Childhood Food Memories

Probably the only good thing about all of this "they are eating the dog, cats, and pets" talk, other than creating lots of funny memes and videos and showing us what utter craven morons Trump and Vance are, is that it got me thinking about the food of my childhood.

I just remembered that when I was a kid we ate beef tongue!

I have no idea what cultural or ethnic influence this was. My parents would boil a giant cow tongue in a pot of salt water and we would have it with horseradish and maybe mustard too. Sounds crazy, but it was really really tasty and it made great sandwiches! Also, a giant tongue looked pretty funny but gross in the middle of the table.

I should probably mention that the cow was not anyone's pet and my parents got the tongue at the deli. City slicker Americans often don't eat these cuts, but foreigners and country folk do, so they are quite cheap. Come to think of it, that's probably why we were eating it.

Honestly, if you have ever seen a cow lick it's calf, it's really cute, and therefore it seems sort of cruel to eat cow tongue, but if you feel like that, you should just be a vegetarian, since the cow is dead when they cut off the tongue and it is no different from eating sirloin really. It's not our fault that cows are both slow and tasty.

As I type this, I'm having a sudden urge to try and become a vegetarian again...ok..its passed.

I basically ate whatever my parents gave me and it never occurred to me that I had a choice. 

One time I went to my friend's house for dinner and his mom put some broccoli on my plate. I don't really like broccoli, unless it is Chinese broccoli, but I ate it. She also tried to put broccoli on my friends plate (her child) and he said,

"No thanks, I don't particularly care for it."

I was dumbfounded. First of all, he was like 9 or 10, so he had no business talking like that. What really shocked me was that his mom immediately relented to this food preference and that was the end of it.

I tried this technique a few days later at home and my mom told me that I better eat my food or else I would be eating nothing. I ate my food.

The lesson I extracted from this was that black moms really are different from white moms. This reminds me of a funny Arie Spears video which I won't put a link to.

A completely unrelated food anecdote involved my dad who fancied himself a bit of a comedian.  I know a few people like that actually.

I distinctly remember him one day telling us that we were going to have rabbit for dinner but after we were done he was laughing and told us it was just chicken.

Of course, that was not the end of it. A few days later he told us we would have chicken for dinner and at the end he was laughing again and said it was rabbit!

WTF?!

If I had been a little bit older I would have said,

"Mom, he play too much!" 

I'm not sure what the point of this "keeping us off balance" approach to meals was, but I could see the twisted humor of it.

Again, I should probably mention that neither the chicken nor the rabbit was anyone's pet.