The asparagus of childhood appears in memory like dead green fingers from a cold can, and I can clearly see its gray green squishiness lying there limp and dead on the plate. The thought evokes the buttery burning rubber smell of it and soon I feel the familiar rising tightness moving up my throat—even now, half a century later—and I approach the very edge of emetic crisis. The sight, smell, the very thought of asparagus used to make my digestive system go into violent reverse peristaltic waves and all was lost.
My parents claimed this was a vegetable. To my mind, this vile substance was never anything more than a green poison created by children-loathing adults on the other side of the Iron Curtain. That is where, in those days, the Evil Ones lived. And THEY must be responsible for this. I hated them, and I loathed the mind control they exerted over my parents to make them insist that, to become or to remain amongst the “good children”, this toxic substance must go in, go down and stay down. This of course was not humanly possible, and the enemy thus exerted a hegemonic form of psychic tyranny over adult and child alike. Those were terrible times.
Many years later, having escaped the Gulag of Childhood, I found myself the new owner of twenty acres of sunlight and rich earth. I was enjoying—yes enjoying—cutting our acre of grass for the first time with the push mower in early spring. There in a flat area that I assumed was a flower bed, a thin, pale, green and shiny stalk had pushed through the leaf litter. Its top was faintly adorned with small overlapping artichoke-like leaves on a frail and tapering tip. This was asparagus. I recognized it from the wanted posters I had seen as a child.
I had learned in my botanizing that this stuff grew wild, and was even stalked by those who also thought many parts of a picnic table were edible. Wild Asparagus was to die for, according to some brainwashed and pitiful souls. Here in my new yard it apparently grew as an act of intention—all the more awful and repugnant, I thought as I mowed up and down, coming closer and closer to the dreaded plant with each pass. But alas, I was lured to it like a tongue to a frozen pump handle in winter, and I plucked the awful spear from the ground. It held me in its chlorophyllic trance. I put it in my mouth. What was I doing!?
I ate it and it did not threaten to come back up. It was, in fact, delicious! It was at that moment that I discovered the difference between fresh and embalmed asparagus. Succulent and slightly crunchy, fresh asparagus tasted of summer sun, rich humus and all things green and growing. Such is the way with knowing there is no middle man between your food’s life in the soil and your first bite of it fresh from the earth. From the time they could browse the garden rows, my children loved fresh green peas (another canned gaggy childhood horror for me) because they could pull Sugar Snaps warm from the trellis and eat them like candy.
So parents, if your vegetable-challenged children hide canned peas in their cheeks or smuggle them to the family dog; if they threaten to bring back the meal’s slightly-chewed metal-entombed asparagus back onto their plates (and who can blame them?), just send them browsing to the garden. Produce fresh from the vine may forever change their little minds about those loathsome good-for-you foods that so horrified you and me as hungry but mistrusting children. (You must remember, however, that for some veggies for some people—brussel sprouts or rutabagas, for instance—there may be no redemption, no matter how fresh.)
By Fred First [email protected]
