The college newspaper editor was talking about her story. It’s on a study that found eating healthy isn’t always affordable. She was talking about interviewing other college students about whether this was the case or just an excuse.
Could poor college students on meager budgets add more nutrition to their diets? Nutrition that wasn’t French fries and pizza crust?
Because, she said, she was a vegetarian, but often struggled herself. At the beginning of the month she eats well and eats organic. But by the end, when the money starts running low, she eats frozen burritos.
And that’s when she lost me. That’s when I checked out. Didn’t hear another word. I went off to a strange place where I sometimes go to pass the time and think about things.
Things like frozen burritos.
Good day, y’all. I’m taking a trip down memory lane.
Because frozen burritos were a staple of my father’s place when I was little. I’m not sure he buys them anymore. Probably a doctor found a sodium-laced refried bean lodged in an artery and told him to quit. But I remember them well from weekends over there with my brother.
On Friday nights he would pick us up from my mother’s and haul us to his pad where we built pillow forts, watched bad movies until all hours of the night, ate frozen burritos and eventually slipped into deep comas. Our bodies would spend days detoxing from all the sodium and alien preservatives.
We cooked the burritos in an abused toaster oven. It had two inches of burned breadcrumbs lining the bottom, like little charcoal briquets. They provided a smoky flavor to the meal. We were masters of cooking them — able to get the flour tortilla a perfect golden crispy brown while the depths of that spicy mixture remained completely frozen.
My dad’s place was a guy’s eating din. When it came to food, it was part college dorm and part conspiracy theorist food pantry. You know, the types who believe the end of the world is coming and that they will survive it with stockpiles of canned meats.
Boxes of Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs the size of queen mattresses rubbed elbows with tins of Underwood Deviled Ham. If you’ve never had it, deviled ham is a delicacy — a spread the color of band-aids with the consistency of granulated porridge and the flavor of salted salt.
We ate it on hiking trips or whenever the mood struck us, which was pretty much anytime — day or night — that a cracker was in the vicinity.
And the same went for beef jerky. And bean dips. And Velveeta cheese. And corn dogs.
My father eventually remarried and his new wife decided to bring us out of the woods — to domesticate our heathen weekend food palates. She had cookbooks larger than the boxes of Lucky Charms and would concoct stir fries heavy on vegetables and easy on soy sauce.
“Why is the chicken white?” we would ask.
But it wasn’t the same. It was healthy and good for us … and too much like what we got at home during the week. Cultured. Refined. Nutritious. My mother made sure we ate vegetables and salads — foods that didn’t cause strange discolorations to parts of our bodies. But his place was supposed to be an escape from that — a Willy Wonka wonderland of processed, pre-prepared junk food. Like cases of frozen White Castle hamburgers.
A little weekend junk food didn’t hurt us. We were skinny like 2X4s, athletic and active. We couldn’t gain weight if we added concrete to our cereal.
I don’t eat like that anymore. Only as a kid. My dad doesn’t either. But sitting there listening to that story, I sure did miss it. Which is why the next time I’m at the store, I might stroll down the frozen food aisle and look for those burritos. Maybe just one more, for old time’s sake.