Angry Food.

I'm reading a great book right now )which I'll review on my book blog before too long). The author talks a lot about eating in a chapter entitled, sensibly enough, "Eating". When she was a child her mother would put the same meal on the table every Thursday evening, a jellied salad and something called American Chop Suey that sounds like a disgusting melange. The author hated this meal and the dinner table became a battlefield. Every Thursday she would sit at the table until bedtime or until she finished her meal(she could never force herself to swallow this godawful concoction). When we were teenagers my sister and I went to live with my father. He was, I guess, disappointed that we didn't know how to cook. My mother had not been a culinary role model; her pieces de resistance were flaccid bacon with a can of tomatoes tossed over top, potatoes mashed with a can of salmon or Kraft dinner. If my grandmother hadn't sent us CARE packages several times a week we might have starved. Actually,to her credit, my mother did eventually learn to make a decent Bolognese sauce. What was I getting at? Oh yes, every week my father bought huge bags of frozen mixed vegetables (peas carrots, corn, squash, etc) that made my sister and I gag and we were served these night after night for years. We'd try to sneak them into napkins on our laps without getting caught and then we'd flush them down the toilet at an opportune time. We'd have to swallow some, though, which produced violent retching. To this day I can't understand why he didn't buy peas or corn or carrots frozen separately, we would have eaten them that way. Why would a parent set up this type of power struggle? As I read this book I identified with the author and felt all the anger rise up that I thought had dissapated long ago.
Food and eating are, as we all know, emotionally charged subjects. Take for instance the current backlash against vegetarians. Meat eaters seem to take vegetarianism as a personal affront for some reason.Bad News Hughes takes particular offense:

Ever see a vegetarian find out their soup might have been made with chicken broth? It’s quite a spectacle. Coughing, dry heaves, tears... They’ll put on a nice little show, for sure. You’d think someone smacked ‘em in the gut with a frozen ham. Not that I would know what it looked like if you just up and smacked some vegetarian in the gut with a frozen ham... I swear.

WesaTurtle suggests:

eating THREE times the amount of meat you'd normally consume to make up for all the meat that your vegetarian buddy isn't eating.

As a perpetually angry adolescent I would be driven up the wall by my mother's refusal to eat a tossed salad although she would eat each of the ingredients if they were laid out separately on her plate. She was not a fan of condiments; mustard, relish, mayonnaise, or pickles never crossed her lips and the sanctimonious way she'd decline such items as if to say, "you don't know what you're eating, you poor deluded creatures" , caused steam to erupt from my ears. Until I was in my mid-teens I was brainwashed into believing that it was tres gauche to eat condiments. Now, of course, I'll eat anything. I try to steer clear of macadamia nuts having broken into a huge stash my stepfather sent me one Christmas when I was stricken with a major case of the munchies. I ate so many nuts (plain,candy-coated, barbecued, chocolate-covered - I jammed them all down my cakehole) I made myself sick and am reminded of this whenever I see macadamia nuts.