SNACK TIME or This rant is not about what you may think it is about.

 So let me tell you some of the things that I enjoy eating. I love hot dogs, sausages, hamburgers, steaks, chicken, turkey, fish of all kinds and various other seafoods. Most of you nodded for a few of those and some of you nodded for most if not all of them. Now let me tell you some of the foods I enjoy that you will probably NOT nod so much for. Hog jowls, pigs ears, pigs feet, chitlins (Yeah I know they are actually called Chitterlings, but nobody called them that when I was growing up and I grew up pretty much in Chitlins central.), Possum, Squirrel, snake, and Armadillo. There are more, but those are the ones you've at least had a chance of knowing. Now while I enjoy the mental image of a lot of you looking queasy and thinking about losing your lunch, I can also hear the desperate question of “WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU EAT THAT CRAP?” Whelp, the answer is both simple and mildly complicated.

Yessee, my family was so poor when I was born, church mice took up collections for us. The first house I remember living in had no running water and no electricity. Our “toilet” was a three-hole outhouse about 200 feet from the back door and our “Faucet” was a well about a hundred feet away on the opposite side of the house. Heating was accomplished by a very large fireplace in the front room of the three-room house and cooling was done by opening up the five or six windows. Even though we had a garden and Daddy worked on Mr. Lawrence's farm, food was never plentiful and the meat was especially scarce. Unless you fished, hunted or raised it yourself, you didn't have access to a lot of meat sources.

So I grew up (Well age 5ish to say 13ish) where you ate whatever the good lord or Daddy's gun provided and you didn't waste anything that was edible. If Daddy brought back a couple of possums or groundhogs, Momma skinned them, cleaned them and cooked them up for supper. If we got lucky and had a pig to slaughter, pretty much every danged part of that animal was used. Heck Momma even boiled the bones done for broth.

About the time I hit 14, Daddy got a job with the County Road Crew and actually owned and operated a small general store for a few years. (Well Momma actually ran it since he worked from 6am till about 5:30 pm 5 days a week.) So about this time, we moved to a house that actually had indoor plumbing and electricity and was able to make regular trips to the grocery store in Luverne, Alabama. A lot of the more esoteric forms of meat slowly vanished from our diet except for the rare squirrel or possum that Daddy or my brother would bring in if they went hunting on the weekends. While we were still poor, we were no longer so desperately poor that we had to eat literally anything we could get our hands on.

Ok, so that deals with why I started eating things that most people would rather starve than eat. No, I hear you, the possibly non-existent reader asking, “Why the hell are you STILL eating those nasty things?” I haven't been even remotely poor or desperate in well over half the 55 years of my life so why eat things like Jowls, Feet, and Chitterlings? (There I spelled it right, are you happy?) A wonderful lady once told me, “We ain't poor no more. We don't have to eat things like that anymore” and she is right. I don't HAVE to eat it anymore. I want to. I enjoy it. I think they are yummy.

A lot of what I hear from naysayers is a kind of negative association. They associate these foods with being poor and ridiculed. They associate it with the helpless, almost overwhelming desperation that is an almost daily part of being truly poor. They feel like if people have managed to elevate themselves out of that deep dark pit, then they should never lower themselves to eating the “trash” foods that helped sustain them.

I do understand that mentality. Growing up dirt poor can be a horribly demeaning time. Everyone, even those only marginally above you in social rank, look down on you. They see the one suit of clothes you have for school or the fact your shoes are hand me downs from your brother and need a balled up sock in the toe to stay on. Everything about you is a target for derision and hate. So why, when you finally manage to escape that, do you do anything to remind people of what you once were?

Well, in the case of the aforementioned foods, the answer is very simple. THEY TASTE FREAKING GREAT! Well, IMNSHO anyways. I like the way they taste. Sure, they are not healthy. Sure (especially up North) they can be hard to get. Yeah, people definitely look at you crazy when you are chowing down on a pickled pig's foot (feet? Foots?), but if it tastes good why give a flick what other people think? As for the not healthy part, I can promise you that a heck of a lot of you eat things that are truly unhealthy for you, but you eat/drink them anyway because you like them. Hells some of the concoctions I see whipped up at Starbucks makes hog jowls seem downright Vegan.

Let's put this in another light. Say you have spent most of your life as a solid Middle-Class family. You have enjoyed snacking on hot dogs, hamburgers and all of the staples of MC life. Suddenly, magical fairy dust is sprinkled and you are now an Upper-Class family with a nice house in the Hamptons and more money than Midas. Keeping in mind that you LOVE all of those foods from your MC life, are you suddenly going to stop eating them. Is your diet going to consist of only the finest steaks, the bestest lobsters? Are you going to stop eating the things you have loved for decades just because people are going to look at you funny?

(As a side note here, I would like to say that there is indeed a sizable slice of people who would indeed stop doing/eating all the things they love because suddenly people would condemn them and mock them, but that is the subject of another rant. Moving on...)

There are many foods from the early days that I no longer eat with turnips and collards being numbers one and two on the list. However, I no longer eat them because I despise them. There was many a moon where the only thing sitting on the kitchen table to eat were turnips and collard greens. You ate them because you didn't want to go hungry, but years and years of eating them over and over again has left me unable to even think about eating them. Hells, I am not even sure I could stomach eating that if my life literally depended on it.

However, I enjoy eating a lot of different things that I don't HAVE to eat anymore. I don't care what people think. I don't care what they say. I will continue to eat jowls, feet (foots?), chitterlings and yes even possum if I ever get a chance. My concern over your disapproval ranks right up there with my deep seated worry over meteorite strikes. Unlike when I lived pretty much at the bottom of the poverty ladder, I have to freedom to eat anything I want AND I refuse to let the views and attitudes of others tell me what I CANNOT do.

End of Rant