Am I starting to get through that my family is weird with food? I never saw this attribute growing up. And maybe it did me good–until getting pregnant, I never had heartburn and rarely suffered from a stomach ache. I think I had food poisoning once (but it could just as well have been a virus or something). I can eat ANYTHING and not have a grumbling belly. Maybe I owe that to my family–all their food peccadilloes may have caused me to have an iron stomach–you know, that-which-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger kind of thing. I mean, it’s apparent we have not needed Pepto-Bismol for, like, 20 years. So, really, I should be grateful to my family for giving me this gift.

Nonetheless, my grandfather went too far on at least one occasion. I had forgotten this episode and owe this little gem of a post to CS.

My family was at my grandfather’s house a couple years ago for the Metairie St. Patrick’s Day parade. My grandfather had a bag of fruit on the counter. All the fruit was either very ripe or over ripe. “That’s a lot of fruit for one person. Must have been a sale,” I thought to myself. I was wrong, oh, so wrong.

My grandfather offered all of us some of his fruit, but we were in a chips & dip and fried chicken sort of mood and passed. He then grinned proudly and said to us, “They were throwing these out.” We all just looked questioningly at my grandfather, so he continued, “You can go back to the produce department at the grocery store and ask them for compost stuff and they’ll give you perfectly good fruit. They just give it to you. For free.”

My grandfather was offering us trash. To eat. With pride.