In bad taste: Reminiscing about ancient personal history
I'm 50 years old today. I'd be happy to stay alive as a female human for 10 more years so I could see my kids grow into adults, but anything's fine, really. I'm getting too old to care.
Lately I've thought about my first real job, if you can call it that. I was on summer break from college--yes, I was young once--and this lady who knew my parents needed someone to help care for her bedbound mother and to make dinner for two, the lady herself and her female roommate. The elder care I learned quickly--giving her pills, offering her liquids, feeding her yogurt and pudding, and changing her briefs (adult diapers) and underpads. It was the ladies' dinner antics that still stick to my mind.
The two women had a quaint custom: critiquing the meals that their servants served them. I had big shoes to fill. Their longtime helper had scaled back her hours, which was why I had been hired in the first place, and she was an amazing cook. The ladies I had to impress had a few trusted recipes for soups they wanted me to use, but there was a twist: Instead of using butter, they wanted me to fry the diced onion that went into the soups in vegetable oil instead because they wanted to start eating healthier.
The ladies never seemed to relish my soups. "It's okay," they'd say, "but not as good as Barb's." I didn't know what I was doing wrong. I was following their recipes like they'd told me to. I kept my mouth shut and tried to improve to no avail until one night they'd run out of cooking oil and I had to fry the onion in butter for the broccoli soup instead.
"It finally tastes just like Barb's!" they crowed.
The anger I felt at the injustice of it all has stayed with me to this day. These were women who were the same age as I am now. They should have known better! Onion fried in vegetable oil will never give the same flavor to a soup that onion fried in butter will. They'd been judging me unfairly.
Decades have passed since I was an ingenue unversed in the mysteries of health cuisine. Those ladies have long since passed away, too, one from Crohn's disease and the other from complications of Parkinson's disease. A whole-foods vegan lifestyle could have benefited them greatly. At least one of them was still alive when this great bestseller came out, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health. DNA determines the illness you'll get; diet pulls the trigger, the book says.
Long may we all live.
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