Flying food
When I was a picky-eating kid, I had a few top-secret hiding/disposing places for vegetables and all other things I refused to eat but needed to give the illusion that I did.
One was my neighbor’s backyard. There, a team of Rottweilers witnessed a peculiar occurrence: Airborne food. Comestibles would take flight, arcing over an 8-foot cinder block wall and landing in the grass at their paws. Soon, the dogs would learn this phenomenon happened daily at sunset, and when the sun dipped low on the horizon, they would settle in a corner behind the wall and wait for the evening’s delivery. My delivery.
Sometimes they’d get peas or Iceberg salad. Other times, it was chicken and tofu stewed with tomatoes, glutinous rice noodles with shrimp or pieces of deep-fried sesame balls (pictured above). They weren’t picky.
While the dogs assembled, I waited for my own pattern to unfold. The setting sun meant that dinnertime was nearing its end and as always, my cold pile of vegetables remained untouched. I couldn’t leave the table until they were gone, and my mother watched me like a hawk. That is, until she had to go to the bathroom. And the minute she left the kitchen, I sprang into action.
I took my plate and burst through the back door toward the wall where the dogs were waiting on the other side. I could hear them barking in excitement as they heard my hurried footsteps grow closer. Grabbing fistfuls of vegetables, I hurled them over the concrete wall with all the strength my 9-year-old self could muster, ran back inside and waited for my mom to come back from the bathroom. She’d look at my plate, deem me done, and go about her business. I was triumphant.
Unfortunately, this method stopped working when our neighbor and his dogs moved away and the woman in their place handed my mother a small box of rotting vegetables and rock-hard sesame balls. She was not at all pleased about the daily assault of airborne food on her herb garden.
– Cynthia Furey
Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will attempt to post Monday through Friday for the entire month. Thank you for reading!
March 19th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Oh my gosh. That’s so adorably funny. Thank you for sharing!
March 19th, 2009 at 6:47 am
No such luck for me – it was the napkin or nothing and that darn piece of paper didn’t hold more than few limp green beans. Those dogs probably regretted the move as much as you did. But hopefully, your tastes have changed – those red-bean paste/sticky rice balls look delicious!
March 19th, 2009 at 10:09 am
At school I stuffed all the unedibles in my milk carton so I could have seconds. This worked until the teacher started picking up the milk carton to see if we had drank our milk. (Others stuck their buttered bread to the bottom of the lunch table)
March 19th, 2009 at 10:45 am
We had an old fashioned table with chrome legs. I pried the cap off one leg and dropped in my dreadful green beans when nobody was paying attention. Alas, my secret was discovered when we moved, the table was turned upside down and several years’ worth of shriveled and moldy worms dropped out of my corner of the table. It didn’t take too long before my mother put 2+2 together. I have never voluntarily eaten green beans since.
March 19th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
When I was a kid my sister and I used to do something similar with dishes. We HATED doing dishes (still do) so whenever a mucked up piece of plastic Tupperware crossed our path we took out our frustrations on it and would hurl them over the backyard fence! We assigned a code word to the act T.O.W. (throw over fence)…to this day I still fathom hurling a crummy dish over the fence…
March 28th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Oh hell you guys, your stories crack me up!!