Toxic Blood: Mud Pies
Chapter 5
Some of my haziest early memories are from the home my parents rented in Canyon Country, at the time a suburb of Los Angeles that is now part of Santa Clarita. I remember the house being on a cul de sac with large cacti and spiny desert succulents in front of a wall where the road terminated a couple houses down. I think there was a freeway on the other side of the wall. I remember a birthday party, presumably for another toddler or small child, where ice cream cake I was not allowed to eat was on offer, although I do not specifically remember any of the other children.
I remember Father had a motorcycle at the time, and after a great deal of badgering Mother fearfully allowed one ride up and down the block on one solitary occasion. It was glorious! The disappointment I felt at it never happening again was profound.
I remember being on the living room floor looking at ants and a growing mound under the carpet, and being told I was not allowed to wander unattended outside the house because of the poison that had been sprayed around the perimeter of the building to keep the ants out.
I remember the refrigerator being completely bare of food. I remember one of my parents opening the cupboards to prove that they were not withholding food out of reach, that there genuinely was nothing in the house they could give me or my brothers to eat.
I remember being in the backyard with Younger Brother, feeding him spoonfuls of dirt so he would not have to be hungry. I was a toddler, and he was barely more than a baby. I remember filling the fridge with literal mud pies, so it would no longer be empty. I remember the dirt tasting good, and slightly sweet. I remember Older Brother refusing my offer of dirt or mud to eat. I remember the crushing disappointment when my parents informed me that the mud pies did not count as food, that I was not helping.
During that time my parents applied for welfare. Once we were on food stamps there was enough real food available that I did not return to feeding myself and Younger Brother dirt, but the availability of quality food remained a constant issue.
I was a picky eater, but not for the usual reasons. I loved vegetables, and genuinely thought that other kids who would not eat green things were crazy. I did not, and still do not, like things like ketchup and mayonnaise, which were doused in liberal quantities on most food offered to children outside the home. Mother did not allow me to eat sucrose (white and brown sugar), so that eliminated a whole spectrum of foods. Most of the food on offer in my family’s house was less than appetizing to me, or downright frightening, so much so that when I had the option of miniscule school cafeteria lunches of questionable quality, I looked forward to them as the best meal of my day.
When I was little, I remember my parents tried to make time to cook, something that became less and less frequent as my brothers and I grew older. On the rare occasions that Mother or Father invited a friend over to the house, Mother would usually go to the effort to cook dinner, and most often that meant fried chicken with her brown gravy, which always received high praise from guests.
When my mother made fried chicken, she always started with a frying pan filled half-way up with vegetable oil. I do not remember her using an egg wash consistently, but she would always roll the pieces of bone-in chicken in a flour/salt/pepper mix. When the oil was hot, she would drop the chicken in the oil and let it cook for a while, then flip the chicken and let the other side cook. When it was thoroughly browned, she pulled it out of the oil and placed it on some paper towels to sop up some of the oil. Usually there was still red seeping out of the ends of the bones, no matter how dark the breading had become. After that she would take the remainder of her flour/salt/pepper breading mix and stir it into the deep pan of used vegetable or canola oil, adding as much additional flour as she needed to achieve the consistency of brown gravy.
This usually resulted in chicken that was greasy and soggy, with a thin layer of weird and often singed breading that refused to stay put. I also remember many occasions when the meat was still pink near the bone, especially the pieces with dark meat. I thought that was normal, and that I just did not like dark meat. As it turned out, I just did not like undercooked poultry! When it was not pink at the joints, I remember the outside being nearly burned and tough and dry and oily all at the same time.
But the oil-based gravy, that was the piece de resistance! Fried chicken is hard to do right, so I think most people could forgive that and be polite about it. That gravy, though! Every single time a new guest tried that gravy, their blessedly polite and reserved reaction was something along the lines of, “Oh! How did you do that? I just must know!” Often it was quite exuberant to hide the shock of how terrible the gravy was. I think more than one friend even told her it was amazing and unique. Bloated with pride from the expected compliment, Mother would eagerly tell them how she made her Praise-Worthy Gravy.
Polite white lies always went over my head when I was a child, so I, like Mother, thought they were sincere in their compliments. I had very little experience with food outside the home, so if strangers thought Mother’s gravy was that amazingly better than other gravies they had eaten in the past, I really did not want to eat gravy and turned it down every time it was offered. Now I feel cheated that I missed out on the joy of real gravy for so many years.
The Thanksgiving turkey was another fearful creature. When I was little the Thanksgiving turkey does not stand out strongly in my mind, so I suspect it was a typical, poorly cooked, bland, dry turkey. Sometime around when I hit puberty, my parents decided that if they cooked the turkey slightly less time, it turned out juicier. While probably true to a small extent, I found the family turkey less and less enjoyable each year for reasons I could not pin down since I had no frame of reference for food safety. Father and Older Brother used to descend on the dark meat eagerly, though as the cooking time shortened, the dark meat became the territory of Father alone. The last time I had Thanksgiving dinner with the family, the turkey breast it ran pink with blood when Father carved into it while licking his lips with eager delight. I had learned to specifically request the meat from the outside of the breast because I found it the least unpleasant, but even that was tainted slightly pink.
Years later, on a visit with my parents, the subject of Mother’s cooking and the Thanksgiving turkey came up. Both my parents were appalled at the accusation they ever served unsafe food. Both swore they never undercooked the turkey, that they were always concerned about food safety. They stood firm that I was remembering it wrong. They would Never Do That. It Never Happened.
Was their response deliberate gaslighting or delusion? I strongly suspect gaslighting, but no matter their claims, I do know for a fact that they undercooked the turkey, and I am not the only one who witnessed it.
Diana was there that last Thanksgiving, as she had been dating Older Brother for a few months. Unlike me, she understood cooking and food safety, knew exactly what my parents had done, and was terrified. Later, she was also terrified by my rather blasé response of, “That’s how they always make it.” She thanked them, but stealthily did not eat the turkey or anything it touched on her plate. The dogs ate very well that day.
Another Thanksgiving staple in my parent’s house was Mother’s pumpkin “chiffon” pie, and it was something I looked forward to all year. It started in a rather normal way by following the recipe on the back of the pureed pumpkin tin and then cooking it in a pot on the stove. While that cooled, Mother made meringue using fructose instead of white sugar (not Swiss or Italian meringue, just plain uncooked French meringue). The pie crusts were baked off empty. The meringue and pumpkin were folded together, poured into the pie crusts, and the finished pies were put in the fridge to set. The resulting pie was initially a consistency not unlike a very light mousse, but increasingly wept as the uncooked meringue separated. The weeping of the filling would seep into the crust and cause it to separate in a really weird way, with tiny pockets of sweet, slightly pumpkin flavored stuff that was the consistency of gelatin. Day one it was one of the best foods available in my home growing up. After that it tended to get weird, but I always ate it anyway because it was better than most of what was easily available.
Mother’s holiday candied yams were something I thought worthy of jubilation when I was a small child. She cooked them in a crock pot for a day or two. The smell would fill the house, building beautiful anticipation. When they were finally ready and could be served, I would be rewarded for my patience with firm chunks of tubers that almost melted in my mouth with honey-like sweetness.
Mother never wrote down the recipe.
As I was approaching puberty, the candied yams became less enjoyable. The flavor was not right, and they were slightly stringy and very mushy in a decidedly unpleasant way. My brothers and I all noticed and commented to each other about the change. Then one year, around puberty, I was watching Mother prepare the annual candied yams, and she put a pint or two of orange juice into the crock pot with the yams. I asked her what she was doing, and she swore she had always put orange juice in it. She may never have told us the recipe (I asked several times – it was always something for later when she was not so busy), but my brothers and I knew very well that we had never seen her put orange juice in it. We all told her so, but we were mistaken. She had always made it that way.
Gaslighting was a way of life.
It was weird, with a very unpleasant tang underneath the sweeter tones imparted by the corn syrup. She grudgingly admitted she could not precisely remember the recipe, and apologized that it turned out poorly, but continued to swear that orange juice was the Special Ingredient responsible for how amazing it had been in the past. In future years she increased the amount of orange juice, looking to rediscover her original recipe instead of reading cookbooks in search of a new one. By the time that last Thanksgiving happened, I think she used a gallon or two of very expensive organic orange juice as the primary cooking liquid, and it stayed on low in the crock pot for a good three or four days. I had a nibble to be polite.
Father enjoyed barbequing, and we always had one of those round Webber grills so ubiquitous in Middle America in the 80’s. I remember he would pile up the pressed briquets and then douse them with a generous serving of lighter fluid, even if he had purchased the easy light briquets. He would let the fumes dissipate, and then set the briquettes on fire with a rolled-up piece of newspaper. If my brothers or I were watching, he would always make sure to tell us about fire safety, but he would not let us touch the grill. That was his space.
Once the coals were ready, the meat would go on the grill. Even if it was hamburger, he would baste it with barbeque sauce constantly while it cooked. I do not remember what brand he used, but it was inexpensive and very, very sweet, so I did not like it. I would ask him to please not put barbeque sauce on mine, but he would do it anyway. He liked it that way, so I guess in his mind anything else was wrong.
Shortly before I moved out of my parent’s house, I decided to treat myself with a small steak. The grocery store had a sale, so I bought two very inexpensive steaks, and I wanted to grill them. Since I had never been invited to try cooking on the grill, I specifically asked Father to teach me how to use it, so I could grill my own steaks. I offered him the second steak in trade. He eagerly agreed, and then immediately broke his word. Instead of teaching me, he refused to let me touch the grill. He said he was “showing me how to do it”, but in reality, he was being a bully.
Father stood like an immoveable object, firmly in the way so I could not touch the grill or my food. He lit the coals, saying absolutely nothing he had not said every time I watched him grill previously. He monitored the coals until they were ready, hovering constantly so there was no risk I could touch the grill myself. He grabbed my steaks and threw them on the grill. Out came the dreaded barbeque sauce, and completely ignoring my protests, on both steaks it went. He was so smug and proud of himself for doing it, too, practically preening like a peacock when he handed over my ruined steak and cut into his. I ate my steak solely because I did not want to reward his actions by giving him both steaks. I am not sure I had ever been so angry with him before that day, though he gave me plenty more reasons to be extremely angry with him in the following years.
Other cooked meals in the house tended towards the territory of the kind of white trash cooking that gives white trash cooking a bad name. Pancakes made with a box mix were always a winner, especially if Father made them in fun shapes, as were Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream.
Tuna casserole was hit or miss, depending on whether it was drowned in too much tinned mushroom soup, and whether or not the broken up potato chips were mixed in vs. a crunchy texture layer on top.
Mashed potatoes came from a box of dried “potato buds”.
Scrambled eggs had so much cheddar stirred into them that I could never tell if they were undercooked, and since that was the way Father liked them, that was the only way they were made.
Meatloaf was oily and bland and drowned in a thick topping of ketchup that became the dominant flavor.
Spaghetti was made with mushy noodles, barely seasoned ground beef, and cheap bottled spaghetti sauce topped with cheap powdered parmesan. Despite its shortcomings, it was one of the better meals that was served, so there was never enough for everyone to get their fill.
There was a very fend-for-yourself atmosphere regarding food in my parent’s house. If you wanted something, you needed to grab it and eat it, or someone else would and you would get none. When I was small and we would go to McDonald’s for a treat, everyone would get a meal and Father would take all the various servings of french-fries and dump them in a pile in the center of the tray. He would then proceed to inhale the fries four or eight at a time. If my brothers and I did not follow suit like a pack of starving dogs on a carcass, we missed out on the fries almost entirely. His disappointment was palpable when my brothers and I finally insisted that we did not want to share, and we would rather keep our own fries, thank you.
By extension, any communal food was first come, first served. If you did not take the amount you wanted on the first go around, or if you were last in line, you did not get enough. That was just the way things were, and since I did not give it much thought or socialize outside the family, it was not until my late teens that I became aware this practice was not only unusual, but horribly rude, inconsiderate, and inhospitable. Of course, it made sense once the realization was made, but it is not the sort of thing we are born knowing. Culture and manners are taught, not born of innate instinct.
Older Brother and I had invited over some of our friends from junior college and they were staying for dinner. Mother felt obligated to cook, and decided on the easiest answer, spaghetti. I dutifully hurried in to grab some when it was ready, and took the amount I knew I wanted to eat without thinking about the extra mouths being served. I was beyond embarrassed when there were not enough noodles for everyone to get a share, in part because I took such a large chunk off the top. I do not think Mother cooked enough noodles even if they had been evenly distributed, but at least everyone could have gotten something. It was easy to amend by throwing on more noodles, but still. It definitely ranks up there as one of the more embarrassing things I have done in my life, and I never again neglected to make sure food was evenly distributed.
Once my parents had climbed the social ladder far enough to buy their own house and qualify as Middle-Class Americans, even when money was tight they did their best to make sure the kitchen always had food in it. They did succeed at that, but it often was food I did not want to eat. As their three children hit their teens, Father and my brothers subsisted almost entirely on a diet of freezer food, and the freezer was always stocked with Hot Pockets, frozen burritos, and a selection of other microwave food items. The pantry always had a good stock of tinned food, most of which was less than appetizing, or at the very least not something you could just open and eat without doing something else to it. We always had bread and milk and cheese, and the refrigerator was usually stuffed to the gills with food that Mother had intended to cook, but now was in some state of melting decomposition.
You were literally taking your life in your hands if you ate food straight out of the fridge without cooking it, although I had no idea since I knew nothing about food safety, and that was just the way the fridge had always been. During my teens it was a nearly annual occurrence for me to be so sick throwing up that I could barely move off the couch and needed a bucket to puke in because I could not make it to the bathroom. When this happened, I usually missed an entire week of school because of “stomach flu” that no one else seemed to catch.
The one benefit I received from this annual cleansing was a stomach of iron. Once I was out on my own, Diana and I ate out often enough at varied enough restaurants that we came down with food poisoning now and again. If Diana or other friends were mildly food poisoned, I usually did not notice a thing. If they were sick enough it was arguably warranted to go to the hospital, I would have just a bit of an upset tummy. Literally, on one occasion Diana got a burrito while out with another friend, and she offered her leftovers to me when she got home, hours before her food poisoning kicked in. Since I finished the exact food that poisoned her, I was exposed to exactly the same pathogen she was. While she was out both ends, I had a bit of a tummy ache.
Eating out of my parent’s fridge gave me a resistance to food borne illness more commonly found in individuals who grow up eating out of dumpsters. I am fairly certain my brothers were hit by food poisoning less often because they preferred the freezer food, although they did sometimes get sick too. I do not know why Mother and Father did not get hit as often. Maybe it was years of undercooked poultry?
I remember more than one occasion when Mother expressed her heartfelt frustration over shopping for food. She tried so hard to keep food everyone wanted in the house, yet there were often complaints of hunger, and so much food did not get eaten. Fresh food rotted in the fridge, tins of food sat collecting dust in the pantry, and massive bags of freezer food became freezer burnt before anyone finished them. If we just told her what we wanted to eat, she was happy to buy it instead.
The problem is, I had such bad experiences with food growing up that I had a good idea of what I did not want to eat, but I also had no idea what I did want to eat. I made some desperate attempts at cooking, but I did not enjoy cooking, and it was hard to learn just from recipes with no resources for learning cooking techniques (this was in the days before Food Network and YouTube). The kitchen was also usually overflowing with dirty dishes and general filth, making the action of cooking problematic and extra unpleasant from conception to completion. I rarely wanted freezer food, but I would eat it anyway if I was hungry enough. Experiences with eating out of their fridge have left me to this day with food texture issues that occasionally rear their ugly heads and make me gag, even if the food tastes great and I know it’s safe to eat.
I chose to go hungry many, many times rather than eat the food on offer. This happened with great enough frequency that I remember saying and believing that I had an easier time going to sleep at night if I skipped dinner and was hungry.
Even when I was able to buy my own food, I was terrified of trying new things because I was so punchy about food and scared of wasting money. With the “compliments” Mother’s food garnered my entire childhood, I just knew that the food out there in the world had to be even worse. Maybe I just did not like food? Maybe.
I discovered Chinese take-out food when I started at Santa Rosa Junior College, and a large tub of fried rice became a staple lunch for me. I had very little money, so I could only buy one thing each day. I knew I liked that, and I did not know if I would like the other items, so I went with the safe choice. Some days that was the only food I ate. That did not bother me much because at the time I was used to being hungry.
My relationship with food changed profoundly as soon as I started spending time with Diana. One of the things she found the least tolerable about me was my fear of food. She figured out quickly that I did not want to be rude and socially awkward, so she reframed my fear of food as rude. When she took me to her parent’s place for dinner, it was rude of me not to try everything. I did not have to like it. I did not have to finish it. I did need to try it, or I was being a very rude guest. That made sense, so I swallowed my fear and tried everything.
The whole world opened up. It was all good! Especially the gravy! If real gravy, both white and brown, was that amazing, maybe everything was amazing! I wanted to try everything after that, and one of the things Diana and I bonded over was our mutual joy of trying new kinds of foods and searching out restaurants serving ethnic cuisine that were frequented by members of that ethnicity. Food went from being one of the things I was most reluctant to spend money on, to one of the things I am most willing to spend money on.
But my relationship with food stayed complicated and unhealthy.
When I moved away and attempted to go to university, I was invited to move in with Older Brother and Diana, his then girlfriend. The three of us had a two-bedroom apartment together, and bad habits and neurotic behaviors I had around food soon became apparent.
I hid food in my room, things like crackers and cookies especially. In my parent’s house that was the only way to make sure one of the boys did not steal and eat your food. Keeping food in my room does not sound too terrible, until you know the apartment complex had a horrible cockroach problem, so I was unthinkingly feeding the little buggers and encouraging them to populate our apartment. Diana blew up when she realized what I had been doing, and even more so when she had to explain why it was bad. She found it extremely difficult to believe that I could be ignorant of the role food could play in vermin infestations, and mistook my confusion for condescension.
After the embarrassment of the spaghetti incident in junior college, I was trying my best to not take more than my share of anything, but this had some unexpected side effects. It was relatively easy to give up food when I was normally hungry. Once I was normally full, if I did get hungry it expressed itself in some very unfortunate neurotic behavior. If there was not enough for me to get full, or if I did not know what I wanted to eat, I would literally spin circles before going into the kitchen and rummaging around looking for something to eat. If I did not find something I wanted, I would leave the kitchen and act normal for a while before once again spinning literal circles and rummaging in the kitchen.
I did not want to engage in neurotic behavior, so I worked to change it. It was hard. It literally took years before I could be calm and behave normally about food when I was hungry. It was years before I was not consumed with anxiety about needing to eat.
When I hit my late 20’s and at the same time I became mostly sedentary due to chronic illness, I plumped out. My weight on the scale barely changed, but I lost muscle and gained fat, so I went up a dress size. I was a little self-conscious about it. Since I could no longer exercise, Diana suggested that I join her at Weight Watchers and control my weight through diet. Neither of us had any idea what I was actually signing up for.
Within one week of restricting my food intake (and consequently going hungry), all those neurotic behaviors we both believed I had gotten over many years earlier were back in full force. I was doing circles and rummaging in the kitchen, even though I knew I was not going to eat anything, just like when I was a teen in my parent’s home.
It drove us both nuts, and I could not stop myself.
I dieted for my free trial month, and then dropped the endeavor entirely in favor of regaining sane behavior. It took another three months to break myself of those neurotic behaviors once again. I have never been diagnosed, but I cannot help but wonder if my neurotic responses to going hungry qualify as PTSD or CPTSD. I am pretty sure it qualifies as something, even if it is a disorder I have not heard of.
I have been on a medically restricted diet since 2013 when my chronic illness was finally diagnosed, but it is not the reduced intake, lose weight kind of diet. There are certain foods that I am supposed to avoid because they are detrimental to my illness, and kinds of foods I am supposed to eat regularly because they provide nutrients and have other benefits to help support my body through the healing process. Overall, the medical diet helps support my quality of life. It is similar in many respects to a severe diabetic diet, but with quite a few added requirements. The amount of food I eat is not restricted at all, so my expectation was that it should not trigger the hunger neurotic behavior.
Unfortunately, the diet is so restrictive that I cannot eat any of my comfort foods or engage in any of the eating habits which brought me joy, like trying new kinds of food and enjoying variety in my diet. That means that when I am following the diet religiously, I usually feel hungry even though I am full, which triggers neurotic behavior and ramps up my stress levels. The diet is so restrictive that I should be cooking every meal, but I have realized that I genuinely hate cooking. Between that hatred and the physical limitations of my chronic illness, cooking is a stressful and miserable experience I am not capable of doing consistently, meaning I both fail to follow the diet consistently and am constantly tortured by it.
Eating has become a constant chore and a source of misery, echoing the misery of dealing with eating when I was growing up. The mechanism of that misery is very different, but it still results in very limited food options and a tremendous amount of stress. I cannot win for losing. Because the diet is a medical need, I should not be deviating from it at all, and yet I do, frequently. Every day I am either torturing myself with the diet, or I am directly sabotaging my health by failing to follow it. I have not been able to find a balance, if one even exists.
I think the worst part about my medical diet is that I can no longer just go into any restaurant and try whatever sounds interesting. Even if I remain on this diet for the rest of my life, I am grateful that I took the chance and learned to love food. In fact, I am so grateful for those experiences that I resent I can no longer eat anything I want. I have had so many wonderful experiences that added to the richness of my life, experiences that never would have happened if I had not decided that the world offered better than I was raised with.