“How come we never have any food in this freakin’ house?” says my daughter, Clementine, standing in front of our open fridge. (Warning: sounding like you’re living inside a badly “dubbed for TV” movie is one of the perils of sharing a house with a twelve year-old. Thankfully, she hasn’t started saying things like “Let’s go get those funsters” and “son of a biscuit”–yet.) Slamming the refrigerator door closed, she stomps away. Curious, I wander over to the maligned appliance and look inside; just as I suspected, it’s full of food–just like the cupboards behind me.
In fact, we have so much food (thanks to my habit of never making a list when I go to the grocery store, but rather blindly tossing the same items in week after week) that last Halloween, when six of us decided at the last minute to go to the haunted house at the adult center, the “three cans of food” admission price was not a problem, (although perhaps the fact that we all paid in refried beans and tomato soup was). In any event, the Halloween raid didn’t even make a dent in my hoard, which made it all the more curious that Clementine should choose our kitchen as her platform from which to lament the lack of victuals.
I’ve been in college–I know what an empty cupboard looks like. I know what it’s like to scrape together your last thirty cents (after you’ve bought that week’s beer, of course) to buy a package of generic macaroni and cheese, only to realize after you get it home that you’re going to have to mix it up with water, because your roommate ate the last of the margarine (true, it was their margarine–but still). I am also well aware that the judicious application of Tabasco sauce can render almost any meal edible, if not palatable.
Still, I suppose that I did learn all these thing while I was actually in college, and not before, which proves that poverty really is the best form of on-the-job training for life I know. And I suppose I should be grateful that it looks like my kids are going to have to wait until college to receive that training, as well. After all: I had friends who were unfortunate enough to know well before they reached college age that you don’t actually have to cook ramen to eat it–that simply running it under the warm tap water of a gas station restroom was enough.
I should be grateful that Clementine knows none of these things, and yet it’s still hard to take when the lack of easy food options (food that can be picked up and shaken out of the box directly into one’s mouth) equals no food in her opinion.
I could point all this out to her, but somehow, the phrase, “You know, there are kids with the munchies in college,” fails to deliver the same kind of emotional punch as the “There are children starving in China” of my youth. (Although, coincidentally, the response to both is the same: “Well why don’t you send it to them, then?”)
Instead, I stick with pointing out the fact that if someone chooses to voluntarily narrow their circle of “acceptable” food down to cheese crisps, noodles, and (Yoplait Custard Style Vanilla-flavored) yogurt, then it becomes very easy for them to be “out” of food.
Not that it ever really gets through: despite our over-flowing cupboards, for Clementine, every day will always be like the Irish Potato Famine, but with yogurt. (“Shiver me shillelagh, and what good is this strawberry-flavored yogurt going to do me, then? I’m starving, here, man!”)
That is, at least until she gets to college and finds out that even strawberry-flavored yogurt can be eaten, in a pinch. Providing, of course, there’s enough Tabasco sauce on it.