You know what’s Crazy? I’ll tell you what’s Crazy?
Kids and food and their likes and dislikes. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Kids wear it. They throw it, they paint with it. They’ll mush it, mash it, hash it, dice it, slice it and even smear it!
It seems the only thing children don’t do with food is eat it.
Oh, sure, kids will gobble up candy, inhale cake, devour Snickers, gnaw Skittles, slurp milk shakes, mulch popcorn, chomp Fritos and lick pounds of raw sugar off the counter top with their tongues!
But when it comes to Real Food, the kind of food you see on the growth chart at the pediatrician’s office, my kids turn up their nose like a French Cafe owner serving a bunch of Arkansas rednecks.
It seems like anything providing sustenance is taboo. If it’s rich in life giving nutrients it must be baneful to their tiny existence. Calcium is like poison. Protein is a calling card of evil. If it could make a caloric contribution to a strong body, my kids want no part of it.
In my house, you’d have better luck getting a vampire to wear a cross.
When my son was a toddler, fah-get-ah-boudt-it, as the boyz from New Jersey would say.
Persnickety and fastidious, he was a nightmare to please. Give him steak, and his querulous whines fill the room. Put a bowl of spaghetti before him and he pushes his spoon through the sauce like a bulldozer through mud. Pork chops? He’d just as soon guzzle children’s cough medicine. How bout Chicken? everyone likes chicken, right? Wrong! If ain’t still in the egg, then it aint’ going in his stomach.
How about Hamburgers? Ground round is universally accepted as the world’s digestable meat product, right?
Not for my son, unless it’s from McDonalds, and then, only if the burger is plain, scraped with a butter knife, so it is free of all other food items. He doesn’t like sesame seed buns, he doesn’t like special sauce, and yes it does upset him.
When I pull up to the McDonalds order board, it’s like Chinese math. The Einsteins behind the counter are overwhelmed when I say hold the pickles and the ketchup and the mayonaisse and mustard and cheese and the oinions, and while you’re at it, just hold the flavor.
You’d think I asked these window jockeys for an aerodynamic explanation of why birds fly. It’s not like I want them to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Sudanese or to donate bone marrow,
ALL I WANT IS DAMN PLAIN HAMBURGER!
After my special order, I wait, window down, listening to crickets. Inside I can only imagine the pimply faced kids wondering what to do with this calculus equation.
I wait and wait and waitn. Just give me those magic words; “drive to the next window please.”
But those words don’t come quickly. In my mind, trumpets of frustration blare stridently like a coronation in a catacomb. I look at my little boy in the back seat and wonder, why he can’t eat his burger like the rest of us. You think a billion Chinese people would care if it’s plain? For the love of humanity and caloric self preservation, just eat what’s put in front of you.
So where does my son derive his nourishment? Noodles, noodles and more noodles! All noodles all the time. My home is a noodle clearing house.
Pasta makers have my house targeted with satellites making sure that distribution allocation to this region of the country is always maintained.
My boy won’t eat just regular noodles. No that would be too convenient. My son will only eat Ramen noodles! Are you kidding me? Ramen Noodles?
Ramen Noodles are arguably the cheapest, most non-nutritious, cardboard tasting, just add water, freeze dried Brillo pad of packed pasta ever invented by accident in a Nazi food lab.
Only children and frugal college kids eat this light-weight, straw-like brick-of-food. Without moisture, Ramen noodles are packing material. They are dried leaves, crushed into a matted matter of unknown molecular properties. Ramen noodles don’t tell you what is in them, because frankly, I don’t think that anyone knows.
Ramen is crusted string, like the inside of a baseball that’s split open and rotting in the sun. Ramen is a desert of Styrofoam, a nutritional waste land of indigestion. It has all the protein of fungus.
Be that as it may, my boy loves Ramen Noodles. Add water and watch him salivate. He’ll stand near the stove and watch the hot, wispy waves of flavor enhanced steam float to the ceiling. In times like these, my kid seems more like a starving refugee coming ashore seeking asylum.
In just minutes, a freeze dried packet of edible asbestos becomes a bubbling mulch.
Like a little hunch back of Notre Dame, the kid will huddle over his bowl. He’s a baby Bob Cratchet whose face is immersed in a yellow vapor of soup haze. His spoon is a frenzied blur, jack hammering through the viscous goo like a steam shovel on high test.
Slurp! Slurp! Slurp!
He inhales each elastic string into his puckered lips like a wind tunnel racing down a straw. I watch the end of the noodle as it wiggles wildly, gyrating like a run-a-way weed whacker.
Steaming and slurping and weed whacking and suction sounds and salt spray and steam shovel spooning and hunch backed assault on a tiny bowl of soup. That is my vision each and every meal with my son.
“Why won’t you try some of daddy’s chicken?,” I ask, all ready knowing the answer.
He looks at me through blonde bangs and a veil of soup vapor. He grimaces and continues to suck the soggy string violently into his cheeks.
I shake my head. For some reason, Charleton Heston yelling; “Soylent Green is people!,” continues to fill my thoughts.
“Don’t worry,” my wife interjects. “He’s obviously not starving, he’s growing, so he must be getting some nutrition.”
“I think all he’s getting is liquefied salt stuck to silly string. It’s probably turning his intestines into a microbiological spider web.”
“I like noodles,” the kid suddenly blurts out angrily, defending his one and only food group.
SLURP!
He swallows another salty spoonful.
Kids and food. They go together like metal rain gear in an electrical storm.
My advice: Get a dog. They eat everything.