Mom's Cooking, So Hold the Arugula

The crusade began. I introduced her to bok choy. I demonstrated how to make pumpkin pie with real pumpkins. I built her a compost bin and told her it would reduce her weekly garbage by half. And I accompanied her to the supermarket, providing running commentary free of charge.

Trouper that she is, Mom tried to listen. "Interesting, interesting," she'd say, tossing a bag of iceberg lettuce into her grocery cart as I decried its utter lack of nutritive value. "Hormones in milk?!" she would gasp halfheartedly, while scanning the shelf for whichever brand happened to be on sale.

The fact was, Mom wasn't interested in rebuilding her lifestyle from scratch. But it was a long time before that dawned on me. For several years, I'd visit and she'd try to accommodate my vegetarian diet, then my preference for organic products, then my conviction that local trumps organic.

Not that we actually discussed much of this at all. Usually when I brought up my "food politics," her eyes would glaze over and she'd say something like, "Well, you know more about this stuff than I do."

And I did. But did I know enough about where she was coming from?

Back when she was a young mother, nutrition was certainly a concern -- but the guidelines of the day offered little beyond the food pyramid and a recommendation to eat three servings of fruit a day. Never mind if you were consuming canned pears in sugary syrup or a tasteless tomato, harvested green and shipped from Mexico for your convenience.

What's more, processed foods such as TV dinners and Hamburger Helper represented progress. No more time wasted canning vegetables -- or making pumpkin pies from scratch.

But the most important thing I've come to realize is that, to my mom, food is a language. When I go home to visit, I constantly have food before me. The message has always been clear: As long as there's food on our plates, everything's okay. Feeling down? Have a snack; it's probably your blood sugar. Missing your ex-boyfriend? Here, a gingersnap will help.

When my mom slides a little plate with a few orange wedges, a cup of Yoplait and some Ritz crackers in front of me, what she's really saying is, "We love you, honey."

So one Thanksgiving, toward the end of my vegetarian phase, when I sat down with my family and plunged a fork into Mom's buttery mashed potatoes to find three small pieces of roasted meat underneath, I knew what she was saying: "Is it really going to kill you to eat one bite of turkey on Thanksgiving? Do you know how long it took to cook this thing?"

And for some reason -- maybe I'd reached a certain maturity, or maybe I was tickled by the sentiment, or it could be that I was just tired of scrutinizing my food -- I ate that turkey. And I asked for seconds. And things haven't been the same since.

Now I tell her to serve it up. "Sure!" I say. "Gimme some of those Hungry Jack pancakes, marooned in Aunt Jemima's "maple" syrup! Serve me that famous spaghetti sauce, made with good ol' feed-lot-style ground beef! And while you're at it, scoop me some of that vanilla ice cream, artificial flavors and all."