Apr 09, 2007 - 11:30:27 CDT
"Where’s the beef?" — Clara Peller, 1984."Where’s the hummus?" — Me, 2007
When Popeye squeezed open that can of spinach and sucked it down -- though sometimes, weirdly, through his pipe -- my reaction was, "mmm, that looks good."
As one of those odd kids that loved vegetables, I drooled over dill pickles, ate warm tomatoes right in the garden and loved spinach and beets. Asparagus was a special treat.
However, I must confess that I also would smuggle sugar out of its canister; hidden behind the couch, I would eat it with a spoon. And at any gathering that served coffee -- which was all of them -- I scored as many sugar cubes as I could before mom’s radar kicked in and she speared me with her patented “eye of doom.”
Many of us outgrow the sugar fixation only to have it replaced with a salt obsession, loving salty potato chips, corn chips, popcorn and sunflower seeds. As children, my cousins and I, running free through the pastures, would snack on pieces we broke off an orange salt lick, with that nice groove worn into it by countless cow tongues.
Mother’s horrified reaction to this particular snack moved us to diligently rinse the chunks a few times in the cattle's water tank. This meant pushing away floating islands of algae to clear an open spot.
Maybe it’s a wonder we survived. Or maybe by the time we hit our teens, we were so inoculated with antibodies that little less than a direct hit from a meteor could fell us.
Anyway, perhaps the memory of that algae-covered tank was lurking when I first tried nori, the seaweed used to wrap sushi. And after a couple of tastings, I grew to like it.
Once you’ve eaten nori, hummus is the natural next step. And in hummus territory, there are new friends to be found.
In its way, the grocery store is a world and shoppers the tourists. Some of us love Italy, filling our grocery carts with boxes of pasta and bottles of spaghetti sauce. Others feel the ancient pull of the Norwegian fjords, their pale fingers pulling even paler fish out of the freezers.
Pink-cheeked carnivores load their carts with roasts and chops and heavy goose-pimpled turkeys. For others, every day is a trip to the carnival — they are irresistibly drawn to the rows of nuclear-orange cheese puffs and Paul Bunyan-size candy bars.
When one searches for hummus, it’s intriguing to find a whole new nation shopping around the organic and vegetarian foods territories.
A smaller, but select group, the ladies shopping in organics, of whatever age, tend to have a similar look, wiry and whippety, rather than soft and doughy. They don’t lean on their grocery carts for support, but waft them along like tough ballerinas.
These veterans know what they’re looking for and unerringly reach for it. I stand out as a rookie for the sheer length of time it takes me to decipher what things actually are. I feel like Jessica Simpson perplexed by a can of tuna. Is this rice? Is it tofu? Is it soy? Is it textured vegetable protein?
Even as I explore these new environs, I still make time to hang out in other regions of the store, touching base with the familiar folks at the buffalo sausage, smoked turkey, rotisserie chicken and salmon sections.
I’m a citizen of the world.
(Reach reporter Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@bismarcktribune.com)
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