I Am What I Ate: Foods From My Childhood

by Kevin Brown

fried okra

I ate few vegetables as a child, not because of my parents, but because I was a picky eater who refused to try new foods.  Beyond potatoes, I essentially ate three vegetables: corn, green beans, and fried okra.  The first was cooked in butter; the second simmered for hours with fatback; the last was covered in corn meal and fried in a skillet.  I mention the skillet because many people deep fry their okra, especially restaurants that purport to sell Southern food.  There is a distinct difference between the two, as skillet fried okra loses chunks of corn meal, enabling the diner to taste more of the okra.  As a child, that was the part I liked least about eating okra, actually.  I wanted to eat fried corn meal, and the okra was just a means to do so.  I could also count it as a green vegetable I ate, though nobody would argue it was healthy.  Clearly, I was desperate to up my vegetable count without actually eating them.  Given that I didn’t cook okra or help prepare it when I was a child, I never had to deal with the sliminess of that preparation.  That’s the complaint most people give about eating it; however, those who know how to prepare okra know that diners should never know okra is slimy, as the correct cooking takes care of that.

I grew up in Northeast Tennessee where there are few African Americans, no real racial or ethnic diversity at all, actually.  I didn’t know the history of okra as a plant that came from Africa through the Atlantic slave trade.  I didn’t know that most people ate okra in soups or stews, that those who were enslaved made a peppery stew with okra that they ate with rice or hominy or some other grain.  I didn’t know that enslaved people parched the seeds to make a fake version of coffee that they sold to white soldiers on both sides of the Civil War.  I didn’t know that Thomas Jefferson referred to it as one of Virginia’s esteemed garden plants in the 1780s.  I didn’t know that those who enslaved others took these recipes and put them in cookbooks with names like The Virginia Housewife or Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen, as if okra was a longstanding Southern tradition.  It only seems fitting that okra’s history would follow the history of so much in the South, many of the best ideas and foods taken from Africa along with the people who were taken from their home, then repurposed and sold as Southern.  We don’t talk about the history of these foods in the same way we don’t talk about the real history of race in the South or in America; we just turn them into something we can consume, something that’s easily digestible.

canned/frozen vegetables from the garden

At various times in my childhood, my parents had space behind our church to have a garden.  They would spend much of their free time there during the summer doing all that is required to tend a fairly substantial plot of land, which ultimately paid off not only in fresh vegetables for the summer, but enough to freeze or can for the winter.  I was either too young to help out or too disinterested, and they decided it wasn’t worth the fight to try to evoke any interest in me, so they let me stay at home when they went to work the garden.  The one job I did have, and it was not even really a job, was to go down to the extra freezer and get out whatever frozen vegetables we had whenever one of them was making dinner on a winter evening.  I didn’t know then, but I know now, that they were proud that we could have as close to fresh vegetables as possible through the long winter months.  I now understand what it would have been like for them to have put in all that time and effort to give their family quality food that came from their manual labor, not the everyday work they did, which neither of them seemed to enjoy.

If I would have understand that as a child, then I probably wouldn’t have said what I did when I was a pre-teen.  I had taken care of my job and gone downstairs to get a bag of green beans out of the freezer for my mother to make for dinner.  She would start those beans sometime in the mid-afternoon and cook them for hours, flavoring them with fatback, breaking them down in that traditional Southern way.  We ate green beans from the garden on a regular basis throughout the year.  For some reason, though, on that day, I decided to inform the family that I preferred green beans we could buy at the store.  I grew up eating food from cans and boxes, so my taste preferences ran that way.  I wanted that higher sodium content that pre-packaged foods contained, not the natural flavorings of what came from the garden.  They were disappointed in my comment, of course, but I realize now that I’m much older how that comment must have hurt.  They spent hours every week during the spring and summer working in the garden after a full day or week of work just to provide us with food I would now willingly pay and work extra for only to have one of their children denigrate what they had done.  I can at least say that I now appreciate that work, and I think about it every time I eat fresh vegetables straight from somebody’s garden.

generic foods

Generic foods were different than store-brand foods, really a precursor to them.  Unless people came of age at a certain time, the early 1980s, they’ve never seen true generic foods.  Their labeling was simply black lettering on a white background, no pictures and little description, if any.  A can of kidney beans would simply have Red Kidney Beans printed on the label, with the size and ingredient information, and that was it.  They were a bit cheaper than other products because the manufacturers saved money on design and marketing, so many families who needed to save money would purchase these, even if the savings weren’t all that dramatic.  They didn’t last long, largely passing out of favor before the decade was out.  Stores produced their own brands with little extra cost, but much better design, letting the generic brand die out.

What the design conveyed, though, was that people who bought them couldn’t afford the name brands.  While brand names have been important throughout the twentieth century, the 1980s—that decade devoted to me and greed—drew even more attention to buying the right product.  Perhaps it was because I was moving into middle school just at the time the generic foods were becoming so popular, but I was even more aware of not being able to afford brand name foods.  It’s not like my friends were coming over to my house and mocking the canned vegetables we had in our cabinets, of course, but I saw what my friends were eating, and it wasn’t food from a box or can with no design and no name on it.  If they pulled out some Pringles potato chips, I certainly didn’t want to be the kid who had generic chips, despite the fact that mine tasted just as good, perhaps even better.  If these products were produced today, they would become wildly popular for a year or so as part of the Hipster approach to ironic consumption, but when I was a child, they just communicated who had the money and means to buy the brand names and who didn’t.

frozen waffles

Throughout much of my childhood, I ate cold cereal for breakfast.  Both of my parents worked, so there wasn’t time for either of them to make a hot breakfast before we kids had to catch the bus to school.  In the winter, though, my mother did try to make sure we had something warm in us before we went outside to stand in temperatures that could drop into the twenties or thirties.  Those breakfasts were usually quite fast, something like instant oatmeal, but still warm and filling.  As I got older, I was responsible for my own breakfast, and I often wanted something different than cereal, so I would encourage my parents to buy a variety of breakfast foods.  One of my favorites was frozen waffles.

Since I grew up largely before microwaves had found their way into every household or were at a level where they provided tasteful meals, my frozen waffles had to be heated in the toaster.  I started with the basic frozen waffles, but I quickly discovered my new favorite: the pre-buttered frozen waffles.  These came with the butter already laden in the grooves of the waffle, slightly melting as it came out of the toaster.  I’m well aware now that that butter couldn’t have been close to real, as it would have melted into the workings of the toaster, but, at the time, I loved it.  I didn’t simply allow that butter to serve as my topping for the waffle, though, as I then slathered even more margarine over the waffle, trying to fill the remainder of every groove, before pouring way too much syrup over the pair of waffles.  I certainly went out into the cold with something warm in my stomach, but, more importantly to me, I went out with sugar and fat to help get me through a morning of school.

‘We don’t talk about the history of these foods in the same way we don’t talk about the real history of race in the South or in America; we just turn them into something we can consume, something that’s easily digestible.’

sugary cereals

Since both of my parents worked, I was often left to make breakfast for myself, especially as I got older and moved into later elementary school grades and middle school.  While I sometimes made something hot for breakfast, my main option was cereal.  My parents certainly pushed me toward healthier cereals, such as Cheerios or Raisin Bran, but I would often put sugar on them to make them more palatable.  When I say that I would put sugar on them, I don’t mean that I would use a spoonful or two of sugar.  I would simply take the lid off the sugar bowl, then use that to spread sugar over what I was about to eat.  My usage of sugar was so bad that I would add sugar to a pre-sweetened cereal, such as Frosted Flakes.  One cup of Frosted Flakes already has 14 grams of sugar, more if one counts the milk.  For every teaspoon of sugar I used, I added at least 4 more grams of sugar, more if the teaspoon was heaping, which, given the way I used sugar, it definitely was.  When I was in high school, my health teacher was horrified to hear how much sugar I added, so I decided to calculate the number of spoonfuls I used by actually using a spoon to add sugar.  I probably added more than I normally would have just to up the number, but I calculated that I used sixteen spoonfuls to a non-pre-sweetened cereal for 64 grams of sugar.

Of course, the problem wasn’t simply that I added sugar to cereals, it was that the cereals I chose when I could were already pre-sweetened.  Though I grew up before cereal stopped even pretending to be healthy and started making cereals such as Cookie Crisp or Oreo O’s, I could still find plenty of options that involved significant amounts of sugar.  Thus, I ate cereals such as Kaboom and Lucky Charms that used oat cereal bits to claim some amount of health benefits, but supplements them with marshmallows.  My approach to eating them was to make sure I had a marshmallow in every bite.  The best part of breakfast was the sugary milk left over at the end of two or three bowls that I would drink straight from the bowl.  No hot breakfast could compare to that taste.

Christmas breakfast

Every year, my father made Christmas breakfast after we had opened our presents.  He didn’t cook often, so that fact alone made this meal a celebration.  He made scrambled eggs (sometimes with cheese!), biscuits and gravy, bacon (ham, even, in later years), and we would always finish with a biscuit smothered in butter and jelly, which I always referred to as dessert.  While we children certainly talked about presents as Christmas approached, we talked as much about Dad’s breakfast.  The first year after my father’s death that we had enough people to merit a big breakfast, my mother made it.  Nobody talked about whether or not we would eat that breakfast; we all just knew it would happen.  It didn’t go well.  My mother wasn’t used to cooking for that many people, and she hasn’t regularly cooked for years.  There wasn’t enough food, and it wasn’t all that good.  We ate it, though, because it was Christmas breakfast, and it was a tradition.

The first year my wife came to my family’s house for Christmas, she was looking forward to this breakfast.  Not only had she heard me talk about it, but she had heard my sister and my mother sing its praises.  After it was over and she and I were driving back to the hotel where we were staying, she admitted that she was disappointed in it.  She pointed out dishes, especially the biscuits and gravy, that just weren’t very good.  I had to admit that she was right, especially about the gravy.  I don’t know if the breakfast wasn’t ever what I had imagined or if it decreased in quality as my father got older or if my tastes had simply changed.  There’s no way for me to know which of those, if any, are true.  Traditions become so not necessarily because they’re good or sometimes even enjoyable; they become so just because we keep doing them, and then we can’t imagine not doing them ever again.  We’re going to my family’s house this year for Christmas, and I’m not sure how many people will be there.  We’ll have Christmas breakfast, though, and my wife and I will try to convince my mother to let us help, significantly.  The meal might be wonderful, but it might not.  The fact that it exists will always be so.

Cheerwine

While we didn’t drink brand-name soft drinks, we did occasionally partake of a local soft drink, Cheerwine.  Most people outside of the South have never heard of it, as it comes out of Salisbury, North Carolina, and has spent much of its slightly-more-than-one-hundred-year existence only being marketed in and around the Southeast.  They’ve recently begun trying to expand their reach, aiming their marketing at a younger generation (read: they’re trying to get hipsters to see them as retro and cool), and working with Pepsi on a distribution deal.  Not surprisingly, being a Southern-made product, it’s available in Cracker Barrel stores.  I’m not sure why we sometimes had Cheerwine and sometimes didn’t, as it clearly wasn’t a staple of my childhood, but I distinctly remember drinking it regularly enough for it to make an impact on my memories.

About a decade ago, my wife and I were in Asheville, North Carolina.  She’s originally from California, so she wasn’t aware of Cheerwine, not surprisingly.  I had told her about it a number of times before, and I talked about how much we liked it when I was growing up.  We had seen it plenty of times when we were various places in the South, but, for some reason, we decided to buy a bottle from the Woolworth Walk and try it.  She didn’t grow up drinking soft drinks, but she was willing to give it a try.  She could barely get one sip down.  I couldn’t wait to try it again.  I could barely get one swallow down.  Granted, I haven’t had carbonated beverages in two decades, but the taste was particularly bad.  I had no idea it had any kind of cherry flavoring in it, which I’m not a fan of, so that was an unpleasant surprise.  Perhaps nostalgia tastes good to some people, but, at least on that day, it was a beverage I didn’t ever want to try again.

Mello Yello

When I was a child, there weren’t many soft drink options.  As I moved through elementary school and on into middle school, that began to change.  The Coca-Cola Company released Mello Yello in 1979 in order to compete with PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew.  For those of us who preferred Coke products, we were definitely going to go with Coke’s option over Pepsi’s.  In my neighborhood, though, that was only two of us: me and my neighbor Kelly; neither of us were among the popular crowd at school—where the only drink machine was Pepsi, anyway—so we weren’t going to change any minds.  Instead, we simply enjoyed it on our own, referring to it as moonshine.  The name we used isn’t terribly surprising, given that we grew up in Northeast Tennessee, and we both watched The Dukes of Hazzard.  What is interesting about it, though, is its association with people who were outcasts, exactly how we felt at the time, not just because of our choice in drink.

What furthered that feeling for me was that my family never bought Mello Yello or any Coke products, as we stayed with drinks that were either more local or not a name brand.  Thus, the only time I was able to drink Mello Yello was when I was next door visiting Kelly.  Honestly, I wasn’t all that good of a friend to him.  I only went to his house to play when there was nothing better to do.  I talked badly of him to other kids in the neighborhood when I was playing with them.  I even convinced a sort-of friend with a bad reputation to beat Kelly up once, which I then denied when Kelly’s mother confronted me about it.  And yet, whenever I went to Kelly’s house, I got to have Mello Yello, got to drink moonshine with another outlaw, got to feel like I was breaking all the rules that mattered when I wasn’t even keeping the ones that did.

‘The meal might be wonderful, but it might not.  The fact that it exists will always be so.’

Coca-Cola

When I was older and began making my own money, whether through mowing lawns or bagging groceries at Kroger, I switched my soft drink to Coca-Cola (or Coke, as everybody calls it).  Given that Pepsi products were bottled in the tri-cities area where I grew up, there was a good deal of debate as to which company produced the better product: Coke or Pepsi.  I was a die-hard Coke fan for one reason: I couldn’t chug a 12-ounce can of Coke.  I thought Coke had more of a kick to it, and, for some reason, that mattered to my teenage self.  When one can’t (or doesn’t) drink alcoholic beverages, the strength of the soft drink seems to matter.  Or at least it did to me.  None of my friends cared about that distinguishing factor.

I used Coke as some sort of proof of my toughness one other time.  I was on a youth group trip from Johnson City to Gatlinburg, a trip of an hour and a half, if that.  I had a cooler with a six-pack of 12-ounce cans of Coke for the trip down.  For some reason, I decided to drink all six of them.  Given people’s reactions to that feat, I kept drinking cans of Coke that day, ending the day having consumed twenty-four cans of Coke in an eighteen-hour period.  For the record, that’s 3360 calories, 936 grams of sugar, and 816 milligrams of caffeine.  Thankfully, I was a teenage boy with a revved up metabolism, so I made it through the day.  Whenever I tell my students this story, I make sure to tell them that I had my gall bladder removed when I was in my early thirties.  I want them to remember that there are consequences to such actions, even if they’re not readily noticeable.  When I was in my mid-twenties, I had gained about eighty pounds, so I stopped drinking Coke.  Oddly enough, I didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms from the lack of caffeine, which never seemed to affect me greatly.  I did lose weight, though.  And I haven’t had a can of Coke in more than two decades.

margarine

I grew up largely eating margarine, not butter.  There wasn’t any flavor- or cooking-related reason for this decision; it was simply cheaper.  In fact, we usually ate the store-brand or generic margarine, though, we sometimes used Parkay, the dominant brand in the 1970s.  We ate it so often (usually on bread as a side for meals) that we used the tubs for leftovers from other meals.  Whenever I wanted to get margarine out of the refrigerator, I would need to hold the tub up to the light and shake it to see if what was inside moved or not.  If it did, then it wasn’t margarine; it was some sort of leftover.  If I tried to guess and open the tub, I usually ended up opening several tubs before I actually found the margarine.

I’m sure I had butter as a child, but I do know that I loved the taste of margarine.  Whenever I would make something myself that involved margarine—toast, perhaps, or frozen waffles—I would scrape my finger across the lid of the tub to get any excess from there and simply eat it off my finger.  If there was nothing on the top, I would just slide my finger across the top of the margarine and lick it clean.  Whenever I would make toast or waffles or anything that had butter on it, I would slather the butter several layers thick, essentially using whatever I was eating as a means to get the butter to my mouth.  Despite my changes in diet over the years and my improvements in healthy eating, especially, I still layer my food—especially bread—with layers of butter, though now I eat vegan butter, which is remarkably similar to margarine.  In fact, if pressed, I couldn’t explain the difference between those two products, preferring to live in ignorance, slathered in layers of some oil-based product that still tastes great.

cube steak

For those who care what particular cut of meat cube steak is, it’s top round or top sirloin that’s been tenderized/flattened.  Essentially, it’s a cheap cut of meat that’s been pounded down until it looks like a cube.  When I was growing up, I didn’t know what different cuts of meat were, as we mainly had different versions of hamburger in a variety of dishes, as that provided plenty of protein for not a lot of money.  What I did know is that I didn’t look forward to seeing cube steak in the refrigerator.  I wasn’t much of a meat eater to begin with, sticking mainly with hamburger, even on those occasions we went out to eat; I would get a hamburger steak—another way of getting a hamburger patty—and slather it with ketchup.  However, cube steak was a problem all its own.

The problem came from the fact that my parents ate everything very well done.  I’m not sure what in their lives led them to be concerned about undercooked food, but it was a lesson I learned early on.  For cube steak, that approach meant that a thin cut of beef was cooked much longer than it needed to be.  And that overcooking meant that I had trouble chewing and swallowing the food.  I would chew and chew and chew, and the meat didn’t seem to break down at all.  Thus, I was left with round clumps of meat in my mouth that were much too large to swallow.  I would try to hide a piece or two in the paper towel we used for napkins; I would claim I needed to go to the bathroom and spit a piece out; at times, I would take much smaller bites than necessary and almost swallow them whole.  I didn’t know that my distaste of cube steak came from the preparation, not the cut of meat itself.  Even knowing that now, I haven’t had cube steak in more than three decades, a trend that will probably continue for the rest of my life.

Hamburger/Tuna Helper

Both of my parents worked, so they definitely could use help when it came to preparing dinner.  The fact that dinner was on the table (or television trays, which is where we ate many of our meals) at six o’clock every day was impressive in and of itself.  My mother left work at five, so she needed meals that would feed a family of five that were cheap and that she could prepare quickly.  Hamburger Helper was released the year after I was born, with Tuna Helper introduced the next year.  Not surprisingly, I grew up on both of them.  All my mother had to do was brown ground beef or open a can of tuna, add it to everything that came in the box—pasta and seasonings—then mix in water, and she would have a meal in about thirty minutes.  We would pair it with white bread and margarine for a side, eating one or the other of the Helper meals every other week or so.  There are a wide variety of selections now, including Asian Helper, Chicken Helper, and even Whole Grain Helper, with a few options in each line, but when I was growing up, there were only two, and we alternated between them.

The Helper dishes were such a part of my childhood that I continued eating them when I moved out on my own.  I made Tuna Helper on a hot plate in my college dorm.  And the first meal I made when I and two friends got our first apartment was Hamburger Helper.  However, we almost messed it up, showing the extent of our cooking skills.  It should have been easy, as we just needed to follow the directions on the box.  The problem was that none of us had every browned ground beef before, and we weren’t sure if we needed to add water to it to keep it from burning or not.  Thankfully, we went with not, and it turned out fine.  Of course, halfway through preparing it, we realized none of us owned silverware, so Brian had to drive to his parents’ house and borrow some.  Hamburger Helper could only help so much; we were on our own for the rest.