Bad Food, Rotten Drinks

This is about food and vacations, with lots of parenthetical asides (in green italics for no particular reason).

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, my family used to go up to Lake Ontario a lot in the summer time, both on day trips and for summer vacation.

We'd go up Route 81 (one of the first Interstates)
toward Watertown, (the real "Upstate New York")
past convoys of Fort Drum soldiers, (eventually bound for Vietnam)
exit at Pulaski, (named for a Polish hero of the Revolutionary War)
drive on rural roads lined with corn ("as high as an elephant's thigh")
and pine trees, to Sandy Beach (real name Sandy Island Beach)
and nearby Sandy Pond (where Steve once caught a catfish by leaving a fishing pole in the water overnight).

Still with me? Good.

The later trips up Route 81 were mostly to a particular vacation home owned by a man named Speakman, right on Lake Ontario near a camp for the underprivileged. My room was in the attic, which was rather hot despite the exhaust fan in the front window. I'd listen to the waves until I fell asleep. I'd get up the next day to listen to the radio (Arthur Godfrey and My Love by Paul McCartney), read books my Mom thought would be better for me than horse and dog books (I was much put out to learn that The Clothes Horse had no horses in it) and fill in puzzle magazines (crosswords and word search, and eventually logic problems) between trips into the water, to ride the waves on a leaky raft.

It was pretty boring, really, except for the few times my parents let me bring a friend along.

What, you may wonder, has all this to do with John Scalzi's Weekend Assignment about bad food or drinks? I'll tell you.

Somewhere between Henderson Harbor and the Speakman camp, there were two smallish black roadside signs, advertising a place called (if I remember correctly) Starlight Cafe. "Starlight Cafe - Bad Food," one sign said. The other sign, on the other side of this fine establishment, said, "Starlight Cafe - Rotten Drinks."  My dad and I thought this was great.  Eventually my dad visited the place on his own, and reported back that the signs were accurate.

I don't generally eat bad food.  Oh, I eat food that's bad for me (why are carbs so alluring?), and occasionally I accidentally bite into an olive or a piece of raw onion, two foods I actively dislike. But I'm not one for eating weird foods on a dare, or for carrying around specific memories of some time when the milk or the meat was spoiled. So I'm sorry, Mr. Scalzi, but I can't regale you with stories of that time I ate something vile or absurd.

Except...

In 1972, my Mom took us to Europe on a three week Caravan tour. That trip generated a number of food stories, most of them brief and uninteresting. I was sick when we arrived in London, and the local doctor prescribed a milk shake, which turned out to be little more than slightly chilled chocolate milk. I remember drinking unhomogenized milk in Holland, as I was starting to feel better, which was very strange texturally but tasted rather good. I remember the odd recurrence of veal, tomato rice soup, wedge-shaped fried potatoes and pineapple slices at Caravan-provided meals in country after country, and the meal at the end at which tour guide Jimmy Patterson personally served us all pinapple slices as a joke. I remember eating Italian ice cream (complete with orange pits) outside the Colliseum after watching feral cats eat spaghetti inside it.

And I remember France.

It wasn't easy to order food in France.  My French wasn't great, and my Mom's French was rusty. In one restaurant, we thought we ordered spare ribs and saurkraut (not a terribly French meal, I'll grant you), but got ham hocks and kidney beans. Ham hocks are pretty weird looking, not exactly food I would normally choose to eat, but it tasted all right.  Perhaps two nights later, we were at a slightly more upscale restaurant where you sit at the same table as other diners, perhaps two parties to a table.  I got steak kabobs or something like that, some kind of tender, flavorful marinated meat. I thought it was beef, but my brother Steve claimed afterwards it was horse. Perhaps it was. I later read in a guidebook that the restaurant does indeed serve horse. That's a vile idea, eating The Black Stallion or Black Beauty, but it wasn't bad at the time, because I didn't know what was happening.

Years later, in college, I ate the only memorably spoiled food worth mentioning--barely. I was living in a house on Westcott Street that sort of belonged to my ex-boyfriend (long story), running up phone bills to Columbus (where John was), and terribly broke and depressed. I ran out of food money, and at one point had nothing to eat but dried milk, spaghetti and moldy Ragu. I picked out the mold with a spoon and combined the rest.  I don't remember how much I actually ate of it.  Then I invited myself to dinner at my Dad's apartment.

Some things I wouldn't eat or drink: John's pen pal Kooichi occasionally sends us odd foods from Japan, most of which I won't touch, bizarre seaweed crackers and cans of a soda called Sweat (which is reportedly cirtus-flavored).  I'm not going to drink anything called Sweat.  I don't care what it actually tastes like.  Sorry, Ko.

Something weird I did eat as a kid, and claimed to enjoy, was a peanut butter, bologna and lettuce sandwich on white with mayo and mustard. (I was trying to one-up my brother.) I ate those things for weeks, but eventually I had to concede it was better without the peanut butter. I also experimented with putting black pepper in Tab or Diet Pepsi as a possible cold remedy.

Can we get off the subject of food now?  I find it rather depressing.

Karen