The Cats in the Irish Cradle

The Cats in the Irish Cradle

My son Roger is thirty-seven years old and I am particularly pleased to have him along with me on this week in Western Ireland. Roger is, for all our differences, more like me than not. There are many ways to notice this, but the best way is to spend a week in a “strange” new land with specific culinary customs. Now some would say that Ireland is more like America than most places, given the shared cultural heritage and the fact that so many Irish have integrated into the United States over the centuries. But that is precisely what makes this such a unique place to observe these eating habit differences. The food tends towards earthen colors and yet has no claim to being non-GMO or “organic”.

To begin with, one must understand the co-dependent relationship that develops between parent and child. I was raised all over the world and my mother was a hard-working woman of great breadth and presence yet humble self-awareness and a fine sense of humor. My father was a non-presence with total self-confidence and a seriousness about him that only the high-striving can recognize. This was neither good nor bad, but certainly not influential. My son has been raised much more locally in the metro New York area and he had the benefit of an attention-to-detail mother and a father who’s eye was always on the next turn in the road. Where I was dragged far and wide by my mother, he was firmly rooted in New York by a mother who prized stability and a father who’s wanderlust ways caused him to see the world while seeking to understand his place in that world. There are enough differences in upbringing to suggest that my son and I might have very different perspectives on food and the tastes that accompany them. But strangely, not so.

I grew up yearning for, by dint of absence, all things Americano. I wanted more processed and pasteurized rather than organic and natural. My tastes ran to the ordinary and the comfort style of cooking because my mother, a home economist by training, was way too distracted by life’s opportunities to ever bother with a recipe. During the formative years, I was a Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie and TV-Dinner kind of kid. Filling the belly with whatever felt non-threatening and pleasing was the message that came through once back in the good old U.S. of A. Local fare in the tropics of Venezuela and the hinterlands of Costa Rica had not been something to be hankered for, but something to be suffered when all else failed. There was a certain strange tolerance while not a great predilection. It helped me become immune to the delicacy of palate that most kids developed, but in both a good and bad way. I often suggest that I have little respect for food and know much more about what I don’t like or want than what I do. I either ate what was on offer or chose not to eat.

Roger had a very different existence. He never had to stick to boiled water and he had a mother that had more recipes in her head than on paper, but who’s cooking was as consistently good as it was tasty. His mother was not a believer in forced eating of any kind. He ate what he wanted of what was put in front of him, most of which was good, but far from purposefully health-conscious. There were no extreme’s in his household, just down-the-center-of-the-fairway fare that was available for consumption by one and all. Good food (great was never an objective though occasionally an outcome), which went down without ever being shoehorned.

So Roger’s variety of likes is quite narrow and mine is as well. We each eat foods that the other would shun, but chances are that if you tracked us both over time, you would find very similar trace elements in our digestive systems. Watching him parse through a meal is a direct reflection on what I must look like to others with more defining and less discerning palates. Mutually exclusive histories and strikingly similar ingestion.

Europe of 2020 is quite different form Europe 1970. I suppose fifty years is a meaningful gap, but yesterday just stopped being yesterday sometime before today, and tomorrow is unlikely to be like yesterday or even today. For all the changes in Europe over the span of awareness, the food remains more-or-less the same. Food is what tends most to define a culture or a people. I’m sure there are other, more subtle, characteristics, but food is who we are. We may be what we eat, but our food has long-since started to look like us. European food comes is two distinct varietals. There is that which resembles anyplace USA (or maybe South Korea) with its brightly colored wrappers. But there is also the food which we are served by the local chef-de-cuisine, which is always involved with a great deal of potato and veg on the plate. Roger sand I both pick our way around the plate, not wanting to stir the pot, so to speak. We share knowing glances and occasional comments. Others like Candice just dig in with a healthy, earthy kind of innocence. An Irish mutton stew is always a must to her. Roger and I are way too skeptical of either the food or our own taste sensitivity to dig in sight unseen to a mysterious array.

My boy takes good care of his father. When he finds me in the bathroom too often, he checks to see if I collapsed from either weakness of underfed nutrition or overfed strangeness. He waits for me on street corners like Lassie wanting to make sure Timmy hasn’t fallen into the gelato well. He helps me up from benches on the assumption that my caloric deficiency precludes any meaningful core strength. He asks if I need a better hat or perhaps a cane. The cat may be in the cradle with a silver spoon, but my boy grew up just like me in some ways and in others he is much better by virtue of his displayed care and feeding of said father.