By Linda Lee Greene, Author &
Artist
I first heard the word “agita” voiced in New York by
my friends of Mediterranean heritage. It turns out that it is Italian-American
slang for the Italian “agitare,” meaning “to agitate;” translated in English as
“heartburn” or “acid indigestion” or “stomach-ache”
or “a general feeling of upset of the digestive system.” A person like me with
a history of digestive disorders is right familiar with painful and gassy
“agita.” For nearly three decades, antacid tablets were such a staple of my
daily cuisine that they might have passed as after-meal mints. But no more! I
found my cure for “agita.” It came down to simply removing specific foods from
my diet. “Such and such food just doesn’t agree with me,” is a sentiment
replete in our lexicon, and oftener than not, we let it go at that without
further investigation as to why it is that so much of our food makes us sick
and/or obese and/or a too-early arrival at St. Michael’s heavenly door.
From the time I was knee-high to a
grasshopper and able to understand such pronouncements, my mother informed me
often that I had been a fussy baby. “Colic!” she asserted. She had removed me
early-on from her breast and put me on warm and thick cow’s milk in a bottle,
drawn directly from a cow, for we lived then on my grandparent’s farm where fields
were scattered far and wide with bovine creatures whose mammary sacs literally
leaked the white poison. I think now that my mother’s milk made me ill because
it was laced with nicotine. She was a heavy smoker. And it wasn’t until decades
later that I figured out that I am lactose intolerant. People who study such
things swear that humans should not consume cow’s milk anyway, lactose
intolerant or not. I am convinced that my mother’s proclamations about my being
a fussy baby were her unwitting way of vindicating herself for the sin of too
soon extricating her body from the ritual of nursing me, and of rationalizing
to me the fact that I was always too much for her to handle. Through my early childhood,
stomach-ache was as much a part of my identity as were the blue of my eyes and
the yellow of my hair.
My strongest sensory memory of my
pre-school years is the blissful aromas emanating from my grandmother’s
wood-burning cook-stove. Light breads; yeast cakes; biscuits; peach pies; apple
pies; chocolate-cream pies; blackberry cobblers, all dressed up in snowy white
flour and sparkling crystals of refined sugar, seeming as pure and sweet and
alluring as Cinderella on her evening with the Prince. The entrees comprised
one of the farm’s free-range chickens, slaughtered, butchered, coated in white
flour, and sizzled to a crisp on the stovetop in lard or left-over bacon
grease, all accomplished at my grandmother’s competent hands. Side dishes
oftener than not were mashed potatoes and white flour gravy, creamed corn, and
green beans boiled in water and flavored with bacon grease. Sunday menus might feature
chicken and dumplings, the dumplings floating in their starchy bath as
golf-ball-sized bundles of gooey white flour and other ingredients, each
dumpling delivering a punch of carbohydrates (carbs) equivalent to the human
system’s requirement for an entire week. And piled on were the additional carbs
of the light bread and the pies. My point is that there was venom in all that tasty
goodness as surely as if the wicked stepmother had woven toxins into the swanky
threads of Cinderella’s frock.
Of course, none of us was conscious of the evil lurking in
our carbs-laced food. My parents and grandparents were loving and solicitous
guardians of the welfare of their progeny in every way available to them. At about
age eight, though, something strange happened to me. I absolutely could no
longer eat the food served up at table at our house. My appetite for it just up
and walked away. By then, residence on the farm had exchanged itself for life
in the big city. But even so, my parents always maintained a vegetable city-garden
in the backyards of our homes: corn; tomatoes; scallions; radishes; potatoes;
cabbages; cucumbers; and a brand of single-leafed lettuce. And mom always kept
a head of iceberg lettuce and stalks of celery bought at the grocery store in
the refrigerator. Some intuitive food genius inside my body set me to nibbling
on those raw vegetables like a rabbit. I often consumed an entire head of
iceberg lettuce in one sitting. I still drank milk because I loved the stuff,
and also because there was only water and coffee and sickeningly-sweet Cool Aid
as alternatives. Mom could get me to eat a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl
of tomato soup now and then—but that was about it in terms of my food
consumption for the next twelve years. During that time, my stomach was as
docile as a lamb.
And then I met and married a man of Latin ancestry and moved
to New York with him. My Puerto Rican/Spanish mother-in-law took one look at me
and proclaimed, “Ju are too skeeny, Leenda! I wheel put some meat on ju bones!”
And she did just that. She introduced me to a cuisine that at the time I could
only describe as “exotic.” Steaming pinto beans plump and soft in a savory mix
of olive oil, onions, green peppers, garlic, and tomato sauce, cradled in a
fluffy nest of Spanish rice tangy with olive oil, olives, capers, chicken
broth, onions, green peppers, garlic, and tomato sauce. On plate was also a
thick slice of pork, roasted to tender perfection in a wash of delicate juices.
To top off the meal was ‘flan’ a delectably quivering wedge of oven-baked eggs,
milk and sugar swimming in caramel. This was custard like I had never come
across. The aroma alone was like entering food perfume heaven. My head was
already spinning from the red ‘Paisano’ wine—my Spanish father-in-law’s
contribution. I took to this cuisine as naturally as if I were born to it. But
it didn’t take long for the digestive distress to show its nasty head again,
and for my body to begin its steady expansion to alarming dimensions.
These are snapshots of my back-and-forth, bittersweet
relationship with food throughout the years of my life. When at the age of 49 I
was struck down with Crohns Disease, I had no other choice than to undertake a close
study of my nutrition habits. A flood of controversy is afoot about this subject
of carbs. My own experience has shown me that “bad” carbs found in packaged and
“white” foods, certain fruits, as well as sugars are the devils in my diet.
I feel
safe in stating that the ubiquitous danger of sugar (sucrose - C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁) is
widely known and accepted, unless of course, a person has lived under a rock
for the last several decades.©
Recommended Reading: SUGAR BLUES by William Dufty
Essay Image: DINNERWARE - acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene
Multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene’s eBooks and Paperbacks are available for purchase on Amazon. An overview of her latest romance/thriller/paranormal novel, A CHANCE OF THE MOON, is below:
Amid the seductions of Las Vegas,
Nevada and an idyllic coffee plantation on Hawai’i’s Big Island, a sextet of
opposites converge within a shared fate: a glamorous movie-star courting
distractions from her troubled past; her shell-shocked bodyguards clutching
handholds out of their hardscrabble lives; a dropout Hawaiian nuclear physicist
gambling his way back home; a Navajo rancher seeking cleansing for harming
Mother Earth; and from its lofty perch, the Hawaiian’s guardian spirit conjured
as his pet raven, conducting this symphony of soul odysseys.
Was it chance or destiny’s hand
behind the movie-star and gambler’s curious encounter at Caesars Palace in Las
Vegas? The cards fold, their hearts open, and a match strikes, flames that
sizzle their hearts and souls. Can they have the moon and the stars, too? Or is
she too dangerous? Is he? Can their love withstand betrayal? Can it endure
murder?
While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.
While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.
