OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I stared down at my dinner plate, the startling revelation stripping me of my appetite as quickly as dysentery.
Before me lay a wonderful feast of a meal. The flatbread was moist and green with baked-in herbal goodness, the turkey covered in hummus and horseradish, the cheese sliced and fresh from the pre-sliced package.
I froze as I reached inside the bag of whitish, vitamin-filled seedlings, a strange sensation staying my hand from withdrawing the plant life.
* * * *
I flashed back to when I was a boy, back in rural Virginia, sitting on the porch of a childhood friend's family home, a four-room clapboard shack of a place, home to two parents, a grandmother, and five children.
You know, back in the ancient times, the Dark Ages. 1986, to be exact. Back when the cool kids wore red pleather jackets covered in zippers, while the rest of us waited for grunge to make our thrift-store flannel shirts cool again.
My friend and I sat on the porch, gnawing on leftover fried chicken and dry buttermilk biscuits smothered in melted
WIC cheese. We split a warm can of
Dr. Chek cola.
My friend's dad worked on a tobacco and soybean farm. Their entire family lived off maybe $500 a month. Without thinking twice about it, my friend's mother fed one more child than she could really afford to feed.
And it was one of the best meals I've ever had, sitting on that porch in Prince Edward County, Virginia, soaked in sweat from riding my bike all morning, savoring every bite taken as crickets chirped under the house, as the blacksnakes baked on the gravel county road.
I've dined in some of the finest restaurants in America. Emeril Lagasse's
NOLA? I recommend the hickory-roasted duck. If you're ever in the Twin Cities, give the
Loring Pasta Bar a try.
Masa's is a must for any visit to San Francisco - great vegetarian menu. And the
Tobacco Company's Escargot Rockefeller Stuffed Mushrooms remains the best example of Nouveau Southern cuisine to ever cross my lips.
But very few meals will ever top that one back in rural Virginia, the one given freely by a family that could barely afford to keep their electricity turned on or their rusted-out Olds Cutlass running.
* * * *
I slowly, cautiously, pulled a handful of sprouts from the package, careful not to waste even one sprig of the crisp, fresh greens.
Where I grew up, in red-clay poor Virginia, most people will never be able to afford such luxuries. Hell, there are folks who'll never see one lick of health insurance, will never have the opportunity to even complain about a dental plan. Think they're worried about additive-free food?
Right now, there are 14-year-old single moms who are the
children of single moms that I went to school with, trying to split six bucks between diapers
and food, trying to figure out the bullshit government assistance paperwork while (hopefully) trying to finish high school, too.
And I just whipped up a sandwich with a street value of more than eight bucks, one meal for one person.
Stupid fucking Conscience. Some nights, when I'm alone, it speaks the loudest.
* * * *
Back in the early 1980s, back before my mother went back to work after my sister was born, (my dad's factory job paid a whopping $800 per month, before taxes, which paid our portion of the farm expenses and kept food on the table), our family dinners consisted of cuisine that would send your average health nut running for the nearest treadmill.
Fatty, cheap pork chops, canned store-brand peas, and Top Ramen. Chopped
Red Dye No. 4 colored wieners, stewed in pots full of generic, white-package Mac and Cheese.
My aunt made the world's best grilled WIC cheese and onion sandwiches, served with a dab of mustard and handfuls of deep-fried, trans-fat filled goodness from 99-cent family-size bags of cheese doodles. I had a distant relative who can make even the greasiest squirrel or gamiest opossum taste better than even the most expensive cuts of meat. The secret, of course, was in the sauce - Thrifty Made ketchup, a splash of vinegar, and about three pounds of salted lard and butter.
You know, it's a funny thing, poverty in America.
The United States is, in many ways, a sadistic society, a nation so twisted that its poorest citizens are made fat, and eventually killed, by a cornucopia of cheap foodstuff with barely enough nutritional value to be called food, while its wealthiest citizens are the only ones able to afford things like fresh produce, minimally-processed meats, and chemical-free cuisine.
Only in America do the poor get fat because they can't afford to eat like the rich. Only in America do the rich do terrible things to themselves to look famished, while the poorest folks are encouraged, through slick marketing and product placement, to Super-Size and Go-Large everything.
In other nations, poverty is marked by starvation or malnutrition. In the U.S.? poverty is measured, health-wise, in terms of morbid obesity and heart attacks.
* * * *
It wasn't the random flashback alone that disrupted my otherwise peaceful supper.
It was something that happened here in Oxford recently, while shopping at the local grocery store, that turned a simple meal and reflection into a painful, almost nauseating experience.
A group of young, affluent women - local undergraduates - had been shopping in the organic aisle next to me, buying some of the same foodstuff I was purchasing.
A very large woman (easily more than 500 pounds) was trying to make her way down the same aisle with a shopping cart full of all sorts of clearance and discounted items, mostly potato chips, soft drinks, fatty cuts of beef, and economy jars of mayonnaise and store-brand peanut butter. The woman had five young children with her, all overweight.
The clothes the family wore were old and stained, clearly hand-me-downs or yard sale finds. One of the kids, a cherubic blond boy, sported an Tupac Shakur tee-shirt from the mid-1990s, an adult shirt that stretched tight across his large preteen frame.
The woman seemed very self-conscious about her weight, as she was wider than her shopping cart, apologizing numerous times for having to pass through the usually not-so-tight aisle.
* * * *
After the woman passed, I returned to my shopping. The young, affluent, dangerously thin college students, however, were whispering and laughing to themselves.
"Can you believe somebody fucked that thing? Oh my God, if I looked like that, I'd shoot myself.""Did you see that little boy? Like, talk about trailer trash.""See Becky, I told you they had wiggers here. Fat ones."It was the
wigger comment that drove me to, well, force my way into their conversation. I'd had enough, really.
"Don't ya'll skinny-ass bitches have somewhere else to be? Seriously, you ain't all that, especially you with the buck teeth. You shouldn't talk. I didn't know Mr. Ed had a kid."And you? Who are you? I've seen better tits on goats. And what is that on your lip? You might want to wax that shit. You look like Hitler in drag..."I lit 'em up. We're talking
Old School snappin'. Haven't laid the verbal smackdown like that in years. Rusty, but I think each scathing remark was dead-on in terms of hitting its target.
Don't ever, EVER make fun of poor people around me. I was a big kid myself, too, and, well, being one of the very few white kids to graduate from a successfully integrated, ethnically diverse
Brown v. Board public high school, I don't take kindly to the use of the word
wigger.
The women just stood there, jaws maybe three inches from the floor. I thought one of the women was going to cry. I didn't care.
You see, people who view themselves as somehow perfect don't deal too well with the idea of imperfection. As long as there's an
us and a
them, there's aways a latent fear, some insult that tears deep into the psyche.
Why is it the self-described pretty people just can't take their own imperfections being exposed, but seem so quick to point out the imperfections of others? Do they not know it works both ways, that there's no such thing as
perfect or universal
prettiness?
* * * *
I managed to choke down my overpriced, homemade sandwich. Memories of my childhood and of recent experiences may have stripped my appetite, but my Conscience wouldn't let me walk away from it.
If you make a sandwich, even an eight-dollar sandwich, you'd better be willing to eat it, especially if you know what poverty really tastes like in Rural America.
Cause' I keep lookin' and huntin' just like a lion,
Let the suckas know that it's them that'll be dyin',
I show no remorse to the source of the tales,
And if they yell, then the hungry better battle...
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