Ripshit Heart

Great changes took place in American Culture in the 1970s. Prosperity allowed the middle classes to remodel their kitchens into hues of orange, olive, brown and harvest gold, many of which are rental properties that retain their earth-tone glory to this day. Women's Lib caused more women to enter the workforce, creating latchkey kids and probably bolstering adolescent drug use. Baby Boomers, ever tired of not having wash-and-wear instant gratification in all things, divorced in large numbers, leaving kids to be shuffled around between parents for weekends and holidays.

How did one segment of the middle class cope with these changes? By embracing whole grains. If you can't change what's going on in the outside world, one can change himself from the inside out, starting with eating copious amounts of wheat germ. A mother can't show her love to her children while they are at daycare, but she can lavish them with a nice dinner of lentil loaf with homemade yogurt sauce when they get home.

in 1976 my mother joined a food co-op, which met once a week in the lunchroom of the elementary school a couple of towns over. This allowed her to schmooze with other like-minded healthy moms as well as acquire brown rice by the bucketful at near third-world prices.

In another fit of healthy living, my mother also outlawed sugar and sweets. From a young age, my sister and I were instructed to politely turn down candy if we were offered it. Never mind the fact that Mom ate Haagen Daaz chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream straight from the tub while we were sleeping—sugar would make us hyper, rot our teeth, and turn us into mindless sugar craving zombies.

Halloween was a cruel joke, as mom took us trick-or-treating to 2 or 3 houses, and then were allowed to pick 3 things to keep (items we could eat excluded Reese's peanut butter cups, Hershey Kisses or other things my parents liked).

Denied processed food, I began experimenting with alternative snacks. Paper was abundant in school, so clean, white and flat. Nothing approximated this whiteness in my house, where the walls and sheets that were white in other peoples’ houses were brightly colored to my parents' bohemian tastes. Ripping old spelling papers into little pieces under my desk, I put little balls of paper in my mouth until they became moist and chewy. The taste was pulpy, not unpleasant-- if you ripped a bit with ditto ink on it, it gave it a peppery flavor.

Another smooth, white abundant school material was library paste. It had a sweet, slightly chemical smell to it, which didn't linger in the taste at all. Pasty, flavorless, and left a sticky film in your mouth, I stuck to the paper.

Crayons were next on my list. I couldn't eat my own crayons, because I only got one box a year. Thus I took to eating the communal 2nd grade crayons, the broken and shredded bits left behind for those who forgot their crayons to use. Crayons had a pleasant texture, though the taste wasn't that memorable. I thought the different colored crayons would taste different, but alas, th sumptuous Sienas, Umbers, Mulberrys, and Aquamarines that Crayola gave us all had the exact same waxy flavor with the slightly acrid aftertaste. Now, whenever I eat Starburst candies, I am reminded of the pleasing texture of crayons.

Every year at Christmastime, we brought down a gingerbread house from where it lay packed in newspaper in its box in the attic. It was about the size of a birdhouse, with frosting trim, candies on the walls, a picket fence made from candy canes, and even "stained glass windows" made from melted hard candy. It looked delicious, and every year I begged to eat it. Of course I was never allowed to, and I just got told the story of Hansel and Gretel again. My longing for candy and sweets was turned into a "what if there's a witch who lives in there?" game. I played along, though I knew that if a witch lived in this house, she would be too tiny to be too scary--a fly swatter would probably neatly dispatch any witch leaving me to and eat her house in peace.

Every year the little gingerbread house got a little more derelict and shabby. The carefully placed icing began falling off in chunks, the swirly red and white peppermints around the doors cracked and crumbled, one of the windows fell out from where I had secretly licked it. by the third year, even a very tiny child-eating witch would be hard-pressed to live in this ramshackle gingerbread hovel. I asked Mom if I could eat it now.

Finally, the moment I was waiting for. She said I could eat the entire house! Every year I had gotten the lecture about how cake your make for building things doesn't taste good, because it has to be sturdy to hold together (but I don't CARE!!). With another small warning, she told me to eat the house. I thought a moment, deciding on which area I should start on. Then, I positioned my mouth at the corner of the roof and took a big bite. My teeth stayed in place on the roof; no tasty morsel came off for me to chew.

Crunching some of the deliciously pasty-sweet petrified icing, I examined at the slightly soggy bite marks I had left on the roof. Where I had scraped the icing off with my teeth, the inner structure of the house was reavealed to be-- corrugated cardboard.

"It's not gingerbread, it's cardboard!"
"I told you it would taste awful after all these years."
"No, it's REALLY cardboard, look!"
"Hmm. Well, I guess you learned your lesson then!"

To this day I'm not exactly sure what lesson I learned. I'm guessing it may be related to the lesson I learned when I discovered I was old enough to make my own dietary decisions and binged on an entire bag of gummy worms when I was in high school. I was on a massive sugar high until I fell asleep on my friend's kitchen floor, waking up the next day with the biggest sugar hangover ever.

You'd think the opposite, but I really don't have a sweet tooth now. Go figure?

posted by Scooter B. @ 1/08/2007 09:13:00 PM 0 comments