Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, October 25, 2002
Junk Food

Once again, I’m interrupting your main feature with a newsreelette. Unlike when you’re actually at the movies, though, you can skip to the main feature if you want. Oh, the dizzying freedom!

I’ll be away from home all weekend, back on Monday night. So I won’t be updating until Tuesday at the earliest, and maybe not even then, because all I will have to report will almost certainly be deeply dull. I don’t want to say where I’m going, in case one of you lives there and then I’d have to break my self-imposed rule (the most important kind) of the weekend, which is: see no-one except the Room Service waiter/waitress, and do nothing but try to recuperate from the Baudelaire-orphan-like life I’ve had recently.

And now, the main feature. At least you were spared animated dancing candy and soda and nannyreels telling you to hush up and behave.

Much as I hate to admit it, I think we do eventually return to the way we were raised. No matter how hard you may rebel against it, it seems that breeding tells. In some ways, at least.

When I was a child, we lived in the country in upstate New York. We had five acres to play on, and these five acres included a forest of pine trees and a creek. In the summer, we went to Maine, where we had a cottage on a pond and access to beaches and sailboats. So we played outside all year round and rarely, if ever, watched television. In Maine, we didn’t have a TV or a phone in the cottage, just the radio, and we never felt deprived.

Besides all this healthy playing outside, we also ate pretty healthy. Dad made dinner every night, and he was a great cook. In Maine, lobster, fish, and other seafood was cheaper than beef, so we ate seafood most of the summer. We had whole wheat bread. Edible oil products were unknown in our kitchen. We actually had to eat Brussels sprouts (to which I still refer as “poison balls”) and spinach. We never had soda and rarely had junk food in the house, though there were of course the occasional bags of potato chips and so on, but these were unusual and therefore really treats.

So when I was at my friends’ houses, and they got to eat Kraft dinner and Wonder bread and things like that, I was filled with envy and wished that I, too, could eat such delights. But alas, my parents persisted in their healthy regime, and I secretly vowed to eat nothing but crap when I grew up.

I never really grew up, and I’m still eating healthy. I have taken it a few steps further over the past few years, buying organic wherever possible, and we haven’t eaten cows or pigs in over a decade. Now you couldn’t pay me to eat the junk food I envied as a kid, so I am forced to conclude that my parents triumphed over their willful daughter in the end. In this one area, anyway.

Not that I never eat junk food. John always has a huge stash of it, and I have been known to partake of it (earlier this week, I ate an entire bag of Cracker Jack without his knowledge, and he came home looking forward to it to find that it had vanished. He took it well, but has bought half a dozen bags since then just in case), but I don’t buy it. I wouldn’t even think about it if it weren’t for John’s taste for junk food and how he has to have a wide variety of it on hand at all times, since you never know what you’ll have a craving for.

P.S. Has anyone else noticed that the so-called “prizes” now in Cracker Jack are complete crap and not even worthy of the name? You used to get little compasses that really worked, or yoyos, or secret decoder rings, or toy cars with wheels that moved, and now you just get stupid stickers.