Five Things I Shouldn’t Have Eaten
1. Random plants found on elementary school playground
As a young girl, I dearly wanted to live in the wild. I read a lot of fairy books and books about cats living in clans in the forest. My friends read the same books. So we set ourselves to foraging. There was a clump of what we called onion grass sprouting from under the playground fence. We sliced it with our thumbnails, breathed the strong oniony smell, stuck it in our mouths. This was probably wild chive, essentially harmless. We also decided to eat creeping Charlie. Or it was a weed I thought I’d heard my parents call creeping Charlie. It grew in the soccer fields. It had leaves that looked like slices of celery: domed and scalloped on the top, curled inward on the bottom. The creeping Charlie tasted sharp, a bit minty, a bit piney. Sometimes it made my mouth feel strange. We pretended it was a curative herb.
2. Stale marshmallow from school musical
I was eight. My sister, thirteen, was putting on a production of Bugsy Malone. Her music teacher was old and hateful and chose obscure, embarrassing musicals for the middle schoolers to perform. Bugsy Malone is about Prohibition-era gangsters, so each boy on stage was armed with a marshmallow gun. During the performance, a stray marshmallow bullet fell at my feet. My mom said something to me, quietly, out of respect for the performers, and she motioned to the marshmallow on the floor. I couldn’t hear what she said. I picked up the marshmallow, blew on it, and ate it. It was very stale. After the curtain fell my mom asked where the marshmallow was. She had meant for me to give it back to the stage crew. My sister said they reused the same marshmallows for weeks at a time.
3. Gluten, for the first fourteen years of my life
I found out that I have celiac disease accidentally and with some relief. After a strange fatigue, I’d had many vials of blood drawn and sent off for testing. There was a hole in my heart when I was born, supposedly benign, but my mom always worried. When I heard we had results, I thought, This is when they tell me I need open heart surgery. No: I had asymptomatic celiac disease. My doctor gave me two weeks to go on a gluten bender before eliminating it completely from my diet. The last gluten I ever ate was in the form of an Oreo cheesecake. My school orchestra was having a field trip. We stopped at The Cheesecake Factory before seeing Riccardo Muti conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The cheesecake was delicious. The concert was probably good, too, but all I remember is the fear that I would fall asleep and my head would nod onto the shoulder of the man sitting next to me.
4. Construction dust
My orchestra toured Italy. There were ninety of us, ranging in age from nine to eighteen, clogging the streets with our loud American voices and the instruments on our backs, earning the hatred of locals everywhere. In Florence, I bought a cup of hazelnut and stracciatella gelato. The gelateria was the real deal, according to our delightful tour guide, Lisa Careless. She actually cared very much and we drove her to despair with our chronic lateness. I loved Lisa. She was British and lived on an olive farm. She called us sweeties—“Andiamo, sweeties!”—pronounced with that clean British t. Gelato in hand, I stepped out of the little shop to make room for more customers. It was windy that day, a chill and terrible March wind. The next gust left on my beautiful gelato a scattering of dust and bits of stone or plaster from the half-constructed building next door. What could I do? I wasn’t going to waste the gelato.
5. Ball of butter
Senior prom was at a hotel in Chicago. I wore a teal satin gown and resolved to enjoy myself. I was hungry. There was bread on our table, but I couldn’t eat the bread. Instead, I eyed the small ball of mozzarella on my plate. It was pale and soft and smelled milky, mildly cheesy. I took a bite and then placed it toothmarked-side down on my plate. Unfortunately, it was butter.