What Was On My Plate

I have had a series of lightbulb moments lately. One has to do with
how my mother viewed nutrition. She was a registered nurse who
strongly believed what she had been taught in nursing school. This
is it in a nutshell: Your dinner plate should have a meat, a green
vegetable and a colored vegetable. If you needed more calories you
could add a slice of bread. Children, up to age 21 were to be
served milk at every meal. Deserts could be had on special
occasions, soda when you were sick. Lunch for children could be
any combination of sandwich and or soup or during the school year,
a “hot lunch” from the cafeteria. Breakfast should be toast with
scrambled eggs and citrus fruit, but if you were short on time,
Instant Breakfast would do.

Salads were made solely from iceberg lettuce, tomato and
cucumber. Salad dressing was thousand island, or in the 70's ranch.
In the 60's the bread was white Colonial, by the early 70's it was
Roman Meal. Soup was generally Campbell’s. A few times a year
she would make a pot of real soup. Of course, toast was buttered
with margarine, and chicken was fried in Criso. Seasoning food
involved threatening it with a ten year old jar of McCormick’s.

We were uptown and health conscious. If you wanted seconds,
you could have them, provided what you wanted was the green
vegetable, the meat, soup or salad. Seconds of “starchy foods”,
potatoes, corn, peas, bread and pasta were discouraged. You
never dared ask for more desert.

Casseroles were saved for special occasions, like Thanksgiving and
Christmas. We ate very little pork, only chops once in a while and
ham at Christmas. Beef was considered a better food then chicken,
which was only served once or at most two times a week. Beans
were considered inferior protein, so even though my mother loved
pinto’s we only had them twice a year. Greens were cooked at
New Year’s, Southern style, which means boiled up with ham
hocks until grayish and totally limp. We did have cornbread every
other month or so. Mom made it to go with homemade soup, and
the pinto beans and greens. Cornbread also topped my favorite
meal, hamburger pie.

When I was about eleven we started making Lipton instant tea with
lemon and artificial sweetener. No calories. We could drink all of
it we wanted. And that was a lot. We used a large jar of the
powdered mix every week.

Television brought us visions of such wonders as Kraft Macaroni
and Cheese in a box, Cream of Wheat Cereal and Rice a Roni. I so
loved Cream of Wheat that I would make it myself, with milk and
sugar, every afternoon after school. Cake was strictly off limits but
the Cream of Wheat passed muster. Middle sister made the Mac &
Cheese, which I liked best with little green peas and hamburger.
The Rice a Roni never really caught on.

Rarely, once in a great while, we were allowed chips or french fries
with our burger.

We felt sorry for, and a little superior to, people who ate beans
often, or who made do with chicken because it was cheaper then
beef. We really worried about the neighbor who made fried ham,
homemade biscuits and homemade red eye gravy every Saturday
morning for her children. What dangerous food to feed children!
We smugly ate our Cream of Wheat with sugar, grapefruit topped
with sugar, Rice Crispies with sugar, toast with jelly and a egg,
washed down with milk and reconstituted orange juice, knowing
our diet was far superior to the neighbors.

Every single day we consumed an entire gallon of 2% milk and
every other day an entire loaf of bread.

My father made his own breakfast, never varying the contents, two
strips of bacon, two scrambled eggs on white bread with
mayonnaise. The sandwich was tightly wrapped in saran wrap and
eaten in the car while he drove to work. I looked forward to
joining the management work force, so I too could have bacon
every day.

The foods that scared my mother the most were all the things she
considered “starches”. Starches would make you fat and pasty,
they were empty calories and bad for the digestion. Starches were
partially responsible for most of society’s ills including poverty,
illiteracy and plain old meanness. Under the umbrella of starches,
were rice, pasta, bread, corn, peas and all grains.

Until I was an adult, living in my own home, I never tasted a whole
grain other then rolled oats. The first real whole wheat bread I
tasted, I made. Thank you Laurel’s Kitchen. Ditto the brown rice.
Even so, I could not shake the feeling that if you did not eat meat
every day you would become weak and waste away in a horrible
manner. I was also suspicious that Mom was right and that the
“starches” would get you.

I thought that green beans came in a can and needed to be cooked
for at least two hours. Peas were easier, just open the can and heat
to a boil. Unfortunately, they were starches, so I could not make
them as often as I would have liked. Corn was the same. I will not
torture you with all the ways you can combine canned food on a
plate, but needless to say I had learned from the best.