Food Thief

In the land where I grew up, expectations were high. When I was eight years old, an only child, I lived with Mom and Dad, and Grandma and Grandpa lived next door. These four smart, articulate, critical adults focused all their ambitions, dreams, hopes, and high standards on me. Maybe if I had been less able to meet their expectations from the start, they would've given up setting ever higher and less reachable goals for me. As it was, I was an eight-year-old boy who excelled at school and had a natural talent for playing the piano. Chatty, cheerful, and always aiming to please, I was the apple of their eyes. For awhile.

Although I was a plump child (we called it husky), and although I was quite effeminate, it was tacitly agreed that these were phases that I was going to grow out of soon enough.

Food was a huge part of our lives together and I loved to eat. Dad, whose self-discipline was strong, kept within 2o pounds of trim; but Mom, Grandma and Grandpa were fat, Mom most of all. She was less than five feet tall and weighed about 160 pounds. She ate in shame and in secret. She would start the latest diet with good intentions but after two or three weeks and maybe five pounds lost, she would give up. I revered her and started to emulate her secretive food behaviors. I'd catch her sometimes in the middle of the night, making a big delicious sandwich for herself. When I did, she would giggle and blush, then offer me some. We would eat in the kitchen, in the dark, having a secret little food party, and I loved it.

At a general physical exam, the pediatrician looked over my eight-year-old pudgy body (and my pudgy mom) and put me on a 1000-calorie diet. He handed the little brochure to Mom and told me to come back in a month to chart my progress. Mom carefully followed the plan and cooked me tiny meals. I lost 10 pounds that month, going from 110 pounds to 100, and grew an inch taller besides. I looked the most "normal" I had ever looked, which was good, but I felt light-headed, and soon the bother of making the special meals and my own ravenous appetite brought an end to that diet. It took only a couple of months to gain the 10 pounds back.

Every morning, Mom made me a fried egg and a piece of toast with margarine, along with half a grapefruit and a big glass of nonfat milk made daily with Carnation powdered instant milk. My parents bought it in 40-pound containers from the commissary. I guzzled milk, as much as I could get, and thought of whole milk and even low-fat milk as nectar of the gods. I never had a bowl of cold cereal for breakfast; it was considered much more healthy for me to have the egg, bread and milk. We sneered at mothers who didn't take the time to make a "decent" breakfast for their kids.

I loved the greasy lunches at school as well as the meatloaf sandwiches smeared with mayo that Mom made for me a couple of days a week. We didn't have things like candy or soda in the house, but there was always cheese, deli meats, bread, mayo, fritos, cream cheese, and things like homemade granola (more akin to oatmeal cookies than cereal), homemade custard, leftover roast beef, blue cheese dressing, and such. I was adept at visually weighing food and soon was serving myself the biggest pork chop or hamburger patty at dinnertime. If I couldn't figure out which plate had the bigger portion, I'd ponder the decision for minutes while my father impatiently waited for his meal. Sometimes I'd tear up a little if I was served the smaller portion. My father was a full-grown man, but I got the bigger piece of steak or else I spent the entire meal looked longingly at his plate, like a sad-eyed puppy begging for scraps. He was disgusted with me. I didn't care. Food was the most important thing. I was hungry all the time.

I also laid claim to all rib bones, often loudly gnawing on them until they were as clean as a whistle. I snorted and grunted my way through meals and cleaned my plate every time. I had no problem with the "clean your plate" rule because I usually liked everything anyway, but at each meal I was admonished to "finish everything - there are children starving in Biafra." Grandma's version was "Eat it all for the starving Armenians, or you don't get dessert." If I had to, I would drop brussels sprouts into my napkin so I'd get dessert. Sometimes, while clearing the table, I'd grab the pieces of fat someone had cut off their chop and pop them into my mouth, or gnaw on someone else's inadequately chewed T-bone during the trip from the dining room to the kitchen. I could slip a half-eaten roll into my pocket before anyone saw me. If we were having some big roast, I'd excuse myself in the middle of dinner to fill up my water glass, then cut crusty, greasy chunks of meat off the roast as it sat on the cutting board, chewing hurriedly to get those extra delectible morsels swallowed before returning to the table.

Between meals, I was the fridge raider. I got expert at sneaking into the kitchen, silently opening the refrigerator, holding down the light-tripping button, carefully sliding open the cheese drawer, and pulling off paper thin slices of mozzarella from the five-pound block wrapped in wax paper. Six or seven trips to the fridge and I could swipe a half pound of cheese easily. The next day, we would all be in the kitchen, and Mom would say something like, "I guess we have a mouse because all the cheese is missing!" and I'd giggle and blush. If there was nobody around, I'd hack off a chunk of Tillamook cheddar, dip it into the Best Foods mayonnaise jar, grab a few sweet pickle chips, and scarf it all down, going back for more 30 minutes later.

We had a full-size freezer and a walk-in pantry in our daylight basement. I soon learned that I could sneak ice cream, sherbet, and even frozen hunks of cheese and cake from the freezer, and the pantry offered exotic treats like mint jelly, maraschino cherries, peanut butter, cocktail onions, banana chips, and if I was really brave, I'd sneak a can opener downstairs and feast on pineapple rings in heavy syrup, chili con carne (eaten cold), and smoked salmon.

Sneaking food gave me a devilish thrill. Sometimes I'd put a huge spoonful of ice cream in my mouth and slam the freezer shut just in time to avoid my father finding me. I'd turn my back to him and hurriedly swallow the ice cream so my thefts remained secret. I was frequently caught - after all, I was the only kid so it had to be me, and even if I only took a spoonful of ice cream at a time, the thefts added up and soon the container was half gone.

I made a leap to felony food crimes when I was ten. Grandma decided to get a jump start on the holidays by making a huge batch of tartlets at Thanksgiving time. Over the course of three days, Grandma made about sixty individual shortbread tart shells, then filled them with cheesecake, pecan pie filling, strawberry and apricot jams, and chocolate mousse. The tarts were in the shape of circles, diamonds, and squares. They were beautifully fluted and absolutely gorgeous. We each ate maybe three tarts at Thanksgiving. They were buttery, sweet and delicious.

The day after Thanksgiving, Grandma took a big, deep department store box (it was glossy white with the name "Frederick & Nelson" embossed in gold script) and carefully placed the tarts so that they didn't touch each other. Between layers, she cut out pieces of stiff cardboard and covered them in waxed paper. There were three layers of tarts and the box weighed about six pounds. She tied a piece of string around the box and asked me to put it in our freezer. The box would be pulled out at Christmas, and the whole family would enjoy another round of tartlets.

The first time I tried to open the box, the string was too tight and I had to take the box out of the freezer, place it on the laundry table, and pull at the string until it broke. I grabbed two tarts and slipped the string around the box so it looked like it was still tightly tied. The frozen tarts were just phenomenal, like the richest, most enjoyable popsicles in the world. After that, it was easy to open the freezer, reach my hand into the box, pull out a tart, and rearrange the others so it didn't look so obvious.

In the first week, I had eaten the twelve or so tarts on the top layer. I pulled out the waxed paper covered cardboard and rationalized that maybe Grandma would think she packed only two layers instead of three. I slowed my thievery down a little and ate only one a day for the next week or so, but soon the second layer was practically gone. I felt horribly guilty and kept blocking out images of Grandma having a hemorrhage (that's what we called being angry). She had worked so hard on the tarts and felt as good about storing away a huge boxful as someone would feel about depositing a thousand dollars into a savings account.

A week before Christmas, things got desperate. I ate the last of the second layer and had started to pilfer the remaining tarts. I seriously considered making some replacement tarts, but I knew my technique was woefully inadequate and it would generate a lot of rude questions from Mom and Dad. So I just hoped somehow it would work out all right, and kept eating tarts.
I was in the basement with Grandma when she reached into the freezer and pulled out the box for Christmas. She immediately could tell it was dramatically lighter - and in disbelief, she pulled off the string, removed the lid, and found four lonely tarts in the bottom of the box. By then I was tearing up, full of shame at what I had done. Grandma burst into tears and asked me what happened - and I confessed to eating all the tarts. I was so upset to see Grandma so upset, and I kept saying, "I'm sorry" and "They were delicious" over and over and over again. Finally Grandma pulled herself together and decided not to tell anybody about it (my Mom's wrath and my Grandpa's would have been incendiary). So she pulled the last four tarts out of the box, put them on the laundry table, and instructed me to throw the empty box into the fireplace cache. Then we each ate two tarts.

At Christmas, Mom mentioned something about, "Didn't you freeze some tarts, Mama?" But Grandma shot a look at me and lied about it, and soon the gorgeous tarts were forgotten in a sea of almond crescents, rum balls, mandelbrodt, ruggula, and other homemade treats. Later on, Grandma and I laughed about the tart robbery the way a master jewel thief reminisces about the emerald necklace he stole off a dowager's neck.

I was an insatiable food thief. I learned to lie, cheat and steal to get food. By the time I was eleven years old, I was a hardened criminal. Well, a soft, pudgy criminal, that is. But my biggest crime was yet to come.