Going With The Grain

I am standing in a palette of primary colors, rectangles of crayons, a garden of barcodes. Thirty yards of yellows, oranges and greens screaming at me in garish tones. Pick me up. Buy me! The cereal section grows like weedy dandelions or wild orchids with their seductive tongues hanging out.

It wasn’t always like this. There were Corn Flakes, All-Bran and Shredded Wheat, simple and stately in their boxy mansions. There was Rice Krispies, snap, crackle and popping noiselessly on the shelf. There was Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions, my first newspaper suggesting who I would be if I ever grew up. And Grape Nuts emblemtic in that it is derived from neither grapes nor nuts; a deceit which runs through Kellogg, Post and General Mills, with doubtful claims on all their gaudy boxes. These were the first, going back ninety years or more. And they’ve been sitting on the shelf under the watchful eye of a Ben Franklin look-alike in his Quaker hat on the oatmeal cylinder.

It took pasteurized milk and wax paper to make them a morning habit. The Kellogg brothers showed how far 6th grade drop-outs could go. Battle Creek, Michigan, became their center of operation and many a box top was sent to that address for decoder pins, badges and buttons for beanie hats.

The grocer reached for one or the other with his elongated pincer. This was before self service markets. A counter separated the server and the served. He tallied the items with his #3 pencil, kept behind his ear, onto the paper bag. You shopped 4 or 5 times a week. Ice boxes were small and food spoiled….but not cereal.

Cheerios was born in the early ‘40s, the first oat cereal and hopelessly dull which is why it required a cheery name. After the war, mills boomed with the boomers and colonized the aisle. Can it be my daughters were raised on Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops? Cavities got bigger. Dentists got rich. Blood sugar zoomed north. Is it any wonder about ten percent of Americans have type-2 diabetes? Then wheat germ (remember that?), bran and fiber became by-words for lean and longevity. Special K, Smart Start. Fiber-Smart, and granola but they have even more carbohydrates. Muesli is a mix of rolled oats or cornflakes with fruit, nuts and seeds, tasteless enough to make it seem healthy but loaded with carbohydrates.

I love my cereal. I could eat it all day and nothing else, providing I drizzle it with blueberries. Got to kill those free radicals. As we all know the only good radical is an oxidized one.

A walk in the cereal section is a sensory experience; less a Mozart concerto than an atonal cacophony, opera-loud, Dixieland-close. Visually, it is a canvas splashed by intoxicated Fauvists. And it seems never to end, like half a football field, five first-downs. I have wasted quality time looking for Raisin Bran Crunch, Honey Bunches of Oats or Golden Grahams. Curious how many brands are out there, I went to a website which lists them all. I counted 140 before finishing the letter C. It’s America, it’s excess and according to William Blake, The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom…for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.

Table Talk

No, not the beef broccoli again. Pass the Tsingtow Did you hear the one about the cow from Minsk? Try this one written in Chinese and hope it isn’t dog, unless… What's with the cow? …Unless you’re dyslexic. The Dow is down again. Forget about the Dow, I'm talking about the cow. Where else would God be except in the undiscovered. Saw it on Netflix but I can’t remember what. ….gives milk like they’ve never seen before.So they bring in a bull. He’s not in the kitchen steaming the hell out of the rice. It was a director’s cut. And He’s not stuffing truths inside the cookies. Too much good news. When the bull approaches the cow moves away. He’s probably commiserating with those oversized fish in the undersized tank. One of the ten best. I think I just found Him on the tip of my tongue between the sweet and sour and the hot and pungent. . …and the Rabbi said, “My wife is from Minsk".

There’s no deli like Brent's and it’s not just the matzo ball soup. The twice- baked, rye bread makes this a destination. Peggy’s salami recalled a passage from the Thomas Mann book we are reading. Our friend was moved to discourse on Derrida as she deconstructed her blintzes. In the next booth two men were in disputation over Neocons. The man across the aisle with Einstein’s hair wrote in his notebook, sauerkraut dripping from his Reuben. On the way out my buddy mused about Orpheus and Eurydice and never looked back. I’d never thought of cold cuts as brain food or how Darwinism trumps Creationism in the way cucumbers evolve to briny dills. 

Religion and politics all over the news but not on our menu. We talk movies and sports and past glories.. We search the salad for something benign on the tongue or an agreed-upon subject to scorn like the monsoonal air, our H.M.O.s or complain that we’ve forgotten how to sleep. At the next table we overhear a remark on the undocumented busboy or the genetically tampered tomato. How a caramelized walnut found a homeland among the over-dressed greens The imperialism of the vinaigrette causing small uprisings among the fundamentalist lettuce. It could be worse. We could be in the wrong city sitting next to wired zealot and we, without a prayer, while the ice cap is melting in our passion fruit tea. 

Deliver me please from this trendy ristorante where the waiter auditions the specials and the pasta tastes like noise; where we must shout for water and lip-read across the table, then tip and run into the relative silence of traffic. Return me to the Automat where I could introvert into my hot water and ketchup and thicken my life with crushed Saltines, where the man in the change booth throws out twenty nickels like an alchemist who just found the key to convert base metals, fingering them through the glass so I could take communion with a Kaiser roll and coffee. Or better yet I might brown-bag it in the park with some pigeon-covered bronzed general among men adrift on their benches, lost in memories of what never quite happened and I could be one of them. 

Much-Maligned Salami

In its time salami was practically a staple. At least no less so than bologna or pastrami; part of the cold cut mix which I was sent to purchase at our local deli along with cole slaw and potato salad. This was in pre-history when people took Alka Seltzer for dessert disbelieving that they "ate the whole thing."

Over the eons we took a closer look at salami; not only at its ingredients but what held it together and preserved it. Then we broke down it's fat content, its cholesterol etc. Under closer scrutiny salami didn't stand a chance. The sodium nitrate alone sent us running.

I have now given salami its second act. Never mind the 140 fat calories and the smidge of trans-fat.

Consider this: no carbohydrates. The quick snack for that ever-swelling army of pre-diabetics
searching to fill up on some protein without consequences on their glucometer.

So hail Salami. Perfect with eggs and/or cheese ... all zero carbohydrate foods. As for the plaque it is famous for I leave that to my daily dose of statins.

Besides, it feels good to bring back a food so long driven to exile. I welcome salami to my plate as a prodigal food once thought to be good for nothing like some old friend who fell into disrepute 65 years ago and has finally found a measure of redemption.

With a PhD in salami a trained palate can discern whether it hailed from Milan or Naples or any hill town between. I'll just stay home with my Hebrew National All Beef version and live forever.