Cookie Crumbs Lead to Ovens (excerpts)
The Suffering of Food
Something was getting in the way of me putting food in my mouth. The baker was supposed to give me a cookie as long as I was polite. I’d never visited a baker, let alone a grocery store before, but my foster mother said not to worry. When I was introduced I smiled and he held out a cookie and instinctively I swatted from his hand, crumbs falling everywhere. She gave me a stern look and dragged me away, no apologies. The baker looked stunned. We headed for frozen wieners and cake. To keep things sane the old lady lumped everyone’s birthday together into one sorry party, but because my birthday landed on the leap year I wasn’t included, which I meant I could help organize without ruining any surprise.
Sometime after that trip I began to have real difficulty eating. It was awhile before I knew what it was. I became convinced that food was a delicate instrument and chewing it caused the food much pain and anguish. Mealtime began to appear entirely savage to me. The apples screamed when I bit into them and the milk cried as it slid down my throat. My stomach hurt and I had a vision of it as a hidden geography of chaos. It was a wasteland in which disorganized and mangled heaps rotted in bile, and as long as my torso survived so did the chaos.
Before I stopped eating altogether I requested that my food no longer be cooked. At least I could save it a witch hunt. I watched in horror as my fat foster mother plucked burnt wieners from bowl, and the other children dug their hands into potato salad, macaroni salad, and coleslaw. I started hiding knives and forks, but the drawers replenished themselves with more tarnished cutlery. I dulled the wood-handled steak knives by stabbing them into the sandbox, but soon they grew sharp again. These were the necessary tools of survival and our house wouldn’t let them go. I developed an austere respect for dried, canned, and boxed foods that were rumoured to live for years, unmoving, in the lightless kitchen cupboards.
For a short while I became convinced that the fridge was the only safe space for food. I pressed packages of chicken breasts or blocks of cheese against my cheeks and felt their cool, calm nature. They spoke to me. They told me about their lives, their losses, their loves. Some food made love while no one watched and sometimes they shared a little mold and got sick. I hated that jelly came in a jar so I had to spread it, give it freedom, but the dry shrieks of the toast under the scrape of knife were too unbearable and so I chose other things which jelly was more fond of. I spread it on the couch, between the mattresses, and on the bathmat.
One afternoon I awoke on the kitchen floor, grit pressed into my damp forehead. I felt confused and light, like a blimp, and my hands and feet were numb. As I got up I remembered that I had just witnessed the final melt of a popsicle, watched the last sticky drip hit the floor. I questioned all the members of the house as to who let the popsicle melt, but no one confessed. I grew confused. Had I, in a fit of rebellion, euthanized the popsicle? Or had the popsicle liberated itself of its earthly form? The fridge grew to be a more sacred space, the only place food could live on before being savagely devoured. I had to keep the family from getting in and the food from escaping. I struggled to lift my foster dad’s drill to the fridge door. A handful of screws ensured complete and utter safety.
The Great Era of the Calm Fridge didn’t last long before angry shouts and selfish hungry desires led the family to mutiny, and insurgent actions were taken to return the fridge to a smelly infirmary for the Kitchen War. I was soon captured and tortured. I protested by threatening to remove all my teeth, but the first one bashed out on the edge of a chair proved so excruciating that I forfeited under the pain. My Foster family forced a tube down my throat. My stomach expanded with the pulp of cuisine and I felt it crawl through me, finally escaping in the most putrid state. I laid it to honorable rest in porcelain and realized that for as long as I was alive food would suffer.
After this ordeal I began stealing the lids to jars, twist-ties, and plastic clasps all used to keep food sealed. I knew that this act would kill the food, which was painful, but I had decided that extensive food-death might lead my family to find alternatives. They could never pin it on me as I had very good hiding spots and ever better timing. Quickly the food would foul and have to be disposed of. Repeating this tactic ensured that over time our assembled bodies would increasingly struggle to maintain adequate foods and the realization of its suffering would become glaringly obvious.
