Thanksgiving: A Beige Eater's Raison d'Être

Emma Gase  

Thanksgiving was almost a week ago, and like all the best holidays, it’s festivity and inevitable family fosters a universal tendency toward self-reflection. Now as much as I have renounced my Beige Diet tendencies, my bleached-white flour past still haunts me in my vastly improved culinary present. When I think today about how I used to eat even just four or five years ago, what stands out most is the constant litany of judgmental reactions I would get from my friends and family circa the holiday season. The incessant nagging ranged from the bearable “Em, you’re so picky!,” to the annoying, “Try it! Oh, c’mon! You might like seafood,” (I HATE seafood, and will, forever) to the dreaded, “No dessert until you finish that [non-specific green vegetable or unappetizing legume]!” And when I ponder these sepia-toned childhood memories growing up in the South Bay of Los Angeles, I remember exactly one food experience per year where I felt as liberated as a vegan in Portland. For is there anything better for a cheese-and-carbo-tarian than the one sweet, sweet day a year where most of the food you are supposed to eat is….beige?! The answer is nay, there is not.

Since my earliest picky-eating days, Thanksgiving has always stood out as the one day a year when I was free from the scrutiny of the green-eating Gestapo that was oh, just about everybody in the world except me. Could a veggie-phobe want anything more than a day where it is not only socially acceptable but actually encouraged to eat stuffing (beige), turkey (beige), mashed potatoes (light beige…ish) and gravy (beige!) all in one bite? That, to me, was reason enough for a national holiday.

For years, I savored the magical Thursday in November when—disregarding all sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, brussel sprouts, and basically anything that wasn’t turkey, gravy, potatoes or stuffing—my plate basically looked like everyone else’s. On Thanksgiving, I wasn’t a picky eater, or being difficult, or frantically searching the menu at Trader Vic’s for a grilled cheese. Instead, while everybody else was concerned with being grateful for their families, or cherishing each other and honoring the pilgrims for slaughtering the Indians to make this Amurican land our own, etc, etc, I was busy thanking my lucky stars that I got to eat all this beige food with no judgment or restraint. Conformity tasted better than the choicest morsel of dark meat perfectly proportioned with some garlic mash.

But this year, I looked upon Turkey Day anew. As I admired my large plate loaded with enough food to feed a small Eskimo tribe, I noticed something slightly different from the other years. Last Thursday, my plate had all the requisite beige favorites, but a coup d'état that I didn’t even notice until now had taken over. What piled my plate, but all of my childhood rejects: brussel sprouts and sweet potatoes and mushrooms and water chestnuts and carrots. Who am I? I wondered, as I steadily but surely took down basically all the brussel sprouts in the serving platter. As much as I enjoyed my multi-colored plate, somehow I didn’t feel the pride and liberation I normally feel when I still occasionally (re: everyday) revel in (and brag about) my newfound foodie horizons. Even with the green addition, I didn’t feel any different than I did on any other Thanksgiving. Did I eat any less than I did when I was a disciple of the Beige Diet? Probably not. Did having green on my plate make me proud? Not particularly. And that’s when it hit me.

It really doesn’t matter what you eat on Thanksgiving. Foodie or Beige Dieter or Vegetarian or Gluten-Free, or whatever gastronomic gospel you abide by, the point is not proving your discerning tastes, but first and foremost, heartily indulging yourself. Because that’s what Thanksgiving is: a judgment-free eating day. Portion-wise, carbohydrate-wise, pie-wise, butter-wise—even if your family goes out to a restaurant, or orders pre-made catered food that night—no one is allowed to feel ashamed about how and what they eat. It really is a beautiful thing. There is nothing quite like the solidarity that bonds a family after they eat themselves into a lethargy that induces them to watch twelve straight hours of college football the next day. Now that is something I can be thankful for.

Thanksgiving: A Beige Eater’s Raison d'être

Emma Gase  

Thanksgiving was almost a week ago, and like all the best holidays, its festivity and inevitable family gatherings fosters a universal tendency toward self-reflection. Now as much as I have renounced my Beige Diet tendencies, my bleached-white flour past still haunts me in my vastly improved culinary present. When I think today about how I used to eat even just four or five years ago, what stands out most is the constant litany of judgmental reactions I would get from my friends and family circa the holiday season. The incessant nagging ranged from the bearable “Em, you’re so picky!,” to the annoying, “Try it! Oh, c’mon! You might like seafood,” (I HATE seafood, and will, forever) to the dreaded, “No dessert until you finish that [non-specific green vegetable or unappetizing legume]!” And when I ponder these sepia-toned childhood memories growing up in the South Bay of Los Angeles, I remember exactly one food experience per year where I felt as liberated as a vegan in Portland. For is there anything better for a cheese-and-carbo-tarian than the one sweet, sweet day a year where most of the food you are supposed to eat is….beige?! The answer is nay, there is not.

Since my earliest picky-eating days, Thanksgiving has always stood out as the one day a year when I was free from the scrutiny of the green-eating Gestapo that was oh, just about everybody in the world except me. Could a veggie-phobe want anything more than a day where it is not only socially acceptable but actually encouraged to eat stuffing (beige), turkey (beige), mashed potatoes (light beige…ish) and gravy (beige!) all in one bite? That, to me, was reason enough for a national holiday.

For years, I savored the magical Thursday in November when—disregarding all sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, brussels sprouts, and basically anything that wasn’t turkey, gravy, potatoes or stuffing—my plate basically looked like everyone else’s. On Thanksgiving, I wasn’t a picky eater, or being difficult, or frantically searching the menu at Trader Vic’s for a grilled cheese. Instead, while everybody else was concerned with being grateful for their families, or cherishing each other and honoring the pilgrims for slaughtering the Indians to make this Amurican land our own, etc, etc, I was busy thanking my lucky stars that I got to eat all this beige food with no judgment or restraint. Conformity tasted better than the choicest morsel of dark meat perfectly proportioned with some garlic mash.

But this year, I looked upon Turkey Day anew. As I admired my large plate loaded with enough food to feed a small Eskimo tribe, I noticed something slightly different from the other years. Last Thursday, my plate had all the requisite beige favorites, but a coup d'état that I didn’t even notice until now had taken over. What piled my plate, but all of my childhood rejects: brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes and mushrooms and water chestnuts and carrots. Who am I? I wondered, as I steadily but surely took down basically all the brussels sprouts in the serving platter. As much as I enjoyed my multi-colored plate, somehow I didn’t feel the pride and liberation I normally feel when I still occasionally (re: everyday) revel in (and brag about) my newfound foodie horizons. Even with the green addition, I didn’t feel any different than I did on any other Thanksgiving. Did I eat any less than I did when I was a disciple of the Beige Diet? Probably not. Did having green on my plate make me proud? Not particularly. And that’s when it hit me.

It really doesn’t matter what you eat on Thanksgiving. Foodie or Beige Dieter or Vegetarian or Gluten-Free, or whatever gastronomic gospel you abide by, the point is not proving your discerning tastes, but first and foremost, heartily indulging yourself. Because that’s what Thanksgiving is: a judgment-free eating day. Portion-wise, carbohydrate-wise, pie-wise, butter-wise—even if your family goes out to a restaurant, or orders pre-made catered food that night—no one is allowed to feel ashamed about how and what they eat. It really is a beautiful thing. There is nothing quite like the solidarity that bonds a family after they eat themselves into a lethargy that induces them to watch twelve straight hours of college football the next day. Now that is something I can be thankful for.

An American in Andalucía: The Aftermath of Cuisine Culture Shock

Emma Gase  

This past winter I studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain. For four months, I lived with a Spanish family (actually, two Spanish families, but that is neither here nor there), traveled around Spain and Europe, and improved (very, very marginally) my Spanish language skills. But most important of all, I ate every meal with my host family. That’s right, I was treated to four solid months of home-cooked, authentic-as-could-be Spanish cooking: Breakfast (if you can call a sad slice white bread and knock-off Nutella “breakfast”), lunch (paella, paella, and oh wait did I mention paella?), and dinner (who likes frozen pizza…with ketchup?). In order to make a long and still freshly painful rant shorter, I will summarize this: Never have I lived in such a dearth of tasty and nutritious food.

What’s that? Spain is a country rich with culinary tradition and charming local flavors? Paella is kind of good? You enjoy small, barely dead crustaceans in everything from white rice to season-less garbanzo beans? You dig drinking milk that is so pasteurized it doesn’t need to be refrigerated? All right, to each his own. But grudges aside, I have in my possession official evidence of the food crimes committed against me. Below you will find an excerpt from my soon-to-be award-winning masterpiece, I mean blog, which was written after a dinner at a Sevillano Country Club I was treated to by some Spanish friends. My American roommate, Megan, can corroborate every detail below:

“Last Saturday night, Carmen and her husband Pepe took Megan and I out to dinner at their tennis club. Essentially, it was sort of like a country club, but a very, very Spanish country club. While the conversation was excellent, the food was…Spanish.

And now:

Things I will never again voluntarily ingest

Caracoles = mini snails Carmen loves, eat them with a tooth-pick. Fried.
Gazpacho = liquidy tomato soup, lots of olive oil, weird cucumber aftertaste. Served cold, in a beverage glass. Sufficiently disgusting, tastes like tomato juice and minced red onions. Native to Andalucia.
Salmorejo = essentially gazpacho, but thicker, served with boiled eggs, cured ham, and fried crutons on top. Slightly resembles Thousand Island dressing. May edge out the long-holding croquettas for worst offender.
Croquettas = unidentified fried balls of previously fried, minced meat. Resemble spherical mozzarella sticks. Inside looks like Crisco. Just stay away—they smell deceptively good (you could fry a finger, and it’d smell good), but trust me on this. Your stomach and arteries will thank me later."

Alksd;laskdggggggggg…sorry, I just passed out on my keyboard from a tidal wave of Post-traumatic-Spanish-food symptom-induced shock. Safe to say, I subsisted for four months mostly on oranges, $8 imported peanut butter, pretzels, and Maria cookies, which are basically sweet Ritz crackers (I am discounting travel, where my dining habits hovered on the exact opposite end of the spectrum). Either way, I think the real milagro here is that I didn’t become anemic.

So, never one not to be proactive, I have since come up with a Plan of Attack for those who are either going to study abroad in a country with um, “foreign” palates, or anyone, really, who needs a quick out when presented with a plate of unspeakable stew.

Emma Gase’s Survival Guide To Residing in a Food-Tundra

1. Is your meal inoffensive but besmirched by only one overused ingredient, e.g. it is swimming in a pond of enough olive oil to dress a salad the size of the Prado? Be creative. You never know what a little garlic, salt, and seasoning (and draining!) can do to save a dish. Also, the microwave is your friend.
2. When secretly throwing away food in your host mother’s tiny Spanish kitchen, make sure to wait until she is vacuuming the living room to execute your disposal. Hah! Just kidding, that is a ridiculous and obviously horrible idea. What you really need to do is secretly stash the offending meal into a grocery bag while your roommate creates a diversion, and then run it out to the dumpster as fast as your American legs will take you. Using a different trash can is key, in case the aforementioned host mother decides to rifle through her own garbage to see if the American girls are throwing away her cooking and then confront them about it later (this is not an unfeasible occurrence).
3. Lie and say you are feeling un poco enferma (ill), and then revel in your victory at getting served tea, yogurt and a fried egg for dinner. Then obey your host mother and put on your slippers immediately, because not wearing them is the reason you are sick.
4. Take a financial hit and eat out (but make sure to let your señora know a day in advance, especially if you don’t want a passive aggressive and emotional Spanish lady to hide your socks and bleach your underwear into oblivion as her own special form of retribution).

And, in the last, most hopeless case of desperation:


5. Get an apartment

Holy Guacamole: A Love a Decade in the Making

Emma Gase  

It all started about ten years ago in a Redondo Beach Trader Joe’s. You know those weird idiosyncrasies about yourself that you try to hide from your friends and loved ones, lest they think you insane and/or question their affiliation to you? No? Well, I don’t believe you, but I shall soldier on regardless. Back to TJ’s. So I was shopping with my mother, when we rounded upon the guacamole section. As she put a tub of guac in our cart, I was hypnotized by the odd, chunky greenish appearance. Despite the fact that I had never even tried it, I was baffled by my parents’ love of the damn stuff (there’s a ten-year-old’s logic for ya). What was so great about it? It was green and it had raw onions in it, and when you left it out on the counter for more than twenty minutes, it turned a moldy shade of brown...thanks, but no thanks. And at that moment in a California Trader Joe’s as I glared at her for putting the small tub into our cart, for reasons known only to the Higher Epicurean Powers, I decided then and there to hate guacamole. And that’s not all: In addition to being anti-gauc, I also pledged to avoid any and all things related to avocados for the rest of my life. (Let us remember: This was during the glory years of the Beige Diet and I cannot officially be held accountable for my actions). I even vowed to never say the name guacamole ever again, because I was convinced it had bad juju surrounding it’s mushy green essence (I put that last one down to a preteen penchant for drama).

Now before you call the authorities to have me committed, I realize how ignorant, silly, and unwarranted this all sounds. And although I had not a single modicum of logic to back up my prejudiced behavior, I managed to avoid guacamole and all things avocado-related for almost ten years. This was no small feat, either, considering that I was swimming against a strong pro-avocado current of popular opinion—Americans love them some guacamole. There’s also the small obstacle of how my entire family and every single one of my close friends idolizes and cherishes the avocado, thereby forcing me to be stealthy about my ten-year grudge to avoid additional food-related harassment. It was doable, but it also meant I was forced to feign countless years of half-hearted chip-dipping while heavily leaning on the salsa bowl for relief.

About a month ago, I found myself back at Trader Joe’s (kismet…you see where this is leading) doing some pre-football-game-watching-snack-stocking (not to be confused with the other yet equally essential pre-football-game-watching-beer-and-wine-run). Wanting to please the masses like the thoughtful and generous roommate I am, I found myself perusing the guacamole section. A modest green tub proclaiming, “Made with Greek Yogurt!” caught my eye. Hmm, I thought. I do enjoy Greek yogurt, and this tub is less than four dollars. Sold.

So what earth-shattering occurrence reversed my decade-long Freudian superstition? It was this totally radical and counter-intuitive thing called Actually Giving It A Chance. Yup, it was as simple as mustering the gumption to dip a tortilla chip far enough a bowl of guacamole to actually retain a decent dollop of the stuff, rather than a faint green residue which I nullify by immediately dunking into salsa. Oops, I thought, as soon as I chewed and swallowed a big scoop of TJ’s guac. I kinda of like this.

Since the inaugural bite, I have purchased and plowed through no less than three to four tubs of guacamole. I put it on everything from my breakfast tacos to turkey sandwiches to spooning it solo…and it only took me ten whole years to come around.

MoJophobia

Emma Gase  

You’d think that after I had tried and conquered the salad empire, my culinary life was a trip to races after that. Well, you’d be assuming wrong. I did not conquer the salad empire that fateful night at Claim Jumper — the reality was I had tried one salad that had fried bits of noodle on it and was doused with a dressing that was really just a spicy, glorified version of peanut butter. Hardly fare of the foodies. It was early days, and I had some hard work ahead of me if I wanted to really triumph over the Epicurean Empire. At that point, I had merely landed on its shores, but there were still hordes of hostile natives and a whole continent ahead of me to explore before I could revel in any sort of true victory.

Enormous and intimidating boundaries aside, at least now there was an entire previously forbidden section of the menu now open to my perusal. My tastes had been officially diversified: I liked salad. If that didn’t connote adulthood, I didn’t know what did. I was cured of the Beige Diet—or so I thought.

Taste buds can change, but habits are tricky lil’ devils. You don’t just go from American cheese melted onto Einstein bagels to quinoa and kale chips overnight. This journey has been a long and tumultuous one, filled with spat-out bites, tentative dips of hummus, and joyous revelations.

As luck would have it, merely months after my salad breakthrough, I was on my way to freshman year in Ann Arbor, a place rife with unique dining options. Which leads me to the site in which I began to forge my eating identity, the mother lode of all freshman food consumption: MoJo dining hall.

I remember the first time I walked into MoJo. For fifteen solid minutes, all I could do was continuously make laps around the whole room. I gawked at the massive salad bar, the two giant Panini makers, the block ‘M’ waffle-makers, the ever-roasting rotisserie chicken, the make-your-own stir-fry station, the chronic supply of fresh, impossibly gooey cookies every twenty minutes, the giant vats of peanut butter. Talk about sensory overload.

So I did what any overwhelmed and intimidated freshman would have done: I made a beeline for the burgers and fries, ate it all in twelve minutes, and booked it right on outta there. So much for my expanded horizons. And making friends.

And so it went for the first two weeks. Kashi cereal for breakfast, turkey and cheese Panini for lunch, and a burger for dinner. I was so boring I nearly fell asleep mid-bite. I never ventured near the salad bar, or the make-your-own stir-fry station, or the rotisserie chicken (I didn’t seem to have a problem with the cookies, funnily enough). With all the change and discomfort of being a freshman at Michigan, my brain didn’t have the capacity to branch out, even if branching out was as insignificant as putzing around the salad bar. I couldn’t deal with the stress of making a salad while I was trying to understand game theory in PoliSci 160!

After two weeks of monotonous bread, cheese and cold cut combinations, I felt an overbearing sentiment only Paul Rudd’s character from “I Love You Man” could have understood: I needed to make some fucking friends. Luckily, ‘twas the season. Fall was kicking into gear, people were starting to get familiar, and I had tentatively chosen two people I could very well see as being real friends. And it just so happened that these two folks turned out to be some of the most knowledgeable foodies I had (and will ever) met. And it also just so happened that these fledgling friendships were forged over two-hour dinners in MoJo every night. It’s like Ringo and Joe Cocker wisely said: I get comfortable with the salad bar and expanded dining options with a little help from my friends. Or some variation of that.

I still remember that first meal I ate with my new friends. As they ventured to the salad bar and started placing foreign and terrifying items such as beets and hummus onto their plates, I took a deep breath and steeled myself to dive blindly into the unfamiliar. Following their lead, I made a salad for the first time in college. Well, perhaps “salad” is a loose word to describe what was really just a bowl consisting entirely of garbanzo beans, sesame seeds and a mountain of feta, but hey, it was a start. I had four years to get it right.

Chinese Chicken Salad, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Overcome the Beige Diet

Emma Gase  

It was the night of my 18th birthday. My palms prickled with moisture as I saw the waiter slowly moving to our table, palms up in the perfect waiter-ly 90-degree angle. I nervously thrummed my fingers on the leather booth, trying to ignore my growing apprehension. The waiter set down my plate in front of me. It wasn’t on a silver platter, but it may as well have been. There it was, in all of its pyramid-shaped, peanut-sprinkled, fried-won-ton topped magnificence: my very first salad.

I know what you’re thinking. Do Chinese chicken salads even count as salads? Just kidding, because of course they do. They have lettuce. The more shocking thing you were probably wondering was why in the heck it took me eighteen long years to order a salad. Am I some sort of freak? The answer is…yep, actually. I’ll elaborate.

I grew up on what my mother has dubbed “The Beige Diet.” To be fair, I would say the colors also ranged from yellow to white to plain brown, but you get the gist. Mine was a diet of chicken fingers, of French fries, of grilled cheese and goldfish crackers, of waffles, peanut butter, and cheeseburgers. Cheese, bread, bread and cheese, and most of all, meat of indiscernible origin fried into cute, bite-size shapes. And let’s not forget potatoes of all varieties—except for sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes contain detectable traces of something resembling actual nutrition, and were therefore blacklisted from my diet.

Though I’m sure I technically fell into the broad category of the plain-buttered-noodle eating crowd labeled as “picky eaters,” I really don’t think “picky” is an accurate enough word to describe my former eating habits. My tastes were a different animal. For the sake of clarity, let’s call my former self an “uninformed, unimaginative, stubborn, and slightly deranged eater.”

Looking back, my tastes came from some dark place that defied logic, and, well…taste. I inexplicably found all fruit unappetizing and mildly grotesque. I scorned the very idea of vegetables, and would only choke down some broccoli at dinner in order to get dessert. I was so offended by the color green in my food, I can’t even count the laborious and painstaking minutes I dedicated to picking out the dried green parsley bits in Top Ramen.

Like the majority of stubborn and close-minded people, my unfortunate habits stemmed from one dangerously common root: fear. I was afraid to take a risk and try something new, certain in my misguided, youthful convictions that something earth-shatteringly terrible would happen should I try a salad (or any non-beige food) and like it. While I can no longer recall exactly what I expected would transpire should I ingest radically exotic cuisine stuffs such as bananas or mushrooms, I can tell you I was not interested in finding out. Just a cheeseburger for me, well done, no lettuce, tomatoes or mayo—and lots and lots o’ ketchup, thankyouverymuch.

For years, I endured pestering parents, relatives and friends prodding me to try this, try that, you might like it, you’ll never know if you don’t try it, you might like it, tomatoes are basically ketchup, just try it! Just try it. Try, try, try. This was the mantra that haunted me for years. It was easy enough to ignore in elementary and middle school, when a hot dog or grilled cheese was never too far out of reach. But in high school, things started changing. It began to bother me that I only ordered cheeseburgers at restaurants, that I endured a constant reaming from my friends and family, that I hated going to nice restaurants because there was food plain enough for me to order. I began to feel jealous of my friends who tried new things, who ordered meals that couldn’t be classified as Kid’s Menu fare, or just another form of chicken fingers.

My discontent grew. And grew and grew. Until one night, my friends took me out for a meal on my birthday and everything I knew changed. I remember looking at the menu, and feeling seized with a strange, immutable urge—an urge to pass over the burger section, and order a foreign item. So I did.

Though I may have been the only person to experience a cathartic moment in that particular Claim Jumper in Wheeling, Illinois that particular night, I am not exaggerating when I say my life changed after that. I’m not just a different kind of eater than I was when I was 18; I’m a different kind of person. In the last three years, I have expanded my culinary tastes in a more accelerated and concentrated amount than anyone else I know. This is the story of my sojourn from a Beige Diet to a Try Everything diet—and it was all thanks to a Chinese chicken salad.