My
first meal in boot camp was breakfast and memorable for many reasons. One was a
sign hanging behind the chow line that read, "Take all you want, eat all
you take." I soon found out that they were serious about that.
At
that breakfast, I was so scared with Drill Instructors yelling, the noise, no
sleep, sloppy clothes, my baldhead, that I kept my eyes straight ahead as
instructed, and put my tray out whenever I wanted something. For some inexplicable
reason, I thought you had to take everything. I ended up with a queasy stomach,
and a tray heaped with food. As I approached the table, I saw that my fellow
recruits, thinking more clearly than me, had a cracker, or a piece of toast, or
nothing, but none had the arm straining weight of the food I carried.
When
I sat, I saw our Drill Instructor glaring at me. I put the slogan I had seen
together with that look and my tray that should have had a forklift under it
instead of my quivering arms, and I knew I was in for a life altering
experience.
I
watched in terror as the huge man stormed over to me. I was able to jump to the
position of attention as he put his face an inch from mine and screamed the
profanities of a demon. I was able to decipher that he ordered me to eat every
bite of food on my plates, notice the plural. Further, I had three minutes to
do it, and if I were unable to hold it down, I would have the opportunity to
eat it again. I believed him. I looked at my tray and the horror of my error
came crashing home. I thought to myself, "I am going to die in the Marine
Corps, not in combat, but from breakfast."
I
sat to my task with both hands scooping food into my mouth. I chewed very
little of it, and was getting through it pretty well until I saw the bowl of
oatmeal. I have never liked oatmeal. The thought makes me sick, and there sat a
bowl of the stuff, steaming, as if to mock me. I broke into a sweat that soaked
my shirt.
There
was only one way I was going to be able to put that stuff on top of everything
else and not see it again. I scooped the whole glob out of the bowl with my
right hand. My gag reflex was working overtime as I brought the mess to my
mouth. Before I got it there, a recruit sitting down the table from me, hurled
his miniscule breakfast and everything he had eaten in the past month. Mine was
on the way up to join his, but I believed the Drill Instructor's stated
consequence. I crammed all the oatmeal into my mouth at once and swallowed to
hold the coming eruption down. I closed my eyes and tears joined the sweat
coursing down my face, but I did it. I got it all down, and held it. I won. I
had survived breakfast.
The
next event with food was the opposite. In Vietnam, due to some real life and
death circumstances, my unit was without food and water for three days and four
nights, and under extreme physical duress. I dreamed of that boot camp
breakfast and longed for the morsel of oatmeal that had slid down my face, onto
my tray, that I hid by sliding a plate over it. These two experiences have combined
to give me a near neurotic intolerance for wasting food.
The
real magnitude of my neurosis surfaced when I was a Scout Master. I had never
been a waster, and it irked me when people would throw away untouched food in
lunch lines, but with boys burning food just because they could, I became a
Food Cop. Whatever you cooked, or took off the community plate, you ate. It
became a hard and fast rule for my family, the scout troop, and me.
Enter
plastic storage containers. They are where food goes to die. This has become a point
of contention between the Admiral and I. Being an Admiral, she thinks that
every meal must feed a ships' company. Consequently, we have leftovers, and I
don't mean a serving or two, I mean pans of stuff. After the meal, this food
becomes an unrecognizable mass as it is squeezed into plastic containers and
placed in the refrigerator.
Someone
will go there to investigate the leftovers, take out one of twenty plastic
containers, open it, and not be able to discern what it is. They will sniff it
in a vain attempt to identify the contents, and not being sure, or worse,
knowing what the mass is, will return it to the fridge shelf where it will be
shuttled into the dark recesses and left to become an unrecognizable mass with
fur.
When
the refrigerator is cleaned, these tubs are emptied in a process that the
Admiral euphemistically refers to as recycling. Knowing what you know about my
aversion to waste, you can see how this process is ripe for conflict.
We
are working through it, cooking smaller portions, emphasizing the
take-all-you-want-eat-all-you-take standard. It seems to be working. Either that
or the Admiral is cleaning the fridge under the cover of darkness. The problem
has a simple solution; eat it, don't leave it.
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