What would be a better example of the dysfunctional family table than an Arrested Development-themed dinner menu
The Bluths are a drinking family, so don't scrimp on the hors d'oeuvres—you'll need something to soak up all that vodka. Parmesan Pepper Popcorn is our nod to when Oscar, attempting to share his Pop Secret kernels with Buster, inadvertently reveals that he's Buster's real father. We also recommend Fried Calamari with Peperoncini Mayonnaise, our take on "calamari with club sauce," because who can forget Gob reading the country club menu to his date, Lucille Austero? Feel free to swap out the calamari for one of the other menu options: popcorn shrimp with club sauce, fried cheese with club sauce, or chicken fingers with spicy club sauce.
I had very sparse memories of a dinner table as I grew up mainly without a dinner table which when we had one meant having a tablecloth made of oilcloth. Those were very early days during the time when my dad was at home. When he left, the dining room that contained the piano became my sister’s room, which was nice because I had what would be the living room in other flats in our building.
The disadvantage was that across the landing on the other side of the building was my indigent uncle and my paternal grandfather, the former a washout from the Army Air Corps, the latter a former numbers runner who put enough money together to buy a building to house his adult kids. I probably learned some irresponsible habits and a sense of difference from them.
I grew up with the same kind of clutter I live in now, probably because I even married someone whose ordered military existence collapsed upon entering civilian life.
So life was visibly disordered probably reflecting interior lives of disorder, and as for function, what was the best thing was delivered hot meals, a kind of dysfunctional meal on wheels that had won-ton soup with abalone and chicken chow-mein, the standard by which for many years I gauged the quality of local Chinese restaurant food wherever I lived, much like I use roast duck to measure Continental restaurant quality when encountering a new place to eat.
My spouse and I would have dinner parties but the chaos never seemed to be hidden, so perhaps that or my then crappy cooking may have curtailed those things. I never was much of a dinner party person, it seeming to be a kind of Edwardian thing or at least what seems to be the Downton Abbey pretension that many try to adopt. And I never was good at cocktail parties, reminding myself that my mother was incompetent at them as with so many other middle-class rituals for a rising professional class family. As with now, she just refused to learn new things, or perhaps couldn’t learn new things. But then again I’m supposed to forgive those things much like when I tried as an adult decades ago to convince her that she could adopt some feminist practices and divorce my dad. No, she said, he had to divorce her so he would bear whatever familial shame that would really not exist and yet he wouldn’t for a variety of reasons, for which the bottle always seemed like the solution, however fleeting.
That’s as much personal information that should be shared on the interwebz, although it made me think about how fast-food or highly prepared, microwavable food is designed for dysfunctional networks of familial and non-familial living groups aside from that existential bane: the single adult. And then there’s the dysfunctionality of comfort food as enabling an inner child.
Food writer Tracie McMillan has taken (Barbara) Ehrenreich’s conceit into the fields of Central California, the produce section of a Detroit-area Walmart and the kitchen of a New York City Applebee’s and produced an even more disturbing picture, not only of bleaker realities for today’s working poor but also of a national food system dysfunctional at its core: from farm to marketplace to dining table.
McMillan’s stint picking grapes, peaches and garlic reveals, not surprisingly to many, an almost entirely immigrant workforce under duress from low wages, few if any health benefits, perilous working conditions and onerous production demands — those same workers, by their often-tenuous legal status, are fearful of protesting their situations.
How Dys/Dat functional is your dinner table…
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