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The
Best-Planned Meals of Moms and Dads
by Michael Shaw
The amazing thing about slippery slopes is that sometimes you have
to hit bottom before you realize you were sliding. The latest epiphenomenal
thud? My wife, Jennifer, made the following statement while we were
all sitting around the dining room table:
"You should try Liam’s new chicken nuggets."
In my giddy gastronomically advanced childfree days,
the only nugget I would have legitimately associated with a chicken
belonged under a rooster. But parenthood can change many things, including
your palate. I looked up from the latest sale circular from Baby’s
Got To Have It.com- “The internet’s foremost source for blow-molded
plastic objects to litter your child’s life with.” Our son, the
heir to my kingdom, was taking his midday meal. Taking it specifically,
and throwing it all directions, like a food sprinkler.
Jennifer plucked something from a pile of soggy Cheerios on the far
corner of Liam’s tray and handed it to me. I slowly slipped it my mouth.
It was tepid, salty, slightly moist in the middle, with a meat-like
texture. Liam watched me eating his nugget, shocked that I would voluntarily
put this thing in my mouth. (And this is the child who, left on his
own, would happily consume an earwig.)
At 11 months, Liam had reached the infant-on-the-cusp-of-toddler
phase that demanded every meal be accompanied with a “real food.” After
a week of watching the food chain fly through the air, Liam had found
the chicken nugget worthy of consumption. He would put them in his mouth.
It wasn’t entirely clear if he had actually eaten one yet.
Liam, too, lolled a nugget-chunk in his own mouth, contemplating
its fate. You could see it in there, making slow revolutions, in a rinse
cycle of sorts, as he slowly extracted its essence. Suddenly it fell
from his mouth, landing on the tray with a soggy plop. It was at this
point that his mother, a woman who had managed restaurants, could produce
the mother sauces from scratch, and owned the Culinary Institute of
America cookbook, took Liam’s jettisoned nugget and popped it into her
mouth.
"They’re not bad, they actually taste like chicken…”
What have we become? Are we no better than jackals that
regurgitate their kill for their young? But I had to admit it: those
were pretty good nuggets.
Jennifer continued, “They’re better than those Chickycheese Knobs
I bought last week, and at least Liam sucks on them before he throws
them.”
Ah, Chickycheese Knobs. Not actually a nugget but an
extruded lump of a chicken and cheesy substance coated in road-cone-orange
breading. So alien was the Chickycheese Knob I made the mistake of dissecting
one. Now I know how Chuck Heston felt in Soylent Green. It was
impossible to tell where the Chickycheese substance stopped and breading
began. Even young Liam who loved anything minced, processed, reprocessed
and then extruded, refused the Chickycheese Knob a place in mouth.
I asked hopefully “uh, did he eat any of his steamed green beans?”
“No, if you’d like some, there’s a few still wedged in his booster
chair. Remind me to pick up more meat sticks for Liam and mini corndogs
for Hannah.”
Our daughter Hannah was in the midst of a two-week
mini corndog bender that showed no sign of abating.
Ahhh, meat sticks. Our bridge from baby to real
food. Imagine an arrested Vienna Sausage. (I know it’s difficult, the
Vienna Sausage being enough of a mystery in itself, having nothing to
do with, as far as I can tell, with either Vienna or sausages).
But beyond pondering the lineage of little weenies, loomed a larger,
more profound issue. What had happened to us? At one time we were food
snobs and damn proud of it. Just a few years ago, it would have been
easier to separate the saffron from a Risotto Milanese than the
pretentiousness from our opinions about food. We read James Beard and
Jeff Smith. Watched Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. (This was PBS dammit,
not the style-over-substance performances of the current generation
of cable chef pretty boys.) Corn dogs were mutant state fair fare. Our
meat was free-range, our produce fresh from the farmer’s market. Iceberg
lettuce would find no respite in our crisper. Frozen processed food
was the chow of the hoi polloi.
Now our daughter, the same daughter on whose behalf,
my wife had drawn a culinary line in the sand stating "No hot dog
will ever pass my child’s lips." was slamming down corndogs like
a guest in Jerry Springer’s green room.
But as my wife says, “When you’re a mom, you take it
like a man.” Certain habits evolve out of necessity. Like the human
dust buster. This is when, during clean-up, bits of food are deposited
in the nearest available receptacle, you.
Oh we tried with Hannah. Lovely, home made baby food
prepared from fresh fruits and vegetables. Carefully prepared and presented
only to end up in everyone’s hair. In fact, it was snapping the obligatory
“Hannah covered in her lunch” photograph that sealed our fate. Once
you’ve done that, it’s all over. We had joined the hoi polloi.
Some people have tried to pull us back from the heat-and-serve
abyss. My friend Roger, alarmed by my growing indifference to the pedigree
of Liam’s foodstuffs, gave us the unused organic baby food (he claims)
his daughter had grown out of. Each jar was a symphony to wholesome
nutrition, prepared in the shadows of the Himalayans by Tibetan daycare
monks. Liam swirled the first spoonful of organic Carrot and Couscous
Medley in his mouth for a few moments. Then it slowly re-emerged as
an orange tinted drool along with a plaintive wail for a meat stick.
He can have his meat stick. And he’ll also have a wonderful “Liam
covered in Carrot and Couscous” photograph to remember it by.
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