Running Away—and Eating Like an Absolute King
I was sure that food would taste better, out there.
BY
DANNY M. LAVERY
The most substantial and immediate result of reading novels as a child was the shoring up of a dim yet tenacious conviction that somewhere out in the world was good food, good food of a type and quality and quantity that was either being consciously denied me in the present by certain unknown insurgent agents or whose preparation and provenance had long ago been forgotten. The best literary foods always appeared in the process of running away, that ceaseless and shared imaginative project of childhood everywhere.
My family lived in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, roughly equidistant between a Piggly Wiggly and a Jewel-Osco supermarket, which supplied my parents with sufficient material to feed us regularly and, I have no doubt, with the best of intentions. This meant skinless chicken breasts, sometimes with and sometimes without a sheet of Coca-Cola–colored teriyaki sauce blurted over them; Hamburger Helper (usually the beef stroganoff variety, but on at least one memorable occasion the cheeseburger macaroni made an appearance); massive and perpetually out-of-season raspberries in plastic clamshells; blue glasses of skim milk; foil-skinned triangles of Laughing Cow cheese; steamed broccoli; jealously guarded green boxes of SnackWell’s diet devil’s food cookie cakes and Healthy Choice diet ice cream; Trix pink-and-purple-swirl–flavored yogurt; a newspaper-clipping recipe for coffee cake; Jif peanut butter (smooth, always; the primary texture of my childhood was smoothness); Little Caesars pizza on Friday nights; Oroweat whole-grain bread; a tusk-colored tub of Country Crock margarine; Eggo mini waffles on Sundays, two flats apiece, each flat containing four mini waffles, for a total of eight mini waffles per person, with Log Cabin maple-flavored syrup, microwaved for 15 seconds before pouring.
But the type of book I liked best as a middle-grade, middle-class, middle-risk child always managed to combine the independence of running away with the conveniences of a secure household:
Lucy Pevensie bolts out of England through the wardrobe and straight into afternoon tea; the
Kincaid siblings tuck themselves into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently tuck into pie and coffee from the automat (a true flower of the Midwest, I was overwhelmed by the glamour of the very idea of automated coffee); Liza and Annie of
Annie on My Mind share baked beans and cheese sandwiches at the selfsame museum a decade or so later; Jesse’s terrifyingly extravagant three-dollar lunch in
Bridge to Terabithia; even Ramona Quimby’s “
tongue surprise” had an otherworldly appeal, as the only tongue I’d ever chewed had been my own, to say nothing of her basement feast of apples; the hoarded blueberries and river-cold bottles of milk available to the
Boxcar Children, whose tenure in the boxcar was disappointingly brief;
Heidi’s endless supply of toasted-cheese sandwiches; the dizzying array of savory pies available to Bilbo Baggins and the mice priests of Redwall, which often melded together into a single feast in my imagination.
