My relationship with food started with a tummy ache.
When I was born, my parents soon learned I was allergic to cow’s milk. My mother had grown up on a farm in Wisconsin where her father milked his cows to provide milk on the table. My father loved cow’s milk so much that he scooped the cream off the top of pasteurized milk with a spoon and put it in his mouth, right over the bottle. So my allergy to milk was unusual for them. To solve the problem, they bought a goat, milked it, and put the goat’s milk into my bottle.
Our family was large—two parents and ten children to feed. This meant that the preparation of food required a major effort, not just by my mother but the whole family. Since my father grew up on a farm, our first home was a rented farmhouse on top of a barn on a two-acre property in Fair Oaks, California. My dad’s day job was in the military, but before he went to work and after he got home, he milked the goat and cow, fed the chickens and ducks, collected their eggs, gave lettuce to the rabbits, sheered the sheep, picked fruit from the fruit trees, and planted, weeded, and harvested the vegetable garden.
When I was three, my parents bought a house right down the street on a half-acre lot, and it was the most prolific half-acre I’ve ever known. We didn’t keep a cow there, but we still had sheep, ducks, chickens, fruit trees, and a year-round vegetable garden. Radishes, carrots, lettuce, and green onions in the spring. Zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers in the summer. Pumpkins and acorn squash in autumn, and potatoes in the winter. I remember running bare-foot under the plum trees over fallen, ripe plums that were magnets for the honey bees. Before I went to Kindergarten, I had been stung dozens and dozens of times each summer.
We weren’t legally allowed to work when we were kids, except as harvesters in my father’s garden. Under the blazing summer sun, I stooped between the rows of tomato plants and picked tomatoes until my arms itched with rashes. When I complained, I was switched over to the rows of green beans where the purple dragon flies terrified me as they flitted among the bean plants’ twirling tendrils. I hated the hot sun, the rashes, the dragon flies, and the repetition of picking.
One day at the dinner table, I came up with the incredible idea that I didn’t like green beans, and, if I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t have to pick them anymore. With this inventive scheme in mind, I looked down at the green beans on my plate and said out loud, “I don’t like green beans.” As fast as lightening, my brother stuck his fork in my green beans and lifted them over to his plate. All I had left were fish sticks and mashed potatoes, and the serving dishes on the table were all empty. Nevertheless, I spent my whole childhood hating green beans. It wasn’t until I was around thirty that I tried them again and discovered they were delicious.
Cow’s milk and green beans weren’t the only foods that traumatized me. My mother was a decent cook, but she often lost track of the vegetables cooking on the stove. By the time she remembered to turn off the zucchini, it had turned into a gelatinous mass of green sludge, and she made us eat it anyway.
My mother employed her daughters as helpers in the kitchen as soon as we could reach over the counter. When we had French fries for dinner, I had to peel ten pounds of russet potatoes and slice them into French fry fingers. Then, Mom deep-fried them in oil and we cooled them on racks placed over cookie sheets.
I never complained about not liking French fries. I loved them as much as everyone did. In fact, if I didn’t protect the fries on my plate, one of my siblings would snitch them when I wasn’t looking. The best course of action was to eat the French fries on your plate first, get another helping, then eat the rest of your food. To this day, I don’t dip my French fries in catsup while I’m eating them. When I was a kid, I didn’t have time.
Some of my food trauma also stems from the creative ways that my father punished us when he caught us committing food crimes. I think my dad could have earned a PhD in psychology if he had the notion to get more than a two-year college degree. He was thoughtful, and, because his sentences were so inventive, they were effective. One time after dinner, he caught me popping a large marshmallow into my mouth. “You still hungry?” he asked. “Next time you eat when you’re at the dinner table.” He made me sit at the table and finish eating the leftover pork and beans. That was a “tooty” experience that I never forgot. Today I don’t even like marshmallows.
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