My parents were products of the American Black South; no plate left with anything on it. “A happy plate,” one of my aunts proclaimed, where you did everything short of licking the plate clean.
So I grew up with the mandate that to throw away any part of the food you’ve been given is verboten, and those who transgress face a fate worse than death.
For the most part growing up, I had no problem eating everything put before me and ask for more. My mother was an avid student of the soul food tradition, so big pots of collard greens and cabbage were made on Saturday or Sunday to be the veggies we would eat off the rest of the week. Every now and again, the big pot was pulled out to make gumbo, awash in shrimp and sausage and stewed chicken. Cornbread and muffins stood by to sop the gravies and sauces.
There was one category of food I hated, though. Slaw. And my mother made two kinds, carrot and apple slaw.
When she would make it, it was a tearful battle at the table, one she would win. (Dad would just tell me to do what my mother said, so he largely stayed out of it.) It would end with me, sitting alone at an empty table, with nothing but two spoonfuls of apple or carrot slaw. The mayonnaise in it would be getting warmer, and I would retch as I tried to choke it down.
But I couldn’t leave the table without it being gone. They caught my first few attempts; putting it in the trash, going outside and putting it in the garden. But I elevated the arms race to untold levels when I just dumped it behind the stove. ANTS BE DAMNED. I was never caught, I’m weirdly proud to share.
I say that to say this. I was reminded of some circumstances recently which illustrated to me just how janky and double dealing my folks were in this arena. Constantly prodded to “try it, you might like it” and “YOU BETTER FINISH THAT”, there was ONE food that I, in my juvenile wisdom, refused to try, and they did NOT try to coax me to try.
Cheesecake.
And as they paraded to Marie Calendars and Cheesecake Factory, and I would scrunch up my nose and proclaim “I don’t want any!”, they would shrug.
Come to find out, years later, how wrong I was and, in a way, how wrong they were. To deny me a universe of goodness!
But, then again, you can’t have a growing boy finding out he likes cheesecake. I was eating one of Mom’s pound cakes in a week; imagine the devastation on a $30 cheesecake.
So I understand…now.
Still wrong, though.