Food for thought

By Patricia Hunt
Published: May 2, 2008

Americans will eat absolutely anything. In the last two weeks, the truth of this statement has been demonstrated to me.
A couple of weeks ago, a small box was delivered to my office containing candy, one ballpoint pen and a notepad. It was sent as a gift by a Christian organization that apparently wanted to be fondly thought of by Mary Baldwin College students.
The candy was the cheapest candy available. There were suckers, no-name chewy squares, bubble gum, and a lone Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, which I ate immediately. This is the kind of candy that children hate to get on Halloween. This is the kind of candy that can brand you a cheapskate by all the neighborhood kids if you dare try to exercise frugality in your choice of Halloween offerings. It is the candy you give to your brother when he has the flu and couldn’t go trick-or-treating and your mother insists that you share your loot.
I thought I had low standards for what I will eat. Until last week, I thought that the only people with lower food standards than mine were 3-year-olds who eat stuff that drops to the kitchen floor and my hound, Oscar. Oscar has me beat. I have seen him enjoy a squirrel that has been dead for so long it looked like a gray pancake. I did not think it possible for fully grown humans to ingest foodstuffs that I myself would refuse. I was so wrong.
I took the candy out of the box (which cost more than the candy) and put it in a bowl in the entrance hallway of my building. I made a little sign that said free stuff and named the organization that sent it. I wondered how long I should let it sit there before I threw it away. One week? I was never tempted to eat a single piece of it (except for the one I had wolfed down the minute I opened the box).
My building houses the secretary and faculty offices of a graduate program, the Learning Skills Center (just one person) and me. It is not an especially high-traffic area. In less than a week, all the candy was gone but two purple suckers. This morning, all evidence of the candy was gone: the candy, the bowl, the sign. I don’t know if the housekeeper threw out the last two suckers or if someone ate them.
Quite frankly, I was stunned. I simply did not think people older than 8 would touch this stuff. It was awful. It was bad for your body, terrible for your teeth and it really could not have tasted all that good. Why did people eat it? I am not sure, but I have a couple of ideas. First of all was the word “free.” Free stuff. Americans are gaga over anything free. Nonprofit organizations, banks and businesses are all aware of how crazy we get over anything free. We don’t bother to ask ourselves whether we want what is being given away. Who cares when it’s free? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. (That saying always interested me because there is no such thing as a free horse. Have you ever had to feed one of those things? I guess it is free only if you sell it or slaughter it immediately.) We love free.
The second possibility is simply that it is there. Put food, any food at all, in easy reach and we will eat it no matter how disgusting, how bad for us or how many resolutions we have made to lose weight before swim season. The brain is left out of the loop entirely. The hand reaches for the cheap candy and the stuff is in our mouth before the rational part of the brain ever gets engaged. It is so fast, like a frog’s tongue catching an insect. Only after it is all over do we begin to ask, “What did I just do? And why?”
I don’t know whether to be reassured that my standards for what I will ingest are not really lower than those of other people (I’m normal!) or filled with despair over our prospects as a species (how can people who eat like this survive another hundred years?). Maybe I should regard it as a useful feature for our future adaptation. When the world’s food supply gets low and we need to expand our notion of what is acceptable for the dinner table, we will be well equipped to regard insects and seaweed as delicacies. After all, if you can enjoy a purple sucker, you can eat just about anything.
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.