The Fate of the Human Carbine

A couple of days ago YHWH went for an annual checkup and her doctor recommended she try some natural/herbal products for general health. On the way home, she decided to stop by Akin's. She actually called me on her cell to ask me if I needed anything from there. My reaction, unseen or heard by her, was an eyeroll and a pshaw sound. I refrained from, "Yeah, right!" But I appreciated her thoughtfulness and said, "Oh, let me think. Ooooh! Something carob would be nice!" Only the least bit of sarcasm was present because at the thought of it, I sort of had a hankering for some good old carob.

You wouldn't know it to look at me, but much of my youth was spent eating healthy foods. This was an extension of my mother's troubled relationship with food. Or rather, her own body. Growing up on a farm, my mom was bird-thin. She was the middle of 11 children (4 boys, 7 girls) , but she was very beautiful and delicate, so she 'got' to do the housework and cooking instead of the outside chores involving shoveling, slopping, castrating, etc.

For this I am eternally grateful because, during the brief periods when my mom wasn't a health food nut, we ate some awesome food. For our first Thanksgiving together, I invited YHWH to our clan's feast and I told her for weeks how awesome a cook my mom was. YHWH felt that I had promoted it so much that it could not possibly be as good as I made it out to be. She was also concerned that I must be a momma's boy because of my love of her cooking. So after dinner YHWH said, and still does, that it was the best meal she's ever had in her life and that I hadn't even begun to describe how good it was. Sadly, it was the last Thanksgiving meal my mom ever cooked.

Anyway, about the time I was four or five my mom got ardently and religiously into health food. This lasted about a decade. Kelp, whole grains, vitamins, live active cultures - and carob. Our bread had sawdust in it. There was no salt in the house and our sugar consited of cane sugar in granules twice the size of C & H - it crunched when you ate it. We got regular lectures on digestion and other body things you didn't want to familiarize yourself with. After school snacks were frozen grapes and soy butter n' honey balls. Tofu had not yet fully arrived, but we had all manner of soy products teeming from our cabinets and canisters. But carob; carob was the Cadillac of the health food scene. It was naturally sweet and even though your tongue (and thus brain) told you it was not chocolate, you greedily accepted it as a treat.

At the time we were pretty poor and health food then, as now, was sold at premium prices. There was a way to get the good stuff at low prices if you didn't own a farm, though - the co-op. The co-op was run by a hippie commune and priced to sell to the vain, fountain-of-youth-seeking Riverside residents who could afford it (the same people who have private Pilates instructors today). You could get the stuff for near free, though, if you agreed to work for it. So guess who spent lots of Saturdays and after schools pushing a broom and carrying bags of oats out to BMWs and Mercedes? I have often marvelled at this culture clash commerce. Here you had these hippies who had a room with a sunlamp in it I wasn't allowed into (wink) selling health food to the wealthy and a conservative Christian lower middle class family working the place. The hippie guys also ran the only health food restaurant I've ever known in the state (I'm sure there were probably others). It was called The Middle Path. Isn't that brilliant?

We found out later that my mom was actually anorexic. I'm not sure when it started; probably after having my sister, she started taking unrealistic glances in the mirror. As far as we know she didn't develop it in adolescence as so often happens. We didn't even know what anorexia was until Karen Carpenter died from complications of it. From what I can guess, she must have been anorexic or bulimic before I was born and the health food era was an attempt by her to actually eat food and not destroy her concept of her physical self. I wish she was around to help me understand this. Eventually, the health food thing stopped and the anorexia returned. Finally when I was about sixteen she had starved herself so much that she had to be hospitalized for a week while they put nutrition into her. She had the same treatment they give people who have been castaway at sea or found lost in the woods. I, of course, had no idea. It's just what my mom looked like.

Oddly enough, last year I got another clue as to when she developed it. I had gone in to a new doctor for a midlife checkup and got the usual admonition to lose weight. I explained that I eat practically nothing and don't eat a lot of junky stuff and yet the only time I have ever been close to a normal weight was when I was under severe anxiety after my first wife left. He said he had an idea and after running some benchmark tests he called me in and said before he gave me his opinion, he wanted to know if my mother had much morning sickness with me. That I did know the answer to. Yes. Legendary. She had morning sickness with me every day of her pregnancy, not just the first few weeks. She couldn't keep any food down. The doc said it's a newish theory, but there's some evidence that kids whose mothers have morning sickness like that have messed up metabolisms and hormone deficiencies because they are starving along with the mother. Essentially the theory holds that the fetus learns to hang onto every calorie it gets because it doesn't know where it's next meal is coming from - a variation of the 'thrifty gene' theory. Still no excuse for my not exercising enough! So was she anorexic before the morning sickness or because of it? We'll never know.

So what you just read (sorry so long) came rushing back to me while I was waiting for a delicious carob candy bar. Or maybe some carob kisses. Or these star-shaped carob candies we had at the co-op. When YHWH walked in and handed me a bag of trail mix, I was crestfallen. "What's this?" I nearly shouted. That's all they had she said. I peered into the bag. There were some chocolate chip things in there amongst the nuts and banana chips. "Whaddaya mean, that's all they had?" Not only were there no carob products in Akin's, the scenesters working there had never heard of carob. "What's wrong with chocolate?" they wanted to know.