Prompt: Write about about a food that had a pivotal role in your upbringing.
It was dinner time, and that reliably meant one thing: salad. My grandmother always served it in one of the squat, hand-hewn wooden bowls bought on my grandparents’ trip to Thailand. These only held a small amount, a fact in which I took some comfort. But I hated how, over time, the Newman’s Own salad dressing my grandfather favored had seeped into the pores of the wood, rendering the bottom of the bowls perpetually, ever-so-slightly slimy.
We always ate the same kind of salad—the premixed “bag salad,” as my grandparents called it, usually the Dole brand. Mostly it was battered leaves of iceberg lettuce, as pale as their name suggests, dotted with the eye-catching orange of shredded carrots. Chips of radish lurked between the leaves. Often, my grandmother would “dress up” the mixture by adding some cherry tomatoes that were always bigger than any cherry I’ve ever seen. These were just the right combination of juicy and sweet, a satisfying mouthful in their own right. More than once I tried to argue that since the tomatoes were, by size, the largest component of the salad, the fact that I’d eaten those should be enough. Why should I be forced to finish the rest?
“Because,” my grandfather would inevitably answer, “it’s good for you.”
For ten years, my mother and I lived just down the street from her parents. Most evenings, we clambered into our stoplight-red Toyota for the short drive up the street, though sometimes I walked on my own, dawdling just long enough to pet a neighborhood cat or collect a few of the delicate puffballs that fell from oak trees. Upon entering my grandparents’ house, I was always instructed to wash my hands and set the table. And there they’d be, already taunting me—those slimy wooden bowls.
My grandfather took what I’d call a “laissez-faire” approach to my hatred of salad. “She’s a child,” he’d say. “It will pass.”
But while we were waiting for that, he was willing to sit patiently at the table with me, long after he’d finished his second cup of coffee, to ensure that I finished every last bite.
My grandmother was a different story. Starting when I was around five, she tried just about every strategy she could think of to encourage me to like salad. We went through a variety of dressings, until she realized I couldn’t stand the texture, no matter the taste. She served the salad first, before the rest of the dinner, thinking I might be hungry enough that it would taste better (fast fact: a leaf of iceberg does less than nothing to dull hunger pangs—it actually takes more calories to digest than it contains). Once, she put salad on my plate instead of in the bowl, thinking the rest of the meal would hide its taste, but then I complained that it had contaminated my other food. Finally, she hit on a winning scheme: sugar. Would I, perhaps, eat a leaf of iceberg if she sprinkled sugar across it and rolled it up, like some sort of bizarre “healthy” candy concoction? Why, yes, of course I would. For a little while, anyway, until I decided I’d rather just have the sugar straight-up, thanks.
And so it was that we found ourselves at dinner one night when I was six, with everything eaten except a last, lone bowl of salad at the edge of my placemat.
“I’m full,” I insisted, indicating my finger-clean plate, free of any remnants of that night’s meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
My grandmother smiled indulgently. “Really? Have you checked your salad rib?”
She beckoned me towards her chair and began gently pressing in the spaces between my ribs. “You see, these are shelves for your food,” she explained. “Your meatloaf rib is full—but oh goodness, your salad rib still has plenty of space!”
My little fingers followed hers down my side. Sure enough, there was a noticeable gap just where she had indicated. My bluff had been called. Obediently, I returned to my seat and, wincing at every mouthful, finished my salad.
After the dishes were cleared away, I lingered in the living room, waiting for the treat I was sure I had smelled earlier: my grandmother’s decadent double-chocolate brownies (these were, I later learned, more appropriately called Betty Crocker’s double-chocolate brownies, but knowing this in no way diminished their deliciousness). Sure enough, my grandmother soon appeared—but with only three plates.
“I know you don’t want any, Laurel,” she said. “After all, you were already full after dinner.”
I panicked. Had I really eaten all of my salad, only to be denied a brownie? Almost of their own accord, my fingers fumbled along the other side of my chest. Sure enough…
“No, Grandma!” I proclaimed triumphantly. “My dessert rib is wide open!”
And as it turned out, my dessert rib was even big enough for two brownies that night.
