Food of the Gods

I used to like SpaghettiOs^®. Any kid worth his salt loved them. Of course, somewhere along the way I lost my taste for soggy, canned pasta; but I remember just the same. Kids ate SpaghettiOs – PERIOD. It was the law. We all knew it. Somewhere in some forgotten land, like we had seen Charlton Heston emerge from with his cheaply painted wooden tablets for what seemed like a hundred times, the laws of kid-dom were etched in stone. At the very least, some worshiped older-kid-god had carved them mercilessly into the bark of some unsuspecting great oak with his grandfather's prized Old Timer.

The weird kids, the ones who blindly ate whatever their mothers had prepared for lunch, didn't get to savor those rare occasions when one meatball mysteriously entered the mix. They just didn’t grasp the true meaning of that.

SpaghettiOs meant defiance – months of it. A good eighteen weeks of refusing peanut-butter and jelly or the endless barrage of Oscar-Mayer Mystery Loaf would ultimately lead frustrated mothers to the can. It was inevitable. We knew this; and only the aforementioned weird kids, who also wouldn't jump in Dad's freshly raked pile of leaves, would miss out.

To this day I still don't know if I ever actually liked the taste of SpaghettiOs. I do know that it didn't matter. It came in a can. It couldn’t possibly be good for me. To Mom it was this or let me starve, and that's where the pleasure came in. Taste-schmaste. Mom had submitted. SpaghettiOs meant we kids had taken over the world of lunch, and Bob Franco-American was our fearless leader.

As I got older and lost my taste for most foods with sauces of unexplained origin, SpaghettiOs eventually disappeared from my kitchen cabinets; but every now and then a can will mysteriously find its way home. Laughing mischievously at my unaware mother's expense, I savor each unappealing tasting spoonful… and smile.



©1997, 2009 Sven Skupien. All rights reserved. SpaghettiOs^® CSC Brands LP.

Republished from my website of long ago, Svenhärd's Realm (started way back in 1994 when you had a really slow modem... if you were lucky). I don't need permission.  I wrote it.

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