Feed Me

But No Liver Thanks

0501blog

I’ve been hungry but I’ve never suffered from hunger, I’ve been cold but I’ve never felt like I would freeze, I’ve been sick but never thought I would die and I’ve been overextended but never felt poor, so, in short, I have been lucky to have lived the way I have.

I suppose I would describe my upbringing as middle class and that we were probably as poor or as wealthy as our neighbors although my mother’s mantra was “money doesn’t grow on trees” and I don’t why my mother said that so often because I was not a dumb kid and I knew there were no money trees. My idea of being spendthrift was ordering the orange Creamsickle and not the cheaper, ice pop from the Good Humor man but more on that later. My mother cooked and we usually had pot roast or meat loaf once a week and I recall the small device on the top of the pressure cooker and it would whistle when the food was done, I think, but maybe it was an alert to turn down the heat and this is yet one more mystery to me.

There were hot dog nights, not frankfurters, but hot dogs as I never heard anyone refer to them as frankfurters, maybe as franks as in franks and beans, but frankfurters, no, that sounded remotely German which was not a popular place in my Jewish household. Liver and tongue were two foods that should be wiped off the face of the earth or fed only to bitter enemies because liver was always dry and it was an animal’s organ just like eating lungs or head cheese and you could actually feel the buds on the cow tongue, gross, although I make one very significant exception and that is chicken livers that are chopped and combined with eggs.

Other nights we might have macaroni and cheese or maybe spaghetti and meatballs and occasionally my mother cooked a delicious dish that looked like small pork spare ribs but were really beef because pork is traife and not permitted in a Jewish home unless it is disguised. There was always a dairy night and the meal might be cottage cheese and sour cream or maybe cold, beet borscht with sour cream, a dish that has its roots in 18th Century eastern Europe and a sandwich, possibly tuna fish. And for dessert, more likely than not, my mother would serve the dish that has absolutely no right to call itself dessert and that would be Jello, which is powder mixed with water that is partially frozen and colored while taking great care to insure that each bowl of the gelatin is totally devoid of any taste at all. To try and make it more palatable, my mother would put small pieces of fruit from canned fruit in the Jello but it didn’t help and how could it? Gelatin, the prime ingredient in this great dessert poseur, is a translucent, colorless, flavorless food ingredient, commonly derived from collagen taken from animal body parts. Doesn’t that make your mouth water? There is no such thing as a good Jello.

Sometimes we’d have ice cream for dessert but on nights when the main course was meat, we had to wait an hour after the meal, as per the Garber translation of the kosher rules in the Talmud although as I got older, the amount of time we had to wait grew shorter, again as per page 5662 of the Garber Talmud. Of course, the real coup de grace came in the summers when I would ask nicely for 15 cents to buy an orange Creamsickle from the Good Humor man whose jingle bell alerted all of the joyous and frantic neighborhood kids who wanted to get out from under the dreaded Jello for a dessert that actually tasted good.

We also had snacks in the fridge which I still called an ice box for many years after ice boxes were history and the snacks I preferred were creamed herring with sliced onions and it was always Vita creamed herring and not herring in wine sauce.

And then of course, there was that very special night, the night when my mother did not cook and instead we went out “to eat Chinese” at the local Chinese restaurant where we typically ordered chow mein or chop suey or egg foo young and as my mother got older, she might order a shrimp dish because, again as per the Garber Talmudic translation, an older woman is allowed to eat shrimp though not at home.

So we always had enough food and I never went hungry, except on Yom Kippur when I made believe that I was fasting while furtively sneaking something to eat out of the refrigerator. We never took vitamins or food supplements but we were all relatively healthy. That is not the case for many people in the U.S. and around the world, where hunger isn’t refusing to eat the Jello or the tongue, but rather having not enough food.

Food insecurity is the term used to describe people who are often forced to skip meals and buy cheap, non-nutritious foods like McDonalds, Kentucky Fried, Burger King or any of a number of other fast food emporiums where the food is completely absent of any nutritional value but totally delicious.

Today, about 40 million Americans and 12 million children are food insecure as they live in so-called “food desserts” where the only sources of food are fast food or small grocery shops where nutritious food is scarce. And it’s getting worse.

Whyhunger.org reported that before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 35 million Americans struggled with hunger. Due to the pandemic, more than 50 million Americans are hungry. Pre-pandemic, more than 10 million American children faced hunger and that number has exploded with more than 17 million children, or nearly 1 in 4, going hungry.

Even those numbers pale compared to the Chad, which had the worst hunger and food insecurity problems in the world, according to the United Nations 2020 Global Hunger Index. In Chad, 39.8 percent of the children have stunted growth due to poor nutrition while 13.3 percent of children were diagnosed with child wasting, which both contribute to a mortality rate where more than one in 10 kids die before their fifth birthday.

And I complained about Jello and liver. Sometimes I just don’t know how good I had it.