Samhain Publishing

This is not an appropriate lunch for an ahem, mature woman, is it? Shouldn’t I be eating, I don’t know, yogurt and fruit? Pomegranate juice and low-fat cottage cheese? A bean curd and alfalfa sprouts sandwich?

Unfortunately, as I aged, my eating habits got worse not better. I’m sure this is the result of having a balanced diet shoved at me every day of my childhood and being forced to clean my plate. Potato chips were a rare treat in our house and so was soda. We ate a lot of Jell-o with canned fruit congealed in it for dessert.

Oh, the things I hated but was forced to eat. Liver tops the list. No matter how Mom tried to disguise it, my brothers and I knew it was liver. We all hated it. She’d entice us to eat it by serving chocolate pudding or another favorite for dessert. Blackmail. Who was she fooling? Not her children. You don’t think my parents ever ate liver once we left home do you? No. My mom laughs about it now, defending her evil ways by saying liver was cheap and nutritious. Yes, Mom, but nobody liked it.

I literally gagged on Mom’s fried eggplant. Crunchy on the outside, which didn’t prepare me for the disgusting gelatinous mess I discovered when I bit into it. Gross! One time I was sent from the table in tears for refusing to consume boiled okra.

Canned peas? Disgusting. Flavorless. Pale sickly green. They were regular visitors on my childhood dinner plate.

Mom used to buy powdered milk to save money. My stomach churns just thinking about it. This nasty, white, watery substance neither looked nor tasted like milk. Combining it with corn flakes did not make it any more palatable.

Vienna sausages smushed up and mixed with pickle relish and mayonnaise housed between two slices of white bread was a despised lunchbox special. Luckily, my friend Kathy insisted it was something delightful called “ham salad” and she gladly traded me her baloney and cheese for it.

Since I’m no longer a child, if I want to eat potato chips and drink Coke while watching my new “Crunchless Abs” video, there’s no one here to stop me. Grapes for dessert? Now that’s my idea of a balanced diet.