Things I Have Not Eaten More Than Once:
- Spam
- American cheese product
- Cheez Wiz
- Velveeta
- Non-kosher hot dogs
- Milk with lunch or dinner
- Okra
- YooHoo
- mystery meat
Foods Not Allowed At Home:
- Breakfast cereal with more than 3g of sugar
- potato chips (unflavored tortilla chips were ok)
- soda
- candy (exception: Halloween candy)
A Typical Dinner at Home:
- roasted chicken (mom's special orange chicken recipe)
- roasted root vegetables
- string beans with ginger, garlic and soy sauce
- beer (for grownups)
- oranges and cookies
Foods I Associate with Poverty:
- boxed mac and cheese (of the nuclear orange variety)
- ramen
- rice
- pasta
- fried chicken
- McDonalds
- cheeseburgers
- canned beets
- canned spinach
(I just realized that the reason I associate these foods with poverty is because when I was a kid and we did food drives for the local survival center, this is what I remember being in those bags. With the exception of McDonalds, of course.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Foods I grew up eating
Broiled Chicken
Fried okra
Fried Chicken
Roasted chicken
Sirloin steak
Pulled pork
Boneless Pork chops
Lobster
Clams
Shrimp
Hallibet
It was important to my mother that we didn't eat "like poor people." When I would petition for vegetables (and eventually when I came out as a vegetarian), my mother would scoff and say things like "we can afford meat so we shall have it. Why settle for things beneath you?"It was similarly important that we were not the kind of people who ate processed meat, who ate meat form a can, who ate meat that had been pressed into patties, we were the kind of people who ate white meat, who ate pulled meat, who bought boneless everything. More than any other aspect, food was the way my mother choose to assert her class ascendancy. She would tell me of days when she was of a lower rank and she would eat an english muffin for dinner three nights a week.
It was instilled in me that if you have to, then you should eat less, not compromise the quality. That the thing poor people didn't understand was how to shop wisely (buy in bulk) and how to buy foods that were nourishing. Her tone would be full of judgment as she would list the junk food in my aunts cupboard (they were on food stamps).
I hardly realized my mothers class issues until I was living with two vegans who were amazing cooks. They loved to make asian food, but I would often protest that i didn't eat rice. They found his absurd. Who doesn't eat rice. Then I caught myself just before saying, "only poor people eat rice."
Post a Comment