The real thing
02 November 2010 02:33 PM Categories: Food | Writing prompts
My grandmother kept a bowl of plastic fruit in the center of her dining room table. Heavy grapes the color of lime sherbet clustered next to just-so pears and hard-as-Tupperware bananas, bright and artfully speckled. The bowl rested on top of a frilly doily, next to the lazy susan that held salt, pepper and condiments. We removed the fruit when we actually wanted to eat, put it aside during big family meals when my aunt and mother put the table leaf in and camouflaged the maple top with a pad and a heavy vinyl cloth, its plastic disguise.
Fake fruit was an adult conceit that fascinated me, the effort involved to make something look real, down to a sprinkling of brown on a banana or a jaunty fabric leaf still attached to an apple stem. It was a testament to the illusory power of plastic. As a grownup, I wonder what sort of thinking (if any) is behind fruit as decoration versus fruit as actual food. Why not mix the two and put out stuff you can eat? I don’t remember biting into many fresh grapes or bananas or pears at my grandmother's house. Instead there were syrupy fruit cups, ice cream Dixie cups with wooden paddles for spoons, greasy Cheez-Its straight from the box. Lunches materialized out of powder, water, and starch. Dinner fell from a box or the freezer or was handed to us via the drive-thru window at Big Elk Mall McDonald's. My order never wavered: hamburger, French fries, Coca Cola.
Two years after my grandmother's death, there were still TV dinners in the old utility room freezer. When I missed her I craved salisbury steak in a thick mushroom gravy or fried chicken with crisp battered skin, wrinkled peas, potatoes whipped into paste and crumbly apple cobbler for desert. In her life, we celebrated modern technology, the power of the deep freeze, the effects of dehydration on vegetables. After her death, I was subjected more often to my mother's diet regime, which was all about freshness and sauteing in olive oil or real butter, about the taste of a peach.
Over time, I moved closer to my mother's approach to food. In 1995, I gave up most meat (though I still eat fish). Almost ten years later, I attended a cooking school where we cooked with whole grains and natural sweetners. Though my son does occasionally eat macaroni and cheese from a box, he has never tasted McDonald's french fries. I make almost everything from scratch. The freezer in our house contains blueberries, veggie sausages, loaves of bread, and ice cube trays. We have two bowls of real, edible fruit within easy kid reach. Apples, pomegranates, and persimmons intermingle with cooking ingredients, onions, shallots, garlic, with the odd squash or two. The kid may only eat pasta with butter and cheese for dinner, but he also loves fruit, thank goodness.
My grandmother died of a heart attack when I was nine, probably in part because of her chemical, salt and fat consumption, though the smoking didn't help. I wonder how she would interpret my adult self, my diet, my liberal ways. We were so close (I lived with her on an off until her death and she took care of me during school and summer vacations) – would my rebellious teenage years and outsider adulthood have turned her away? If she lived would I never have gone pescetarian? Would I still be ordering hamburgers and French fries crisp with fat?
And if not, would she have loved me anyway?
From a photo prompt.
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