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Eating Eyeballs
I first became aware of food when I was about six years old. Yes, I already knew that you put food in your mouth, chewed and swallowed, and that it tasted either good or bad. But I wasn't really aware of food until I noted that while my friends had dinner like macaroni and cheese, my parents were making chicken cacciatore. I was crushed; I wanted to be normal. So I retaliated by refusing to taste the wonderful meals my parents would make. I would only agree to try the dishes if my parents would let me eat peanut butter afterwards. My fall back plan was a little odd, as I didn't like peanut butter, so I would usually eat the dinner my parents had prepared after acting dismayed at the foreign sounding name of the dish.
As I grew older, I learned the value of trying new things. I learned that eating food that my friends were not used to made me more comfortable whenever I was visiting someone's home. I would eat almost anything, and my parents trusted me to eat without making ugly faces at unfamiliar food. My manners earned me invitations to adult parties where I could curl up, read, and politely eat my dinner. It got me out of having a baby-sitter, and I was proud to be considered grown-up.
By the time I was thirteen, there were only a few things that I wouldn't eat:
- Snails: I thought the sauce was delicious, but my imagination always brought up a picture of some oozing, yellow thing right before I bit into the actual snail.
- Fish: Fresh fish is still hard to come by where I live, and I always imagined the smell of a fish market was something much worse than it actually was.
- Any organ of any kind: I'd heard too many people say, "Ew, gross," in response to the thought of liver or kidneys to even consider the thought that I might enjoy them.
The first couple of meals I had in France were reassuringly familiar: a little bit of cheese, omelet, gazpacho, or quiche. Then Patrice, Anne's father and a marine biologist, grilled sardines the length of my hand for dinner. His method of grilling the sardines was charring them. I had tried charred meat before, and hadn’t liked it. This dinner was charred, a fish, and it was looking at me with an eyeball in a head that I was going to have to eat. Patrice explained that the best way to eat these sardines was to eat the whole thing -- bones, skin, eyes, and all. Since my French was still a little shaky, I hoped that I had misunderstood him -- one of the few times I would have enjoyed feeling stupid. Patrice made it clear, however, that I was to eat the entire, ugly little fish when he picked one up, pointed to it, and ate it in three bites. I still don’t know how he managed to fit that much fish into his mouth.
I forged my way through three of those little fish: eyes, tongue, bones, imagined brains, and all. Then I switched over to the eggplant casserole, a dish I felt a certain fondness towards because I had displayed some knowledge of the French language earlier that evening by saying that an "aubergine" was an "eggplant." My brief moment of fluency had convinced me that I liked the dish, and I became a great fan of squash for the remaining three weeks of my visit to France.
