My Food-Memoir (First Draft)

I look back on my youngest years and remember daily family dinners consisting of roasted chicken sitting in a pool of mushroom sauce and vegetables with islands of dumplings rising out of the thick salty swamp.  I remember tuna noodle casserole with squares of melted cheddar sizzling on top, frozen chicken nuggets, gigantic pork chops seasoned with a hearty amount of Lawry’s Seasoned Salts, and wing nights, when my father and sister would put down 20-30 sticky barbecued wings each in one sitting.  I remember growing older and realizing that these daily dinners were turning into every other day, once a week, once in a while family dinners.

As family meals grew sparse my independence from the typical American food culture grew as well.  By age 12 I was experimenting in the kitchen with delicacies like curried lentils and rice noodles, and I had built up the idea of vegetarians to an unhealthy saintly standard.  In my mind, vegetarians were animal-loving beautiful activists capable of an insurmountable level of self-control and self-confidence.  They were my idols.  Someone had only to say “I am a vegetarian” and they turned into a god.  If they said “I am a vegan” they turned into the center of the universe.  My middle school years were a blur of days when I declared myself a true-blooded vegetarian, and other days when I realized that there was no real point to depriving myself of meat besides an inflated title and boosted ego.  I had once gone an entire week without eating meat, and then my mom made me stop because all I was eating were french fries and iceberg lettuce.  After that I pretty much gave up the idea of becoming an enlightened earth-warrior bearing kale and quinoa as weapons and settled on the mediocrity of chicken pot pie and pepperoni pizza.  

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that my entire view of vegetarianism shifted from an exotic political statement and representation of someone’s worth to a practical and healthy lifestyle choice. I came to this decision through a combination of short-lived childhood dreams, Robert Kenner’s documentary film Food, Inc., the surprisingly informative guidebook Vegetarianism for Dummies, and a general disinterest in meat and horror of the United States meat industry.  

The first three years of vegetarianism were bliss.  I learned how to cook myself vibrant and fun meals filled with vegetables and grains, how to get the right combination of amino acids from my meals to form complete proteins, and how tofu could soak up pretty much any flavor it was cooked with.  Those first three years I was blissfully unaware that meat even existed; I had no cravings for it, and I was having too much fun making my own meals to go looking for it.  It wasn’t until nearly three and a half years after my induction into vegetarianism that I came face to face with the most viciously tasty meats of them all: bacon.  This came as a complete surprise; when I was little I had always thought bacon smelled like cat vomit mixed with baked beans.  I had rarely eaten it.  

I was spending the week in a retirement community in Florida with my father’s side of the family to celebrate the marriage of my grandpa Tom to Geri, a wonderful, intelligent, and kind woman he had been dating for the past five years.  A few nights before the official wedding and reception, my sister, cousins, and I all snuck out to the pool (which had closed hours earlier) and hopped the fence.  That’s about alI remember that night, and I woke up in my bed with a pounding headache and the distant memories of skinny dipping and riding around the streets in a golf cart.  I slowly got out of bed and shuffled towards the kitchen.  And that’s when I smelled it.  The smokey fragrant smell of the bacon and the sound of its fat sizzling in the pan hit me like a smack in the face.  My mouth started watering and all I could think about was sliding one of those crispy greasy strips of pork into my mouth.  I had never wanted bacon this much in my life.  I spent the morning talking to my father, the heartless culprit who had made the bacon in the first place, and avoided eye-contact with the growing pile of succulent pig bits.  I wasn’t allowed to eat that.  I hadn’t eaten meat in three years, and I was not about to give up that accomplishment in order to fulfill this hangover-induced irrational lust for a bite of seemingly the best bacon in the world.  I was at a cross-roads, each successive thought contradicting the previous and complicating the situation.  I was about to get up from the kitchen table to leave the room when my father abruptly left the kitchen (and the bacon) to go wake everyone else up.  I was left there, stranded, the pile of bacon waiting for my greedy fingers to snatch it up and let the heavenly slice of pork fill my mouth with exquisite and earth-altering flavor.  

Before I could stop myself my feet had taken me to the counter and my hand had seized two slices of bacon.  I devoured it without a second thought.  By the time my father came back with my sister and step-mother in tow, I was sitting back at the table acting as if nothing had happened.  They suspected nothing.  Relaxing a bit, I closed my eyes and remembered the crispy bacon hitting my tongue, overwhelming my taste buds and setting my senses ablaze.  And then I realized something: it hadn’t tasted that good.  In fact, I was now acutely aware of a slimy bacon residue caked on the inside of my mouth.  The luscious smell that had awoken me earlier this morning had reverted back to the normal cat vomit/bean odor, and the glistening pile of succulent bacon now looked only like a pile of fat-smothered pig bits.

I was never going to eat bacon again.