Flirting with Food Rehab

               by Susan Matthewson
               My diet is so terrible my family wants to commit me to food rehab where I will be force fed organic vegetables and fruits to cleanse my body of sugar, fat, grease, and Der Wienerschnitzel hotdogs.

                I eat so poorly I have no idea why I’m still alive. I often have a bowl of buttered popcorn and a coke for dinner or a slice of lemon meringue pie and a glass of milk for breakfast (thank you for noticing the milk).

                I blame my diet on my Southern family and roots. I’ve been trying for years to blame them for all my failures and weaknesses and it’s gratifying to finally have found something to stick them with. I just hate having to acknowledge my own responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong in my life; it tends to be so depressing. But my diet is definitely my family’s fault and they can’t escape blame on this one.

                You see, I grew up with a father from Texas, a mother from Louisiana, and a live-in grandmother from Texas. It was a house in which no one knew that any other kind of cooking but Southern cooking existed. FYI, instead of the traditional five food groups that most of the country adheres to, Southerners have their own special food groups, six not five, and they include salt, gravy, bacon grease, sugar, butter, and fried stuff. Southerners don’t have a food pyramid; they have a food square because every group is equal…doesn’t matter how many servings a day you get of each one as long as you get plenty.

                Our family’s foundational food was bacon grease. My mother cooked everything with bacon grease derived from the two fried eggs and two strips of bacon she cooked for my father every morning. She kept a five-pound Folger’s coffee can of drippings by the stove so she could plop a spoonful handily into everything she made and most of what she made was fried—friend pork chops, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, fried fish, fried potatoes.

                In addition, my father only liked two vegetables—black-eyed peas and spinach, both out of a can and, of course, both simmered in bacon grease. The only fruits he ate were strawberries and bananas…IF they were sliced and sprinkled with sugar on top of ice cream.

                I didn’t know vegetables came any other way but in cans until I was an adult. I thought people who bought that leafy green stuff in the produce section used it to make their own canned vegetables and were just too dumb to know that Green Giant and Del Monte had already put it in cans on Aisle 6.

                To complicate things, my Texas grandmother—who cloned Paula Deen by the way—baked a fresh dessert from scratch every single day. Her repertoire included German chocolate cake drizzled with a luscious butter/sugar/caramel glaze, thick, creamy chocolate custard pie with a four-inch meringue, bread pudding so rich it made your eyes water, devil’s food cake with a scrumptious crushed pineapple icing, Tollhouse cookies, and…well, and, on and on and on. Of course, bacon grease doesn’t work for desserts so grandma’s choice of grease was Crisco, that white, hydrogenated fat that just screams out “Heart attack! Heart attack! Heart attack!”  Our family crest/coat of arms features a can of Crisco perched on a throne of sugar cubes surrounded by sticks of butter.

                Concerns about my diet reached critical mass after my daughter and her husband bought an organic farm in Oregon where they grow more than 50 varieties of herbs, grains, vegetables, and fruits. Ah, yes, I know…the irony…me, with an organic farmer daughter.

                Once when visiting the farm, my daughter asked me to go pick some kale from the field for dinner. Panicked because I didn’t know what kale looked like, I whispered to my four-year-old grandson, “Everett, come show grandma what kale looks like.” I managed to harvest some kale, but not until after he yelled at me in outrage, “Grandma, you’re standing in the onions! You can’t do that!” Well, who knew…weeds, kale, onions…it all looked the same to me. If it didn’t have whipped cream on top or was slathered in butter, I couldn’t recognize it as food.

                The only time I eat healthy is at the farm because all they eat are fresh vegetables and fruit, locally raised grass-fed beef and lamb, organic chicken, homemade goat cheese, and fresh goat milk straight from the goat. There are no Oreo cookies, no gravy, no bacon grease, no soda pop, and no fried stuff. I start shaking and go into withdrawal because there’s just no sugar or grease there to fill me up. Remember that scene in Gone With The Wind when Scarlet O’Hara lifts an old dried, stale root vegetable up to the sky and vows that she’ll never be hungry again. Well, every time I leave the farm, I speed down that little farm road to the nearest grocery store, grab a Snickers bar, hold it up to the sky, and swear to God that I’ll never be without sugar again.

                However, now that I can identify kale, I am trying to incorporate it into my diet to pacify my family and because kale is the new wonder drug. Nutritionists swear that you will live forever and be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound if you eat kale. It hasn’t been easy. I tried kale baked, boiled, steamed, and blended, but it always tasted like moldy grass cuttings. Then one day on a whim and in a never-say-die spirit, I plopped a bunch of kale in a skillet, threw in a half-pound of bacon, and fried it all up. Then, I slathered it with butter, loaded on salt and pepper, and, man oh man, it was great. And the bonus—I fried my pork chops in the same skillet in the left-over bacon grease. There's hardly anything a little bacon grease can't help.

                I’m going to try chard next…as soon as my grandson shows me what it looks like.