and Black's or something and eat one or two squares of it and go, "Okay, I'm good" and put the rest away for later. I guess some people literally cannot do that; I have friends who claim they cannot keep cookies in the house because they would eat them all in a couple days (or less). I am not sure what leads to that mindset; I would hope there'd be a way of getting over it.

Food is a great pleasure; it can be a great comfort. It seems wrong to me to scare people so much about what they put between their gums that they either no longer can take comfort from it or are racked by guilt for consuming it. Or to make them so conflicted about it that they cannot have a box of Oreos, or a bag of potato chips, or a pint of ice cream in the house without thinking obsessively about it until they've eaten it all.

(I'm always surprised at how many of my gen bio students don't really understand what a calorie is. When I explain it's a unit of energy content, they're all like, "baroo?" As if, they've heard for so long that calories are BAD, that they can't understand that a certain amount are needed to keep a person alive. And that the calories in, say, watermelon, are basically the same kind of energy as the calories in a cookie. Well, there are more per unit volume in the cookie, but it's the same energy.)

Food is food. It is not medicine, it is not virtue or vice. It is merely food. It cannot condemn us to Hell nor save us from dying. But every day, it seems there are more people trying to convince us that food is far more than what it is.