Parents often unwittingly subject their offspring to various methods of torture and abuse, all for the sake of maintaining nutritionally balanced children. Mom always kept our cupboards well stocked with bottles of multivitamins, cod liver oil and every canned vegetable known to mankind. No offense intended towards the canning industry, but the simple fact remains; some fresh vegetables simply do not make the conversion into cans and still remain palatable. Within this notable list of encased gut grinders are spinach, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, carrots, mushrooms, okra, and squash. The mere sight of creamed corn has been known to throw more than one child into bulimic spasms of hysteria. When it came to nutrition, I was every parents' worst nightmare. I was the Freddy Kruger of the food chain. I hated everything. At any stage of my life I could have passed as an Ethiopian poster child. My first lesson was to instinctively avoid anything which required the phrase, "It's good for you". Any attempt to digest even a morsel of these duodenal depth chargers automatically transformed me into Mount Saint Helen. Fortunately, I happened to be born with an advanced system of tongue radar. This enabled me with the ability to pinpoint a one-eighth inch sliver of onion cleverly tucked in the middle of a meatball and send it hurdling across the dining room table without so much as missing a beat. I drove my mother nuts. For years, she spent countless hours in the kitchen chopping onions until they became an unrecognizable pile of eye irritating slop. Regardless of these efforts, she could never quite seem to manage to make these morsels small enough that they were undetectable to my highly sophisticated taste buds. I never knew why I hated onions. I just did and that was good enough for me. My mother eventually gave up the battle and resigned herself to the fact that I was not going to eat anything which even so much as started with an "O". This allowed her the luxury of greatly reducing time spent in the kitchen. There would be no more slicing, dicing, mincing and mulching. She just left the onions in large enough chunks that I could simply eat my way around them. I guess it was only natural that my parents would eventually find themselves falsifying the capabilities of certain foods. All of which were "good for me". These meager attempts to manipulate my thinking were a waste of time. I didn't care what foods were guaranteed to make me big and strong. If cauliflower was the only thing on the planet which would increase my intelligence quotient, I opted to remain dimmer than a two watt bulb. I found it increasingly confusing that everything I didn't like had these wonderful benefits attached to them. Yet, foods I did enjoy were never good for a damned thing. A single cooked carrot would prevent me from going blind. Angel Food Cake didn't so much as combat ingrown toenails. String beans would make me tall. Cap'n Crunch cereal just made my teeth fall out. It just wasn't fair. "Eat your bread crust," my father would say. "It'll put hair on your chest." He never seemed to catch on to the fact that I didn't find chest hair particularly attractive. To a seven year old kid it looks like a bunch of mangled chicken wire. Not only was it displeasing to my sights, I could foresee no possible use for it. It wasn't as if there existed a harem of scantily dressed second grade girls anxiously awaiting to entwine their finger in a web of pectoral fur. If my father's claim did happen to be true, I anticipated, after ingesting bread crust for ten years or more, one could easily end up living out the rest of their days as an animated Brillo pad. One day, Pop decided to surprise me with my very own can of spinach. Forcing me into a head lock, he growled, "Don't you want to grow up like Popeye, son?" My intention was to eloquently express my lack of desire to eat spinach or become a cartoon character. Discouragingly enough, not a word would come out. This was undoubtedly due to the wad of green glop my father was attempting to force down my throat using three fingers. I could not imagine how my father could possibly have conceived of such a notion. I had a great many aspirations. However, becoming a bald headed, pipe smoking sailor with deformed arms was not one of them. Furthermore, if spinach had anything to do with him falling in love with Olivoil, who was certainly the most pathetic example of womanhood to ever plague the planet, I would just as soon die of anemia. I stood in the kitchen, scowling at my father. My throat remained in the locked position. Despite the fact that he had managed to shovel spinach into my mouth until I was packed tighter than an over-stuffed suitcase, I was not about to swallow one minuscule fiber. If he wanted my stomach full of agricultural seaweed, he was going to have to slam it down with a musket rod. "What's the matter with you?" he scolded. "Spinach is good. I eat it all the time." I glared at him in disbelief. Suddenly, it began to dawn on me that my father did bear a striking resemblance to Popeye. Both were sailors. Both were bald. Good heavens to Mergatroid, it was true! In one fell swoop, I spit my payload on the floor and dashed down the hallway screaming, "Spinach makes your hair fall out!" Largely due to my general disinterest in every major food group, my parents resorted to placing vitamins on our dinner plates. This was a system I could live with. Swallowing a little manufactured pill was a healthy alternative to eating asparagus. But, as with most things, it was not a perfect solution. As it so happened, the younger of my two older sisters had a severe impairment when it came to swallowing anything which wasn't grated to a fine mulch. She could eat every kind of vegetable put in front of her, but that little red vitamin created more difficulties than one would encounter attempting to swallow an entire set of flatware. I sat in utter amazement watching her recycle that coated pill in and out of her mouth until it was smaller than my mother's finest chopped onion. To this day, she is the only person I have seen perform a feat which would have inspired even Houdini. She placed the vitamin on her tongue and washed it down with a mouthful of milk. After approximately twenty seconds of coughing and sputtering like an engine running out of gas, she shot the pill out through her nose. I was awe-struck. Eventually, the Daily Vitamin Act was abolished. This was quickly replaced with large doses of Cod Liver Oil. My two sisters and I would stand side by side with our eyes shut and our mouths open wide as Pop administered each dose. I assumed this is the taste one would encounter if they tried to suck the scales off of a goldfish. We tolerated this mealtime regiment for three months. By then, we were greased and lubed better than my grandfather's Pontiac. I don't know if we were getting more miles to the gallon but I was not going to put up with any more of this abusive behavior. This whole nutrition thing was getting way out of hand. "I'm not drinking anymore of that fish spit!" I finally protested. "It's good for you!" my father bellowed. "It tastes like shit," I said. This did not necessarily set well with my father. "Hey now," he warned with a stern look. "There'll be none of that language." I couldn't figure out what the problem was. My parents said "shit" all the time. Why could they say it and I couldn't? I was then instructed of the lesson, "Do as I say, not as I do". This certainly didn't seem fair either. Seeing that my father was growing increasingly agitated with my insolence, my sister jumped into the conversation. "They're just words, Dad," she explained. "They don't really mean anything except what we think they mean. If we had grown up thinking the word for foot was actually shit and instead of toes, they were called fuckers, there would be nothing wrong with saying, ‘Look at that big shit with the five little fuckers' on it." Though this all made perfectly good sense to me, my mother was horrified. In my peripheral vision, I watched as her eyes bugged further and further out of her head. By the end of my sister's theoretic symposium, I was surprised they didn't pop right out and roll across the dining room table. "All right!" my father exploded. "That's enough!" After a moment of silence, he screwed the lid back on the bottle of Cod Liver Oil. Our unrehearsed revolt apparently made some sort of an impression. Electing myself as spokesperson for the group, I suggested we return to the vitamin tablets. Even my sister with the pillophobia was in favor of this motion. As the bottle was put away on the top shelf in the cupboard, my mother placed a little red tablet on each of our dinner plates. I already had an entire serving of Brussels sprouts wedged in my mouth which I had every intention of unloading straight into the toilet. "I haffa go tuh duh baffroom," I said. I had so many of those little green leaf balls inside my cheeks that I felt like a hamster hoarding its winter provisions. Just as my mother was about to excuse me from the table, my oldest sister decided to blow the lid off of my entire scheme. "You know why he does that don't you?" she snarled. "He goes into the bathroom and spits all of his vegetables down the can." Then she flashed me one of her infamous smart Alec grins. "Boo naht!" I retorted, spitting chewed sprouts into her face. I had been getting away with this scam job for well over a year. Worse than that, I had just perfected it to the point where I could compact an ample serving of any type of vegetable plus a fair portion of the meat into a single mouthful. Due to the limitations of this method, perfection was a necessity. I didn't need to be a mathematician to understand how several trips to the bathroom during each and every meal would eventually raise suspicions. One week of this sort of behavior would either expose my scheme for what it was or land me at a doctors office to be tested for a urinary tract infection. To compensate for this minor glitch, I had discovered how to create a vacuum effect between my teeth and cheek while chewing. In a dry pulp form, most food groups take up relatively little room and I had just upgraded this system to the point where I could extract juice out of linoleum. The piercing stare from my parents told me that I would never again be concocting versions of Tidy Bowl Stew. Henceforth, I was to enthusiastically gobble up whatever was put in front of me and I would not be allowed to leave the table until my plate was cleaner than a hospital floor. I spent at least one-third of the remaining years of my childhood confined to a dining room chair. It is not that my mother was a horrible cook. I was just a horrible eater. However, being forced to sit at the table for several hours watching a meal separate, coagulate and petrify seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. While the rest of my family relaxed in the living room watching old reruns of The Big Valley, I was being entertained by ample servings of meat pies, cooked carrots and potato pancakes being overrun with mold spores. Needless to say, experiencing this molecular breakdown did little to elevate my appreciation of a home cooked meal. Such an approach to child rearing makes about as much sense as strapping a hyperactive child to a roller coaster and thinking it will encourage him to take a nap. Still, being left alone for such lengthy periods of time did offer me the opportunity to become quite adept in the art of food arranging. Within a month, I could conceal a three course meal beneath a single chicken bone. My grubfest sculptures were enough to make Julia Childs look like a culinary novice and the dog and I had bonded under the common goal of removing generous servings of meatloaf from my plate. Aside from the dog, I rarely saw a living soul prior to 9 pm and became haunted by the fear that I would one day die sitting at the dining room table, which wouldn't necessarily cause the slightest change in my behavior. My family probably wouldn't even notice I had cashed in my chips until the dog started to lose weight. I eventually came to the realization that my life was being controlled by a plate of food. I had had enough. Of all of the people I have heard express these sentiments, Liza Minnelli perhaps did it best when she sang these words: "You have to understand the way I am, Mein Heir A tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, Mein Heir You'll never turn the vinegar to jam, Mein Heir So I do what I do When I'm through then I'm through And I'm through Tootle do" * I picked up my plate, walked into the kitchen and emptied it into the trash can. "Mmmm. That sure was good," I said as I tossed my plate into the sink and entered the living room. My mother gave me a look of astonished disbelief. I was two hours ahead of schedule. "Are you finished eating already?" she asked. I brought the corners of my mouth up into a toothy grin. "Better than that," I chimed as I sat on the floor in front of television set just in time to see Barbara Stanwick pull a gun on a cattle rustler. "I am through." *Cabaret: Lyrics from Mein Heir by Fred Ebb