Food for thought.

My parents just arrived in Anchorage for a their annual two week visit. This means that the Bug is going to be spoiled even more rotten than he already is. Even worse, it means my clutter-free kitchen counters are DOOMED.

When my parents’ flight came in late Sunday night, the first thing Mom did when she got to my house was unpack her little food containers: some wood chips disguised as whole wheat crackers, a few warm grapes, and a foil bag of some rancid-smelling Indian snack mix. “Don’t eat this stuff, it’s been sitting out all day,” she warned me.

“Why don’t you just throw it away?” I suggested.

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “It’s fine for ME!”

My mother is what dieticians call “a grazer.” Supposedly, eating lots of small meals (the goat approach) instead of one giant meal (the python eating the goat approach) is the healthiest way to eat, and she has taken this philosophy to the extreme. Like some kind of food Noah, she collects two of each required food item to eat every day - two almonds, two carrots, two raisins, two figs. In total, it’s maybe enough to feed two hamsters. While folding laundry yesterday, I asked my husband what my mother was doing, and he replied matter-of-factly, “Slicing up a cashew for dinner.” Somewhere out there in the wilderness, birds are telling each other, “You eat like Lalita!”

She also doesn’t mind eating food that we pickier eaters might call GARBAGE. Soon the rancid snack mix was joined by its good friends, the Half-Eaten Bruised Banana and the Bowl of Slightly Moldy Strawberries. I was literally holding a bowl of limp spinach salad - from dinner the previous night - over the trash can when my mom shouted, “STOP! I’ll eat that for lunch!”

This morning, I made a cup of tea, and she asked me if she could use my teabag when I was done with it. This is a DECAFFEINATED teabag, mind you. What possible benefit could be gained from a used decaf teabag, I can’t even begin to fathom. I vaguely recall a couple breaking up on an episode of “The Love Boat” over this very thing.

When my mother orders in a restaurant, she drives us all crazy by agonizing over HOW she will possibly finish her meal, and WHO will volunteer to split it with her, before the food even arrives. And most of the time, what she’s ordered isn’t even a “meal”, in any real sense of the word. At best, it’s an appetizer, and generally one that any other human being would only eat at gunpoint.

Like, for instance, salmon log. Because what the fuck IS salmon log, if not pre-chewed salmon rolled in an unhappy mixture of spices and bathtub caulk? Or fruitcake, as my sister says, “a tragedy of food miscegenation”. My mother actually enjoys fruitcake, despite it being neither fruit nor cake, but something Alaskans save to burn as emergency fuel in case the furnace goes out.

Her understandable explanation for this behavior is that she grew up in India during World War II, when food was severely rationed and all provisions went to the British. Nothing should be wasted, she insists. A worthy philosophy, but frankly, if that were me, I’d be like a stray cat, eating everything in sight to make up for my years of deprivation, not subsisting on bruised fruit and two almonds a day.

The good thing about all of these strange eating habits is that my fridge is never cleaner than when my parents are here, because a spoonful of leftover lentil soup is dinner for Mom. Or maybe it’s because all the things that should be in the fridge are sitting out on the counter instead.

Since having the Bug, I’ve become one of those people who can’t stand clutter on the kitchen counter. I was never particular about it before, but now it seems like the only part of the universe over which I can exert any real control. The geriatric dog might be leaking on the carpet, the cat might be shitting in our laundry basket, the flowers on the deck may be long dead from neglect. But BY GOD, my kitchen counters are going to be crap-free. How can I possibly sleep knowing that little Glad containers housing 1/8th of a granola bar or 13 sunflower seeds are reproducing exponentially, out there on the Formica, RIGHT NOW?

My husband opened the fridge yesterday and found half of a stale pizza crust, wrapped in a napkin. “Whose is this?” he asked. I looked at my mother accusingly, but she shook her head. Then the Bug spoke up. “It’s mine. I’m SAVING it for a snack.”

Kill me now.