I am staring out the train window, into the blackness of salt flats and desert- past the glow of casino neon lights blurred into the night sky. The motion of the train lulls and vibrates me-like a dark soothing mechanical womb. Still in my pajamas and bathrobe, I stumble into the dining car. Meals on the train are thick and dense, with lots of “white sauce” and processed peas. My chosen dinner option is listed on the menu as “stir-fried vegetables”; sliced canned olives sit perched atop my meal, unexplained and uninvited. Pregnant with trepidation, I eat a mouthful of my food.
Then it all comes flooding back to me: canned vegetables.
Living in California, and working in a huge organic grocery store, I have become spoiled by the variety and availability of fresh produce. I had almost forgotten the pasty, bland flavor that is unique to canned vegetables. That mouthful jolted me back to childhood.
My mother was obsessed with canned food. Despite the fact that I was born and raised in California, a land lush and abundant with all manner of fresh produce, my mother insisted on cooking processed packaged food to the exclusion of all else. I was 12 years old before I discovered that all cheese didn’t come in a Velveeta box.
One of my mother’s specialties was canned green beans-microwaved. The beans were dumped into a Pyrex bowl in the can juice, with bacon bits generously mixed throughout. The beans were always cooked until chalky and tasteless, and the bacon bits swelled up with the canned green bean juice, like swollen dried dog food, floating in the pet’s dish on the patio out in the rain. Chewy bacon-flavored sponges swaddled in steaming green bean paste.
I am suddenly jolted back from the smells of my childhood by the arm of a hairy corpulent man reaching over me for a package of Thousand Island dressing. While shoving a mashed, gravied meat sandwich into his throat, he tears open the package-squeezing its contents onto his watery iceberg wedge-enveloping it with a chunky orange shawl-like a white trash princess. I stare back into the face of my dinner. And I think about my childhood. And I think how much I have always hated green beans.