How Not to Eat

Kim Shable

 

The way you avoid eating chicken cordon bleu is you scrape the top off and wave a forkful of it in front of your mouth. Then say something witty. Wait for laughter, then repeat. Become very interested in what other people have to say. Keep the fork near your mouth at all times. With your knife, mangle the rest of the chicken on your plate. No one will notice that you’re doing this as long as you keep the conversation going. It’s sleight of hand—fork near mouth, laugh, mangle. No one ever notices.

            The way you avoid eating lamb chops: cut them up into very small pieces. Spend about half the meal doing this. Talk about fear of choking, laugh, cut. Then excuse yourself to the bathroom. Take your plate with you. No one will notice. Sleight of hand. Flush the lamb down the toilet, making sure to leave some of the scraps—fat, a piece or two—to make it realistic. To add authenticity to your trick.

            To avoid eating cooked vegetables, mash them up with the back of your fork.

            To avoid eating stew, dip your napkin in while no one is looking. It will absorb some of the broth, giving the illusion of intake.

            To avoid eating, make yourself invisible. Become a magician. Sleight of hand.

 

            In my nightmares, there is mayonnaise. There is ham rolled in cheese stabbed through with a plastic sword. There are olives and pickles and ketchup and brazil nuts. There are people eating these things like it’s normal. There’s me, trapped in a cage of food that I can’t eat my way out of.

           

            It’s easier to list the foods I will eat than the foods I won’t:

-Beef (except in meatloaf form, and always plain. Exceptions: spaghetti sauce [not alfredo], Manwich sloppy joe sauce [not extra zesty].)

 

-Chicken (always plain, skinless, boneless, white meat only, unless in processed McDonald’s deep fried logs. Can occasionally incorporate pepper and/or garlic, but let’s don’t go crazy.)

 

-Pork chops (when required by law. Must be plain. Must never be in contact with mint jelly.)

 

-Raw vegetables (except broccoli, cauliflower, green and red peppers. Occasionally radishes. All raw vegetables must have liberal coating of salt and/or peanut butter.)

 

-Corn (fresh only. Not canned. Frozen, if my mom is watching.)

 

-Fruit (except tomatoes, oranges, tangerines, grapes with seeds, those creepy little brown and red bananas. Fruit from strange foreign countries, fruit that looks like it has little limbs growing out if it, or like it could be full of spiders, need not apply.)

 

-All junk food (as long as it’s plain, and the phrase “BBQ” or “zesty” never appears anywhere on the bag.)

 

-Dessert (as long as it’s not too viscous, and does not mix fruit with chocolate.)

 

-Soda (as long as it’s not diet, and commercials for it don’t make me feel inferior.)

 

-Milk (if I have to.)

 

            Everything else, the thought of putting it in my mouth gives me the hives. Makes my tongue feel swollen just looking at it. Makes me push away my plate and say “no, thank you.” Makes me unpopular at dinner parties.

 

            At weddings, I wage a constant war with the catering staff about my salad. I don’t want my salad. I don’t want to look at my salad, or smell it. My salad would make me happier if it were in the kitchen, or in another city. One waitress will put a salad in front of me, already dripping with opaque goo, stacked with colorful vegetables that make me want bolt from the table and hide in the bathroom, gorge myself on the sink mints.

            “No, thank you,” I’ll tell her. “I don’t eat salad.”

            Or: “No thank you. I’m on a high-protein diet.”

            Or: “No thank you. I don’t agree with the murder of innocent plants.”

            And she’ll shrug and take the salad away, but then another will swoop in while I’m refilling my coffee, drop the salad in front of me, disappear before I can warn her away. I’ll consider putting it under the table so I don’t have to look at it, or dumping it into my purse. Deal with it later. These salads were paid for by my friends, who thought their nearest and dearest would enjoy eating foliage on their special day. As long as the salad is in front of me, I am obligated to eat it.

            How you avoid eating salad is you get a tenuous grip on a forkful and let it fall into your lap before it reaches your mouth. Tell everyone you’re just a messy eater. Let go of your pride.

 

            When I was ten, my parents spent about half an hour one night chasing me around the house with a spoonful of baked beans. I admire the balance this had to require, the tenacity. It was as if they had practiced this maneuver before I came home from school that day. Force feed drill.

            “It’s good!” they yelled. “Like dessert! Just try it! Try one bite!” While they chased me.

            All I knew about baked beans: they had ketchup in them. And brown sugar. And beans. There was not one ingredient I found palatable. So I ran.

            Into the kitchen, there they were. The living room. My room. Through the spare bathroom. All the time, with them behind me, my mom with the spoon, my dad there for backup, yelling “it’s good! Good for you! Just try one bite! You’ll see!”

            If you’ve never been chased by your parents with a spoonful of baked beans, you’ll never understand how terrifying this is. Really.

I came to rest under the utility tub in the laundry room, balled up in the fetal position, my mouth pressed so hard into my knee that I had bite marks for a week. There was no way baked beans were getting in here. Not today. Not ever.

            Eventually, my parents gave up, dumped the baked beans in the utility tub above my head. “It was just a joke,” they said.

            I didn’t get up for an hour.

 

            How to order at a fast food restaurant: I’ll have a hamburger, plain, with absolutely nothing on it at all, just meat and a bun. Check the bottom of the top bun for smudges of yellow, for stray bits of wilted lettuce. If it’s not plain, take it back. If it smells like pickles, take it back. If there’s cheese charred into the edges, take it back. This is total quality management. This is not leaving anything to chance.

 

            What it’s like to be afraid of food: it’s like being afraid of socks. Small birds. Squirrels. Totally irrational.

            But when a dish is put down in front of me that I can’t (won’t) eat, my eyes water. My throat closes. I nearly cry. Sometimes, if the food is scary enough, I do. If something unsavory touches my food, I rip off the part that has made contact, and more, just to be safe. If something comes covered in cheese, or dressing, or mayonnaise or ketchup or mustard or lemon juice or cream or gravy or broth or brown rice or sautéed vegetables, I don’t eat it at all. Period.

            What it’s like to be afraid of food: embarrassing. Humbling. It steals your adulthood, makes you into the four-year-old that throws his Beefaroni on the floor because it’s got little bits of onion in it. Because what kind of adult panics at the sight of cream sauce? What kind of adult still needs to ask for her hamburgers plain, with nothing on them at all, just meat and bun? I am a grown woman, living on her own, hundreds of miles from her family, a grown woman with two jobs and bills and a bank account and a car. But at nice restaurants, I still try to order off the kids’ menu.

            Because I know—what’s the worst that could happen? I won’t like it, will have to spit it out. The very, very worst—I could vomit. And then what?

            But I’m absolutely terrified. Like I’m terrified of death. That terrified.

 

            This sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t.

            An exaggeration would be: the curtain opens on a table with a bottle of ketchup on it. a very bad man is already seated. Our hero enters, stage left, and approaches the table.

            avbm: Pass me the ketchup, please.

            oh: [Runs screaming from the stage, her face in her hands. From offstage, a prolonged, ragged howl of despair. Possibly she is gouging her eyes out. These things happen all the time.]

            That’s not how this plays itself out. I react calmly, rationally, in these types of situations. My fear is all internal, all alarms and bells sounding in my head, blood pressure rising. No one knows I’m afraid of the braised endive or the honey mustard dipping sauce. But I am.

            To be more exact, I am terrified like you would be terrified of a thug with a gun. Each slice of bologna to me is like a saw’s blade to an amputee. Each cube of cheese is a bullet.

            Foods that I am afraid of are like prolonged kisses from your great aunt, the one with hairs on her chin and dead babies on her breath. I am disgusted by these foods, yes. And that’s perfectly natural, anyone will say so. But aside from being disgusted, I am also afraid.

            Every stuffed pepper is a bomb. Every pea is a dose of cyanide.

            I know these foods won’t kill me. But aren’t you afraid when, in the movies, a monster could be lurking around every corner?

           

            Things I have eaten:

-A playing card, specifically the jack of spades, completely covered in shiny plastic.

 

-An entire African violet plant, excluding roots

 

-At least three Popsicle sticks

 

-Candle wax

 

-Rock salt

 

-Approximately a ream of paper (over the course of several years, when all I wanted to eat was paper and white rice) (not together).

 

            I had to give up on the paper thing, eventually, when my homeroom teacher caught me eating my homework. Until then I had managed to eat paper in secret, ripping first one corner, and then another, from the pages of my textbooks, which were ratted and dog-eared, anyway; in band, I ate the copyright information from the bottoms of my music, because I knew no one would miss it.

            I have no idea why I would eat these things, run-off from melted candles, quartz-like chunks of rock salt found on the sidewalk outside a Hallmark before Christmas. Maybe I thought I was being bad, which was something I didn’t have much of a grasp on until I was in college. Maybe I thought, if I eat this dirty salt I picked up off the ground, my mother will know I’m a badass.

            Or maybe it was the allure of choosing my own food source, for a change. Maybe if someone had left some chipped beef just lying on a sidewalk somewhere, and I happened upon it, I would have eaten that, too.

            Because in its own way, food is about control. Choosing what goes in, what is acceptable, what isn’t. At home, now, on my own, I hardly notice my food phobia, at least in my own kitchen. I eat spaghetti, every night. Or I go to the drive-thru. Or I eat hot dogs. (And yes, I know what’s in hot dogs.) There’s no need to be afraid, because I control what passes and does not pass inspection.

            But at home, then, with my parents, and even now, in restaurants in at the dinner tables of friends, I don’t enjoy that luxury. The preparation of dinner is entirely out of my hands. It’s then that the fear gets bad. Because no one else thinks like me. No one else knows that casserole is a dirty word. Or that seafood is really just the insects of the ocean. Here, at these tables, I have no control. Anything could be put in front of me, and chances are, it’s not going to be a hot dog.

            How does everyone else do it? Show up at dinner parties and restaurants with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be on their plates that night? Do they sit at home and practice eating something new every night, like I have to practice saying “no, thank you?”

 

            At Café Panache, there is nothing on the menu that does not contain mayonnaise.

           

            Six different lunch menu items: chicken with mayonnaise. Chicken salad with mayonnaise. Mayonnaise a la mayonnaise. I am here with a professor who wanted to take me out to lunch before I left for graduate school.

            How you avoid eating mayonnaise when a professor is buying your lunch is, you don’t.

            I order the chicken salad.

            “This is a good place,” she tells me. “Everything’s kind of fattening. Even the rolls. It’s the kind of place I like.”

            They serve the rolls with a side dish of mayonnaise.

            She dips hers in. “My husband always wants to eat at those chain places. Always gets a hamburger. He’s a picky eater.”

            I nod.

            “Not me. I’ll eat anything. I’d eat this mayonnaise if I didn’t think our meal was coming soon.”

            And I think, please, God, no. Imagine her dipping her spoon into the ramekin full of mayonnaise, its shiny silver tongue disappearing into the white mound, what I imagine the insides of dead people must look like. Imagine her bringing it to her mouth, slipping the spoon in, eyes closed, savoring.

            My eyes water. My fingers grip the tablecloth.

            The waitress brings my chicken salad, chicken slivers in mayonnaise soup, with bits of purple grape. The professor takes some of the mayonnaise from the old ramekin and spoons it onto her chicken, which is already bathed.

            How you get out of this is, you don’t.

            It’s a chicken salad sandwich, even on bread that I don’t like, the kind of bread with birdseed in it. There are grapes in it. And you don’t mix fruit and meat. You just don’t.

            I pick up one half of the sandwich.

            “Come on, dig in!” she says. Her chicken is already half gone.

            I bring the sandwich to my mouth. It smells like how I think brains would smell. A lump rises in my throat.

            A fire alarm, please. A shooting. Someone, choke. Please.

            I take a bite.

            Inside my mouth, it’s warm and slimy, grape sweet and tacky. I can barely chew; the bite feels like a softball in my mouth. I grimace, my teeth coming apart. A sliver of grape, shiny with spit, lands on my plate.

            The bite was tiny. There’s still a lot to get through, here.

            I take another bite while the professor watches. She’s swabbing up mayonnaise with what remains of her roll. Her lips are white with the stuff.

            I am more terrified of mayonnaise than anything in the world. More than spiders, large, unchained dogs. More than burglars with guns and losing a limb. Losing a limb I could handle.

            In my mouth, it’s like drinking melted human fat. Like licking the inside of an aquarium. My nose closes, and I am breathing in mayonnaise.

            “We’d better get a box for the rest of that,” the professor says, checking her watch. “It’s almost time to get back for class.” She eyes me, eyes my two-bites-gone chicken salad sandwich on its birdseed bread. “You’re a slow eater, aren’t you?”

            I nod. Yes. But it’s good, I tell her. I can’t wait to tear into the rest of it at dinner. I try to lift the sandwich into the box with my fork, so I won’t have to touch it, but fail, and mayonnaise gets under my fingernails. I’ll smell it for weeks.

            I will never eat again. My stomach spins, my throat feels coated.

            Later, I foist the sandwich off on my roommate, who eats it all, licking her fingers when she’s done. “Not bad,” she says.

            That night, I have nightmares about mayonnaise.

 

            The worst part of it all is the fancy restaurant, or the dinner party. Spot-scan the menu, and there’s nothing on it for me. Everything’s rolled in something, dipped in something, sandwiches fried and covered in powdered sugar. Things served flaming, or smoking, or sizzling. I don’t like my food to make any noise.

            At restaurants like this, I ask for a plain chicken breast, and the waiter, with the towel over his arm, his little string tie, he wrinkles his nose.

            “I’ll pay for the teriyaki chicken platter,” I promise him. “But I don’t want the teriyaki sauce, and I don’t want the vegetables, or the rice, or any of that stuff. Just the chicken breast.”

            It takes me ten minutes to order at a fancy restaurant.

            And when it comes, it’s still wrong. Somehow, it’s still got the taste, the phantom of a cream sauce lingering as a shiny patina on the chicken. The taste intimates the smell intimates the fear, and I just know this food has been soiled, so I take two bites and then mangle, mangle. I pay seventeen-fifty for this.

            Dinner parties, though, they’re worse. Because to not eat the food is to dishonor the host, to spit on him and his lasagna with mushrooms and crumbly cheese. So I warn people in advance—I’m a very picky eater, I tell them. Don’t be offended if I can’t eat what you’re having.

            But everyone just knows that it’s their potato salad that will change my mind. It becomes a challenge, a goal to reach, something to strive for. I will be the one to enlighten Kim Shable’s palate. It becomes a testament to our friendship, because if I really cared about them, I would at least try their avocado dip.

            As in: Kim, try this. It’s good. I left the chives out of it for you.

            (As if Kim Shable would ever eat anything in which chives might appear, might have ever appeared.)

            No, thank you, I tell them. I’m not much of a dip person.

            But no, seriously, try it. I think you’ll really like it.

            I haven’t liked the last three hundred things you tried to make me eat.

            But you didn’t try them! How do you know if you like them or not?

            And then it becomes a game, with everyone else present joining in. How do you know if you like them? Try it! We all tried it. It’s good!

            How you get out of eating at a dinner party is, you take your food with you while you mingle. Make sure to put a safe item on your plate with everything else, like bread or corn. Make sure everyone sees you take a bite of something. Then, mingle your way onto the porch, into the backyard. Dump the food in the bushes and don’t look back.

 

            There is no common denominator among the foods I find unacceptable. Sliminess seems to be a factor. That eliminates all condiments. Creaminess. My theory used to be, if I can’t chew it, it’s not acceptable. But that was crushed by condensed chicken noodle soup (without carrot chunks).

            Foods may not mingle. They do not touch each other. No foods work well together. Chicken stuffed with ham is unnatural.

            Dry foods should not be covered in slimy foods. Pasta is okay, because it’s already kind of slimy on its own.

            Meat does not belong on bread, except hamburgers, hot dogs, and sloppy joes. Meat does not belong with cheese, and has no business consorting with pickles or jellies of any kind.

            There is a difference between picky eaters and people like me. People who don’t like ketchup are picky. I’m the person who’s afraid to touch the ketchup bottle.

            Some foods I’m afraid to eat because I don’t know how. How do you crack open a lobster, which end do you eat from? Is this lettuce just for decoration? These legs, are they edible? If it requires more than one different fork to eat, I avoid it.

            It helps to have rules.

 

            The dream: I am in an all-blue room. It smells mustardy and thick, like wet blankets. Somewhere above me, a spout opens, and mayonnaise begins to pour out, pooling first around my toes, then my ankles. The room has no windows. No one will help me.

            Then, to my knees. My thighs. My waist.

            I always hold my hands up, in these dreams, to keep them clean. To keep the mayonnaise from underneath my fingernails.

            In dreams, food is supposed to represent pleasure.

            My chest, my armpits. My neck. All around me, the slurping sounds of mayonnaise on mayonnaise.

            When it reaches my chin, I realize I’m going to have to eat my way out.

 

            How you eat a meal is, you start with the meat. Then, you stick with the meat. There’s no jumping around, no changing partners in the middle of the dance. When the meat is gone, you rotate your plate until your potato is in front of you. The meat is gone. The meat is dead to you. You don’t go back to the meat.

            Repeat this process with the vegetable. Sometimes, this helps you get out of eating the vegetable altogether, because you can claim you’re full of meat and potato.

            It all goes to the same place. But it doesn’t taste the same if you don’t keep everything separated. They’ll have time enough to mingle while they wait to be digested.

 

            Occasionally, something new will work its way into the repertoire of foods I can tolerate. It’s like an exclusive club for the very, very plain. Sort of an anti-country club of food.

            Like pepperoni. My friend, pepperoni, spicy disk of goodness. How did I live so long without you?

            It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I even tried pepperoni. It was red, and I don’t tend to like red foods. I didn’t understand how pork could be red. It defied all logic.

            But there it was, the last night of camp, and I hadn’t eaten for a week. Nothing at all, except a mealy apple and some leaves I picked off a maple tree because their veins reminded me of celery, which reminded me of peanut butter, which reminded me of home, where they wouldn’t serve me tacos made from yesterday’s sloppy joes made from yesterday’s spaghetti made from yesterday’s hamburgers.

            It was the last night of camp, and someone ordered pizza, five of them. I had just allowed pizza to reenter my realm of possibility after a two year ban brought on by a spasmodic disemboweling I received at the hands of a Chef Boyardee do-it-yourself pizza-making kit. It smelled like warm, like slumber parties and carpet fiber, and I would have killed someone for a slice of cheese, just cheese and crust and sauce, please. I would have killed my own mother, and my stomach was full of maple leaves.

            But all there was was pepperoni, five pizzas crawling with red pork (how? How could it possibly be so vixen-nail red?). The other girls ate with unmitigated ardor, each one making love to her slice, eyes scrunched, moving in slow motion. I could have killed them all.

            Instead, I grabbed a slice, too, because I was hungry and I was dying, because if I didn’t eat something my stomach would digest itself. I imagined food plummeting into the blank hole in my abdomen where the stomach used to be, settling on top of other organs, working its way into my joints, into my heart. This was a lifesaving maneuver, nothing more.

            What it was, was bliss.

            My first bite was just jaws working over food, pulverizing and grinding, a mechanical action. The second bite was tentative. The rest of the slice, I was making love.

            Oh, pepperoni. How did I live so long without you?

            So pepperoni entered the pantheon of the palatable. The door was open and shut. Only if I’m faced with death again, only if my stomach starts to eat itself, will I try something new.

 

What it’s like to be afraid of food: it becomes a condition. Friends call ahead to screen restaurants to make sure there’s something you can eat. Whole worlds are closed off to them, entire cultures ignored. Chinese food, Mexican food, Thai, all gone. They become resentful.

            You tell them it doesn’t matter, that you don’t have to eat, that you can eat before you leave home. But they won’t hear it. They won’t let you be martyred.

            So you go to the burger joint and you order a burger with nothing on it at all, just meat and bun, and they complain about the food and everyone gets angry and no one talks on the way home.

            Relatives make comments about your plate at Easter, at Christmas, when you just take ham. Your parents chastise you for ignoring the cheese ball your aunt worked so hard to make, rolled it in walnuts herself.

            People can threaten you with mustard packets the same way murderers use knives, you’re that scared.

 

            The doctor tells me: this is an eating disorder.

            He tells me: you have to get help.

            I want to tell him to look at me. That I’m healthy, that my blood pressure is low, that I am overweight, not starved. That I’m fine.

            He tells me to make a list of the foods that I’m scared of and to try to eat something off it. He says to start with something easy, like broccoli.

            Like eating a little tree. That’s easy.

            I want to tell him I’ve lived my whole life without broccoli, that I don’t feel like I’m missing out. I’ve never felt like I was missing out.

            An eating disorder?

            When I think eating disorder, I think Tracey Gold in made-for-TV movies. I think very special episodes of Diff’rent Strokes. I think of ballerinas and fashion models. I think malnutrition, hair loss, bones poking through pallid skin. I do not think plain hamburger with absolutely nothing on it at all, just meat and bun.

            Other people with food phobias, they have a pattern—they’ll only eat white foods, or mushy foods. Some are afraid they won’t be able to swallow.

            Me, I don’t know what I’m afraid of.

            In the grocery store, I linger in front of the broccoli.

            The thing about eating disorders is that they’re for thin girls. The thing about eating disorders is that they cause problems, wreck lives. They’re not for girls who eat two hamburgers for dinner and have ice cream for dessert. Not girls who wear a size twelve. Not me.

            My whole life has been like this, with this fear of food. I can remember screaming at sliced tomatoes in my high chair. Hiding food in napkins, faking food allergies. Is eating something plain a crime? Does my body scream for broccoli?

            I don’t want to eat broccoli.

            This store is full of things I don’t want to eat.

            There are whole aisles of things I’m afraid of.

            Do you walk away from someone who says you have an eating disorder? Do you turn your back on every girl who’s starved herself, who’s felt guilty for eating a whole head of lettuce because it felt like gorging?

            Or do you—do I—have an eating disorder just because he says so?

            The truth is that I don’t believe I have an eating disorder. The truth is that I pretend there’s a difference between those girls and me. I don’t care about looking good. I don’t care about being thin. I am not like you, I think. It feels horrible to think this way, horrible like cabbage leaves, horrible like salmon. Because what if an anorexic girl ignored her doctor’s advice? What if an overeater chose to devour the world until her stomach burst?

            Has my whole life been a lie? Am I an after-school special?

            Do I need to be monitored, force fed?

            Seriously, I’ve never missed cream of mushroom soup.

            When I go back to the doctor, I tell him I ate broccoli. But what I really did was walk to the meat aisle and buy some ground beef, which I fried up plain. At night, I have nightmares of mayonnaise.