What My Childhood Tasted Like
As we look at the theme, Where I Am From, we will examine different parts of our lives that have helped us become who we are. In this writing activity, you will write a piece that connections food to you and who you are. Below are the steps.
- Brainstorm a list of foods from your childhood. Make sure to put descriptions when possible. For example, you would put my great grandmother’s dressing instead of just dressing.
Andrulli Examples:
Spiced hamburger patties
Godfather’s cheese pizza- no sauce
Hot pastrami sandwiches
Donuts and donut holes
Sugar bomb cereals
Cake
Strawberry milk from powder
Non-chewable Vitamin C
Otter Pops
Burger King Whoppers
Candy: Spree, Skittles, Whoppers
Vanilla Weider’s Weight Gainer
Christmas cookies made using cake mix
Raley’s holiday cookies
- Now, pick one of your childhood foods. ______Think about why this is an important food from your childhood. Your first inclination may be to pick the one you find most delicious, but I encourage you to consider one that has a good story attached to it.
- Read the article on the back of this sheet by Rick Bragg. “Summer Snow” is another way of looking at a person’s connection to food.
- Now, you are going to write your own reflection/story responding to “What My Childhood Tasted Like.”
“SummerSnow”
September 2, 2014 | ByRick Bragg|
Illustration by Jack Unruh
It was long before Katrina, in those hot, sticky, normal years when people complained how dry things had been. The drought made the already insubstantial dirt weak and powdery, and the piers of the shotgun houses sank into the earth. It is not unusual in New Orleans for an old house to lean, drunkenly. My favorite story was about a house that leaned so much it fell on a bar—just collapsed. Top that.
But it is not what you want to hear when you are looking for a home. You want your house to appear, well, sober. The sweet real estate lady gently reminded me that New Orleans was just special like that. The potholes were eternal. The termites were too. It was all part of the charm.
Then, perhaps afraid I was wavering, she bought me a snow cone.
Some few days later, I bought a house.
Since then, I have come to believe that the only real antidote to the mean or troubling things of late summer is a paper cone of shaved ice and a squirt of Day-Glo yellow pineapple syrup.
I am not silly enough to believe any crisis can be cooled this way. If you get a tax lien from the State of Georgia or get pulled over for speeding in a school zone in McIntosh, Alabama, a snow cone may not suffice. But if a red wasp nails you on your eyebrow, or you bounce across a New Orleans pothole and your manifold falls off into the abyss to hit a poor man in China upside the head, then a cherry shaved ice might do it. Or a grape one—you pick. Either way, your mouth turns red or purple and you look like you are 5 years old, and even that makes you happy somehow, so it’s all okay.
I like pineapple because, at worst, you look a little jaundiced.
Most cities have snow cones, or snowballs, or snoballs; for some reason shaved ice and poor spelling and grammar seem entwined. I do not write much about grammar here because one reader actually told me that, since I was now writing for educated, middle-class people, I should try not to sound like I fell off a hay wagon. But that is another story.
In New Orleans, a city I lived in for just a few years but will never exorcise from my soul, there seems to be a steady supply: There is a fine snowball stand on Plum Street, not far from Loyola and Tulane. But the proverbial granddaddy of them all, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, still leans on Tchoupitoulas Street.
Hansen’s, at the corner of Bordeaux Street, is thought to be the oldest in the country. The story goes that, in 1939, Ernest Hansen saw a man shaving ice from a cart and thought he could do it cleaner and better. He invented a machine that shaved fluffy ice, his wife devised the sweet syrups, and they sold snowballs under a chinaberry tree.
Katrina closed the long-standing location on Tchoupitoulas Street, and the Hansens (both in their nineties at the time) died soon after. But as New Orleans emerged, their granddaughter reopened it with the same methods, the same recipes. People who say change is good are ignorant of a great root beer snow cone.
I am glad such places survive, for I doubt seriously if I will get through this life without a few more bad days. I can’t even get through McIntosh.
Sugar. The food of the Gods. The substance of life and my childhood addiction happily supplied by my mother. Nowhere was this more evident than my breakfasts. From as early as I can remember until my sophomore year in high school, my breakfast consisted of either donuts or a sugar bomb cereal of some sort or on special occasions, cake or cookies. My favorite cereals included Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, or Frosted Flakes. But there were occasional limited releases that captured my heart and obsessed my taste buds such as the long gone but never forgotten Nintendo Entertainment cereal which I hoarded enough of to last a year past the end of manufacture. After my birthday or some holidays that stores would create cakes for, I would have cake for breakfast for a week. Other holidays would provide me with cookies from Raley’s bakery in the appropriate shape.
My breakfast was this way because I had broken my mother’s will early regarding what she fed me. When I was really, really young she tried to feed me something I didn’t like, and I wouldn’t eat it. The general wisdom for parents, at least back then, was to keep offering the rejected food to the child until they ate it and not allow them to eat anything else. For two days, she kept trying to feed it to me, and for two days I refused. She finally broke down and offered something else to me since it was obvious I was too stupid or stubborn to eat what she wanted to feed me and would soon die of starvation. That was the beginning of me getting to eat what I wanted as a child. I’m always ambivalent when I think back on it. On one hand, as a child, it was awesome getting to eat whatever I wanted. I still remember my friends’ remarks of envy. “Duuuuuuude.” On the other hand, as an adult, I look back at the nutritional value of what I ate during my childhood and am dismayed. As a result of my diet, I did become quite a portly little fellow for about four years before I changed my diet and level of activity. I also feel a little embarrassed about how much of a little poop I was growing up. At the same time, to be fair, my mother’s cooking was terrible. Even now, at almost 40, all of the worst foods I can ever remember eating were made by her when I was a child.
Since that time, my whole perception and relationship with food has changed. Back then, my whole philosophy was to eat whatever tasted best and have always seemed hardwired to like sweet things. Back then in my hedonistic view, candy, cookies, cake, pastries all seemed to represent what was best in life. Of course, since then, I’ve learned that sugar affects the brain in a similar manner as narcotics, so it makes sense. So now I see things differently. I see food as a source of fuel, and I can only expect my body to perform as well as the quality of the fuel I put in it allows, and sugar is not a quality fuel. It can weaken a person’s immune system for several days after consumption, and that frequent consumption can erode the body’s natural processes over time, often leading to serious problems such as diabetes and death. As a result, I try to avoid sugar but still occasionally indulge, feeling the guilt that comes from falling off of the hard won wagon. As much as my view of the role of food in my life has changed over time, such sugary goodness still occupies my thoughts.
However much I look back at the diet of my childhood with horror and repugnance from a nutritional standpoint, in the shadowy corners of my mind I still dream of that idyllic sugarland of endless donuts and cookies, of cake and candy and sugarbomb cereal, of eating however much I want of these delectable desserts, whenever I want with no perceived consequences. But I guess that’s part of growing up into an adult- understanding the implications of your decisions and making your choices accordingly. So I don’t succumb to baking those buttermilk bars or those frosted key lime cookies. I resist making the triple layer holiday spice cake with vanilla frosting and the pumpkin spice cupcakes with chai frosting. I refrain from making vanilla cake with buttercream frosting made from real vanilla beans and coffee cake with that sugar glaze and ribbon of cinnamon through the center. I abstain from making the brownies, and the blondies, and the white chocolate chunk cookies with macadamia nuts. The sugar devil lives on my shoulder, perpetually whisperingsweet nothings in my ear, tempting me to make all these things and more, but I resist- at least, I usually do.