When my brother and I were young men and growing into our 2-meter frames and eating our parents out of house and home, Pops started buying frozen grapefruit juice and keeping it an unmarked plastic pitcher near the back of the fridge. We would pour out glasses of the stuff, thinking it orange juice, or just mouth the pitcher itself and wind up with a blast of sour unexpectedness down the front of our shirts.
Pops discovered that we'd leave the stuff alone..so he cultivated a taste for grapefruit juice so that he could carve out a little corner of the edible world that we wouldn't eat through.
Today the gf (girlfriend, not grapefruit) and I were in Trader Joes. Now I drink grapefruit juice by choice, dammit. I must be a real man. Sour and bitter foods are for adults only.
Then there was the time Pops wrapped some leftover pizza in brown butcher paper and scribbled "Rotten Meat" on the front of it.
Genius, really, and totally effective.
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I have a vivid picture in my mind of my kids, one after the other, hanging over the open refrigerator door like vultures, pouring milk from the jug into their mouths, burning through boxes of cereal, drinking all manner of juice . . . Also, my oldest son saying, with his mouth full of food, "I'm hungry!" Plus, there were triple batches of waffles to feed him and his friends when they brought their bottomless stomachs over to hang out.
In Sleepy E's single digit years his favorite Chinese food was a toasted cheese sandwich. Thank goodness there wasn't a Chinese restaurant in the country that did not have toasted cheese sandwichs on their menu!
I predict a lot of this in my future: falsely labeling items like chocolate so that I can preserve a little niche for myself in this jungle of manly appetites. Even now I can't seem to keep deserts in the house. Middlebrow has an "eat it until it's gone" philosophy, while I maintain a "save some for tomorrow" mantra.
Of course I meant "desserts." Deserts I don't like. Not to eat, anyway.
One year my cousin Ross brought a gift exchange gift to Christmas Eve festivities and asked that it be put in the freezer until we opened presents later. The package was short and bricklike and wrapped in aluminum foil, so we all assumed it was fudge or some sweet edible variant. In the end, it was a hardback novel and the freezer bit just some Anderson family chicanery....I still think this is hilarious.
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