February 16, 2004

• Beans

  
  

  One of the facts I’ve had to come to terms with in my process of growing up, healing body, mind and spirit, and transcending addictions is the fact that food means much more to me than simply fuel for the body.

  
  

  My mother, and others, used to comfort me with food when I was sad or hurt.  I still remember the Kist soda pop delivery man at the grocery store (The company’s slogan was “Get Kist for a nickel,” back in the ‘forties when I was a kid.) who gave me a bottle of strawberry pop when I went into the store with my mom, crying piteously after falling and skinning my knee in the park by the store.  While Greyfox, my late best friend Mardy, and many other people lose their appetites when they are nervous or upset, in such times I become ravenous.  Divorces, deaths in the family, political crap… anything upsetting to me can, if I let it happen, lead to excessive eating, bingeing, and the illness and weight gain that always entails.

  
  

  I haven’t eaten only to console myself for troubles.  Food has always been a favored way of mine to celebrate.  Until recently it just wasn’t a birthday for me without cake and ice cream.  In spring of 2001, I made my first stab at this abstinence from addictive foods, and did all right for a few months.  I recall in early September as my birthday approached I was writing on the eating disorder forums, venting my distress.  I just couldn’t imagine a way to celebrate my birthday without eating forbidden foods.  Then the infamous 9-11 occurred, and in the aftermath of that, stressed out psychically from our shamanic work for those affected directly, I forgot all about celebrating my birthday.  Instead, I bought a package of cinnamon rolls and slid right in along with a huge number of people who fell off one wagon or another, or took up smoking or some other drug for the first time.  The country had a sudden surge in addictive behavior and I became part of it.

  
  

  Throughout my life, I’ve had various emotional associations with certain foods.  Cinnamon is a sure pepper-upper for me.  Red hot candies have always been special treats, and while I was in prison the bags of cinnamon balls I got from the commissary made the days pass faster and more pleasantly for me.  There are some foods I simply don’t eat, because they make me gag, and that’s not emotional but physical:  peas, brussels sprouts… probably a few others, but those are the biggies on my “don’t eat” list.  There’s another category of foods I’ve avoided sometimes, not because they taste bad or make me sick, but because they mean something negative to me.  Beans used to be on that list.

  
  

  My mother was a lousy cook.  She was a professional institutional cook, in schools and hospitals.  Why do bad cooks gravitate to such jobs, I wonder?  I’ve eaten her beans in school cafeterias and at home, and they were equally nasty both places.  She’d salt them before cooking, so they never had a chance to absorb the water and soften.  Then she’d overcook them in an effort to make them soft, and usually burn them in the process.  The next step after that was to remove them from the heat, and pour or spoon as much of the unburnt beans off the top and into another pot as she could.  Then the burned pot went in the sink to soak to be washed later and the burnt-tasting beans went on our table or into the cafeteria trays.

  
  

  In self-defense, I learned to cook.  Most of my expertise with beans came in my teens.  As a young wife on a tight budget, I prepared lots of beans.  My first mother-in-law taught me the rudiments:  soak them overnight first to rehydrate, cook briefly to avoid burning, and never salt them until they have softened with cooking.

  
  

  Okay, so I could cook beans as well as anyone could.  Still, they are pretty dull fare if they aren’t spiced up.  When I was still consuming sugar, I’d make my beans palatable by baking them with ham, salt pork, bologna chunks, or bacon, and lots of sweetener, preferably corn syrup.  They tasted okay, but they still were beans, a reminder of lean times in a bad, abusive marriage when beans were all we could afford to eat.  Consequently, I prepared beans only when times were lean or when I had a huge crowd to feed on a tight budget.  Even then, I preferred pasta as a cheap food, but that and the addictive nature of noodles is another story.

  
  

  My tastes have changed.  Beans, I now realize, are good healthy food, and I like them.  Sometimes I accompany them with this family’s version of the Ancestral Native American cuisine:  popcorn and baked squash.  The other night I did the whole soul food meal:  beans, rice and corn bread–YUM!!   I don’t need to sweeten them now to make them enjoyable.  I cook them frequently, but still not frequently enough to please Greyfox, a bean lover.  Even so, it’s too frequent for Doug, who undoubtedly was influenced in his feelings towards beans by our having them only in lean times while he was growing up, and only then with loads of sugar and spices added.  Beans the way I do them now are bland to him, he says.  “Bland” in his language seems to mean without sufficient sweetness, while “bland” to me means not spicy enough–and the kid doesn’t enjoy spices as much as I do.  So, I don’t spice up the beans enough for me and Greyfox (we add jalapeños and hot sauce in our individual dishes), don’t sweeten them at all, and usually forget to salt them until I reheat them for their second day.  They’re always better the second day.

  

  • 8:45 pm
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