Grub Scott Russell Sanders

The morning paper informs me that, once again, Indiana leads the nation in fat. The announcement from the Centers for Disease Control puts it less bluntly, declaring that in 1989 our state had the highest percentage of over-weight residents. But it comes down to the same thing: on a globe where hunger is the rule, surfeit the exception, Indiana is first in fat. I read this news on Saturday morning at a booth in Ladymans Caf, a one-story box of pine and brick wedged between the Christian Science Reading Room and Bloomington Shoe Repair, half a block from the town square. It is a tick after 6 A.M. My fellow breakfasters include a company of polo-shirted Gideons clutching Bibles, a housepainter whose white trousers are speckled with the colors of past jobs, two mechanics in overalls with Lee and Roy stitched on their breast pockets, three elderly couples exchanging the glazed stares of insomniacs, and a young woman in fringed leather vest and sunglasses who is browsing through a copy of Cosmopolitan. Except for the young woman and me, everyone here is a solid contributor to Indianas lead in fat. And I could easily add my weight to the crowd, needing only to give in for a few weeks to my clamorous appetite. I check my belt, which is buckled at the fourth notch. Thirty-two inches and holding. But there are signs of wear on the third and second and first notches, tokens of earlier expansions. The lone waitress bustles to my booth. Whatcha need, hon? Her permed hair is a mat of curls the color of pearls. Stout as a stevedore, purple under the eyes, puckered in the mouth, she is that indefinite age my grandmother remained for the last twenty years of her long life. Whats good today? I ask her. Its all good, same as every day. She tugs a pencil from her perm, drums ringed fingers on the order pad. Miles to go before she sleeps. So whatll it be, sugar? I glance at the smudgy list on the chalkboard over the counter. Tempted by the biscuits with sausage gravy, by the triple stack of hotcakes slathered in butter, by the twin pork chops with hash browns, by the coconut cream pie and glazed doughnuts, I content myself with a cheese omelet and toast. Back in two shakes, says the waitress. When she charges away, a violet bow swings into view among her curls, the cheeriest thing I have seen so far this morning. I buy breakfast only when Im on the road or feeling sorry for myself. Todayabandoned for the weekend by my wife and kids, an inch of water in my basement from last nights rain, the car hitting on three cylindersIm feeling sorry for myself. I pick Ladymans not for the food, which is indifferent, but for the atmosphere, which is tacky in a timeless way. It reminds me of the truck stops and railroad-car

diners and jukebox cafs where my father would stop on our fishing trips thirty years ago. The oilcloth that covers the scratched Formica of the table is riddled with burns. The seat of my booth has lost its stuffing, broken down by a succession of hefty eaters. The walls, sheathed in vinyl for easy scrubbing, are hung with fifty-dollar oil paintings of covered bridges, pastures, and tree-lined creeks. The floors scuffed linoleum reveals the ghostly print of deeper layers, material for some future archaeologist of cafs. Ceiling fans turn overhead, stirring with each lazy spin the odor of tobacco and coffee and grease. There is nothing on the menu of Ladymans that was not on the menus I remember from those childhood fishing trips. But I can no longer order from it with a childs obliviousness. What can I eat without pangs of unease, knowing better? Not the eggs, high in cholesterol, not the hash browns, fried in oil, not the fatty sausage or bacon or ham, not the salty pancakes made with white flour or the saltier biscuits and gravy, not the lemon meringue pies in the glass case, not the doughnuts glistering with sugar, not the butter, not the whole milk. Sipping coffee (another danger) and waiting for my consolatory breakfast, I read the fine print in the article on obesity. I learn that only thirty-two states took part in the study. Why did the other eighteen refuse? Are they embarrassed? Are they afraid their images would suffer, afraid that tourists, knowing the truth, would cross their borders without risking a meal? I learn that Indiana is actually tied for the first place with Wisconsin, at 25.7 percent overweight, so we share the honors. For Wisconsin, you think of dairies, arctic winters, hibernation. But Indiana? Were leaders in popcorn. Our hot and humid summers punish even the skinny, and torture the plump. Why us? Theres no comment from the Indiana Health Commissioner. This gentleman, Mr. Woodrow Meyers, Jr. (who is now on his way to perform the same office in New York City), weighed over three hundred pounds at the time of his appointment. He lost more than a hundred pounds in an effort to set a healthy example, but has since gained most of it back. He doesnt have much room to talk. My platter arrives, the waitress urging, Eat up, hon, before she hustles away. The omelet has been made with processed cheese, anemic and slithery. The toast is of white bread that clots my tongue. The strawberry jelly is the color and consistency of gum erasers. My mother reared me to eat whatever was put in front of me, and so I eat. Dabbing jelly from my beard with a paper napkin as thin as the pages of the Gideons Bibles, I look around. At six-thirty this Saturday morning, every seat is occupied. Why are we all here? Why are we wolfing down this dull, this dangerous, this terrible grub? Its not for lack of alternatives. Bloomington is ringed by the usual necklace of fast food shops. Or you could walk from Ladymans to restaurants that serve breakfast in half a dozen languages. Just five doors away, at the Uptown Caf, you could dine on croissants and espresso and quiche. So why are we here in these swaybacked booths eating poorly cooked food that is bad for us? The answer, I suspect, would help to explain why many of us are so much bigger than we ought to be. I sniff, and the aroma of kitchen grease and peppery sausage, frying eggs and boiling coffee jerks me back into the kitchen of my grandparents farm. I see my grandmother, barefoot and bulky, mixing biscuit dough with her blunt fingers. Then I realize that everything Ladymans serves she would have served. This is farm food, loaded with enough sugar and fat to power a body through a slogging day of work,

food you could fix out of your own garden and chicken coop and pigpen, food prepared without spices or sauces, cooked the quickest way, as a woman with chores to do and a passel of mouths to feed would cook it. Hot up that coffee, hon? the waitress asks. Please, maam, I say, as though answering my grandmother. On those fishing trips, my father stopped at places like Ladymans because there he could eat the vittles he knew from childhood, nononsense grub he never got at home from his wife, a city woman who had studied nutrition, and who had learned her cuisine from a Bostonian mother and a Middle Eastern father. I stop at places like Ladymans because I am the grandson of farmers, the son of a farm boy. If I went from booth to booth, interviewing the customers, most likely I would find hay and hogs in each persons background, maybe one generation back, maybe two. My sophisticated friends would not eat here for love or money. They will eat peasant food only if it comes from other countrieshummus and pita, fried rice and prawns, liver pt, tortellini, tortillas, tortes. Never black-eyed peas, never grits, never short ribs or hush puppies or shoofly pie. This is farm food, and we who sit here and shovel it down are bound to farming by memory or imagination. With the seasoning of memory, the slithery eggs and gummy toast and rubbery jam taste better. I lick my platter clean. Barely slowing down as she cruises past, the waitress refills my coffee once more, the oil-slicked brew jostling in the glass pot. Need anything else, sugar? My nostalgic tongue wins out over my judgment, leading me to say, Could I get some biscuits and honey? You sure can. The biscuits arrive steaming hot. I pitch in. When I worked on farms as a boy, loading hay bales onto wagons and forking silage to cows, shoveling manure out of horse barns, digging postholes and pulling barbed wire, I could eat the pork chops and half a dozen eggs my neighbors fed me for breakfast, eat core bread and sugar in a quart of milk for dessert at lunch, eat ham steaks and mashed potatoes and three kinds of pie for supper, eat a bowl of hand-cranked ice cream topped with maple syrup at bedtime, and stay skinny as a junkyard dog. Not so any longer. Not so for any of us. Eat like a farmer while living like an insurance salesman, an accountant, a beautician, or a truck driver, and youre going to get fat in a hurry. While true farmers have always stored their food in root cellars and silos, in smoke shacks and on canning shelves, we carry our larders with us on haunches and ribs. The Gideons file out, Bibles under their arms, bellies over their belts. With the last of my biscuits, I mop up the honey, thinking of the path the wheat traveled from Midwest fields to my plate, thinking of the clover distilled into honey, of grass become butter, the patient industry of cows and pees and the keepers of cows and bees. Few of us still work on the land, even here in Indiana. Few of us raise big families, few of us look after herds of animals, few of us bend

our backs all day, few of us build or plow or bake or churn. Secretaries of Agriculture tell us that only four percent of our population fees the other ninety-six percent. I have known and admired enough farmers to find that a gloomy statistic. I am stuffed. I rise, stretch, shuffle toward the cash register. The woman in the fringed vest looks up from her Cosmopolitan as I pass her booth. She might figure me for a carpenter, noticing my beard, the scraggly hair down over my collar, my banged-up hands, my patched jeans, my flannel shirt the color of the biscuits I just ate, my clodhopper boots. Or maybe shell guess mechanic, maybe garbageman, electrician, janitor, maybe even farmer. I pluck a toothpick from a box near the cash register and idly chew on it while the waitress makes change. You hurry back, she calls after me. I will, maam, I tell her. On the sidewalk out front of Ladymans, I throw my toothpick in a green trash barrel that is stenciled with the motto Fight Dirty. I start the car, wincing at the sound of the three cylinders clapping. I remember yesterdays rainwater shimmering in the basement, remember the house empty of my family, who are away frolicking with relatives. Before letting out the clutch, I let out my belt a notch, to accommodate those biscuits. Thirty-three inches. One inch closer to the ranks of the fat. I decide to split some wood this morning, turn the compost from the right-hand bin to the left, lay up stones along the edge of the wildflower bed, sweat hard enough to work up an appetite for lunch.