Food

CONTENT WARNING: The use of derogatory terms to describe members of historically marginalized groups based on gender and sexuality may distress some readers.

I don't know if she borrowed the book from my Aunt Debbie (her best friend) or if she bought the book, but Real Men Don't Eat Quiche somehow found its way to our kitchen table. There it lay, next to mom's cigarettes and lighter, ready to be read. The title confused me. Quiche. I stood over the book and tried to work the word out in my mind. Quuuu-ick-eee? No. No? Qui--quisssha? Nnn-o. Quitch. Nuh-o. Maybe quick, some weird spelling of quick? Real Men Don't Eat Quick. Made sense to me.

"Why don't real men eat quick?" I asked, looking up from the book's cover. Mom had just walked in the kitchen to grab a smoke. 

"Keesh, not quick," she said. 

"What's keesh?"

"It's a frou-frou French dish. It's like an omelette in a pie crust."

"Then, why don't real men eat keesh?" I asked, still trying to untangle this food-word puzzle in my mind. 

"Real men eat quiche, Angela. It's just a funny book with a funny title." Conversation over. Mom lit a cigarette, grabbed the book, and left the kitchen. 

My 12-year-old curiosity wouldn't let it go. Some adult somewhere had the answer to the perplexing question as to why a man shouldn't eat an omelette baked in a pie crust. I decided to ask Cuss, the old man across the alley - he'd tell me! Cuss was known for telling it like it is, whether you wanted to know it or not. I caught him working in his garage.

"Mr. Cuss, why don't real men eat quiche?" 

"What?" He pulled his head out from under the hood of a Chevelle, cigarette dangling between his lips. "Why don't real men...what?" he asked, frowning and wiping his hands on a rag.

"Quiche. Why don't real men eat quiche?" I began to feel self-conscious, maybe I shouldn't have asked.

"Only faggots eat quiche," he said with conviction.

"Mom said French people eat quiche." I shrugged, unsure.

"You're mom's right, she's a smart girl," he said. "The French are fruitiest faggots on God's good earth, she tell you that?" he asked.

I shook my head no.

"Yep," he said, repositioning the butt between his lips and leaning back under the hood of the car. "Goddamn queers."

Why real men didn't eat quiche remained unresolved for me, never fully explained in a manner in which my adolescent brain could understand, and I felt quite unsettled by it. What was clear is that quiche was a hot point of masculine contention for the American man and a topic of ardent discussion for every woman I knew who read Bruce Feirstein's national best selling book. This was the beginning of my awareness and understanding of food identity and how my relationship to food was directly connected to familial and communal scarcity, race and sex discrimination, and socioeconomic privilege. Not to dismiss the global pervasiveness of food identity and its links to scarcity, discrimination, and privilege on a global scale, but what did I know about the world then? I had just been introduced to the confounding properties of quiche.

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the '70s and '80s, mainly in the southend of the city. My paternal grandparents were the grandchildren of Bavarian immigrants and they settled in what would become known as German Village. Growing up, the Village and the surrounding neighborhoods were still heavily populated with the descendants of these German, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian immigrants who had settled the area generations before. Whether Catholic or Protestant, Slovakian or Slovenian, our families and neighbors were loosely connected by old world histories and their love for beer, stinky cheeses, organ meats, and fermented foods. Big Bear on Jaeger Street readily served the heirs of the Old Empires with ancestral foods conveniently packed and packaged for consumption, and neatly displayed for purchase in clean and orderly isles. Head-cheese (Sülze) was the most popular luncheon meat at the deli, and while there you could have the clerk pluck out a fermented pickle (the size of a child's forearm) from a crock behind the counter. There were jars and jars of spicy mustards, horseradishes, pickled pigs feet, hot pickled eggs and sausages, and relish after relish. From my grandma's kitchen, I can still smell the fried Limburger and onion sandwiches and taste her hot potato salad, homemade dumplings and noodles, fruit and sausage breads, and fermented ginger cookies (Lebkucken). My favorite was her version of Black Forest cake, a dense, sour cherry and chocolate confection iced between the layers with lightly sweetened whipped cream - well, not exactly whipped cream, but Dream Whip. The German-American diet was rich, savory, hearty and generally palatable once you got past the brined swine hooves, calf brains, and gelatinous substances. 

On the maternal side of the dinner table, my mother took food quality and nutrition quite seriously  - sweets and processed foods were rare treats for us children. Growing up in the 1950s, she and her siblings experienced crushing poverty and malnutrition. My maternal grandmother was a single parent to five children (my grandfather had left her for his mistress) and she worked as a dishwasher in a small diner. There was no child support enforcement, no system in place to garnish my grandfather's wages, no SNAP benefits, and no Medicaid for families in financial need. Canned goods, sugar, flour, and butter from food pantries and government commodity stations are what fed her children. My aunt was 16-years-old and my mother was 29-years-old when they lost their teeth. My uncles had chronic dental issues throughout their lives, and I never knew my maternal grandmother to have teeth at all. My mom was vigilant when it came to our physical and oral health, and she was determined that her children would have strong bones and teeth.

Unfortunately, we kids ate our share of beef tongue, beef heart, kidney's, gizzards, and livers. It was cheap meat, there wasn't a lot food variety in the stores, plant-based nutritional science was just emerging, and we were poor. Mom worried about our iron intake because red meat wasn't a significant part of our diet. There was canned spinach, and we liked it, but only Popeye can live on canned spinach alone. Liver became a source of mealtime dread for me. I was caught in this weird dissonance between the mouthwatering and delightful smell of liver and onions frying on the stove and its sickeningly sweet metallic taste and grainy texture. Mom wouldn't make it often, but I wanted to cry every time.

"Just three bites," she'd say. She'd already have the liver cut in small nuggets on my plate. I'd pout and try to squirm my way out of eating it. 

"I'll throw up," I'd say.

"Chew a piece with a bite of potatoes and hold your nose so you can't taste it," she'd counter.

Mom was patient and she'd sit across from me and wait until I chewed and swallowed those three little pieces. I know there were times when she wanted to pry my mouth open and shovel liver nuggets down my esophagus. But, as it so happened, the Food Fates deeply sympathized with my mother and they tricked me before she could strangle me. We lived on Markison Avenue, so I was about nine-years-old. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table eating a Braunschweiger sandwich when I came barreling through the back door hungry for lunch. I asked her what she was eating, she asked me if I wanted a bite. I bit and I loved it. I never had to eat fried liver again. Yes, Braunschweiger is high in cholesterol, saturated fat, and sodium, like any highly processed sausage. But, it was very high in vitamin A and iron, much tastier than grainy fried liver, and more filling than a daily off-brand metallic sugar pellet (a.k.a. chewable vitamin). I ate it up between two slices of toast and a good helping of brown mustard. 

My food nostalgia aside, let's go back a little further in my family's timeline and talk generational poverty and malnutrition in the context of western wealth and consumption; let's look at the paternalistic approach to social welfare as a rigged system of benevolence rooted in laws devised by those in power to heavily restrict and regulate those who aren't. Hear me out...

In June 1936, a new provision was written into the Social Security Act of 1935 under President Franklin Roosevelt, called Title IV, or Aid for Dependent Children (ADC). The new provision was a federal reimbursement grant for $25 million per fiscal year to be divvied out among the states who had adopted a federally approved assistance program to provide aid to children in need. Section 402 (a) (4) of Title IV stipulated that if a "claim with respect to aid to a dependent child is denied, an opportunity for a fair hearing before such State agency" would be granted to the claimant. Yet, single mothers, Black families, Indigenous families, and families of non-Eastern European descent were often discriminated against with no real recourse for action. In an era of defined domestic roles and fault-based divorces, Jim Crow laws, and prohibited immigration galvanized by the eugenics movement, millions of Americans who were absolutely eligible for Title IV provisions were absolutely denied those benefits based on sex, race, and national origin...

...including my maternal grandmother.

Her endless battles to survive in Cold War America as an impoverished single mother is woefully indicative of this nation's abhorrent history of double-standards and acts of discrimination, sanctioned and legalized by the state to radically legitimize white male privilege. Grandma wasn't just abandoned by Grandpa and left a single mother to five children, but she was a WWII veteran abandoned by the government she served and the nation she helped to protect. She enlisted in the United States Coast Guard in 1942 and was honorably discharged at the end of the war. In early 1946, she applied for educational benefits through the GI Bill to complete her English degree, but her application was denied because she had married and was classified as a spousal dependent rather than a war veteran. When she and my grandpa divorced, too much time had lapsed and she was no longer eligible for benefits through the GI Bill. She didn't qualify for state ADC benefits, either, because she had been awarded a meager sum of child support which my grandpa never paid and the state never enforced. 

By the time I was born, the Food Stamp Act and Title XIX (Medicaid), signed into law under Linden Johnson, were well in place, although state participation in these federal programs was voluntary. Eventually, all 50 states would adopt the programs and delays (i.e. Ohio didn't participate in Title XIX until 1968) were usually due to states having to build a program's infrastructure, and then hire and train personnel. In 1964, the same year Johnson passed the Food Stamp Act, and after twenty years of sex discrimination by the US federal government, my grandmother was given preferential consideration as a war veteran and hired as an ADC case manager for the Franklin County Welfare Department. She was 48-years-old. 

Grandma helped mom navigate the welfare system so we children had food and basic medical care. Interestingly, in 1977, under Jimmy Carter, the Food Stamp Act was revised and expanded to better reach and serve the most disadvantaged Americans, usually minority populations where local and regional food scarcity was a general indication of systemic racism and discrimination. Part of Carter's expansion included the provision for recipients to use their food stamps to buy food plants and seeds to supplement their nutrition with gardens. To this day, if you are receiving SNAP (food assistance), you are still eligible to purchase food seeds and plants with your benefits. Mom always had a garden and she gifted me with my very first garden patch when I was eight. I didn't attend to it very well, most of it died and was overgrown with weeds, but it was a perfect opportunity for her to school me on the value of food - our food - and the necessary labor - her labor - needed for the garden to thrive and for us to eat nutritiously throughout the year. 

The National School Lunch Program was enacted under Harry Truman in 1948 and expanded in 1966 to include breakfast. In elementary and middle schools, I ate the school lunch like most students. Columbus Public had a tiered lunch program based on income: children with red lunch tickets ate for free, children with blue lunch tickets ate at a discounted rate, and the remainder of children paid for their lunch in full or packed. I was a red ticket kid and I didn't know I was a poor until I entered school and became a recipient of the free lunch program. My peers told me, often in words that weren't so kind. I learned quickly that there were differences between Black food and White food, Catholic food and Protestant food, rich food and poor food, and girl food and boy food. The only food which seemed universal and crossed all gender, racial, religious, and socioeconomic barriers was peanut butter and jelly.

As for quiche? I prefer it the way my mother served it, with her sweet garden tomatoes sliced on the side and crunchy toast topped with her strawberry preserves. You probably guessed it. Mom whipped together a quiche for a Sunday breakfast shortly after my troublesome introduction to this provocative dish. Delicious. It's no wonder that a baked custard pie infused with rich cream, cheeses, and every combination of veggie, salted meat, seafood, and savory herb is the culinary delight to tens-of-millions of people every day, most of them cis-heterosexual (by mere statistical majority). Too bad, so sad, Mr. Cuss! In fact, quiche isn't historically French or fruity, but German and savory! Whuh? Yes, it was a popular regional dish in Lothringen, Germany during the Middle Ages, known as Käsekuchen (cheesecake) or Kuchen (cake) and quickly became popular with the French when they won the region (now called Lorraine) from the Germans in the 18th-century. Hummm. Maybe Marie Antoinette actually said Lass sie Kuchen essen?  Whatever the Käse, quiche is eaten by real people, everyday, all day, and across the globe, including cishet all-Americans who have rebranded it as breakfast bake. 

 

Fact: I didn't experience the severity of food poverty or malnutrition in my childhood the way my mother and her siblings experienced it in theirs, or the way that 29% of the world's human population experiences it right now. I never knew painful hunger and starvation. A kiss to Lady Luck, my mother is an industrious and clever citizen of a wealthy, food rich nation, and she used whatever means was available to her (i.e. gardening, marriage, social welfare programs, nepotism) to secure her children's nutritional well-being. We grew into healthy adults, each one of us with strong bones and a mouthful of cavity free teeth.