“Dealie!” My father sounds urgent but I know he’s not mad. He’s using his nickname for me. “Look at the list of junk in this can. What do you think we’re doing to our bodies?”

It’s the late 60’s. Ingredient labeling is sporadic and unreliable, but as long as I can remember he’s been reading food labels with portentous interest.

I don’t look at the can. I know what it says. I’m my father’s daughter. I learned to read from the police blotter and food labels. “I know what we’re doing. Since we’re made of food and all those things are preservatives, we’re cooking ourselves into a state of high preservation.” Dad laughs. “I guess that means you girls will outlive me and the Chick Chick (my mother) by centuries, since you’ve been eating this stuff since you were born. The Chick Chick and I were forced to eat untainted food for years.” He laughs again, delighted with his satire.

I laugh, too, but internally I shudder. I’m uncomfortable contemplating the hidden recipe and the possibilities implicit in the seemingly innocuous entrées I prepare. I take the can from him. I’m planning on using this in dinner tonight. He picks up his glass and toasts me on my way to the kitchen. “To life,” he says, a sardonic gleam in his eye. I lift the can to his glass. “To life everlasting,” I respond. Neither of us laughs.

I can hazard a guess about what portion of my nutrition has been additives. My mother was of the post-war bottle-not-breast school, so my supplementarial inundation began the day I was born. My first solid food came from a factory, as did much of the rest.

In 1960 our family relocated to Guam. Very little of our food was fresh. I am amused by expiration advisories for foods today. Food processing and storage in the 60’s were fractionally sophisticated compared with today’s methods. Yet even today’s conservative dating was exponentially surpassed by the ocean voyage and precarious storage conditions our food withstood before entering our mouths on Guam. Local produce was grown in poor soil bolstered with chemical nutrients. Plentiful wild food was blanketed with clouds of DDT to keep the mosquitos at bay every evening of my childhood. Sewage was poorly regulated. Those were the salad days of ocean-as-universal-septic tank. Guam floats at the edge of its deepest trench. Ritidian Point, a cliff overhanging a wild ocean inlet, was a garbage dump, established to keep sharks poised at the northern end of the island. The oil refinery discharged into the sea, as did all maritime traffic and military bases, including a nuclear submarine base. We ate local fish, spiced with local refuse.

Decades later, astonishingly healthy despite my history and habits, I face a grocer’s shelf, scanning the ingredients listed on a can of beans. I recall the cryptically prescient conversation with my father. I remember that behind the label lies a man-made marinade, a protean, insidious recipe we’ve thoughtlessly injected into the food chain for generations. When my body burns nutrients, what’s in the residue that remains? Although we’re thinking a bit harder, now, when we grow and process food, there’s still enough ignorance to go around.

That ignorance deposits a chemical ash in our cells. When my mother and I eat this can of beans, we’ll be adding to the ash. Even if I choose to cook organic beans from scratch, the ash of overlooked contaminants will fall back into the pit where my fire ignites.

We can take precautions and attempt to safely harness the incendiary power of food for our metabolistic nourishment. We can be very observant. We can think positively and assume the best. The catch is, fire attempts to consume everything, even a potential fuel that eventually extinguishes it. It has a will of it’s own. When we play with food, we play with fire.

Text, Recipes & Graphics ©1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

Background Provided by