I am by actual count one of fourteen people in America who has never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Never.  I like peanut butter sandwiches (creamy, not crunchy) and I like jelly sandwiches.  The two together just don’t seem right.  People have argued.  Told me how much I am missing.  But I’m resolute.  Not something I want to try.  And since I’ve come this far – this long – without trying one, I won’t start now.  Among other reasons, if I did, this column would be one paragraph shorter.  (Which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but not enough reason to change my taste in sandwiches).

I was in my mid-fifties before I had a tuna salad sandwich.  I wasn’t impressed.  Not that I oppose tuna.  It’s very good, especially raw or barely cooked. Fish is so much better when it is slightly undercooked.  Put it on a warm plate, give it to a slow waiter and have him walk through a hot kitchen.  My Dad hated tuna, so we never had it in the house.  In Minnesota, tuna was a gloppy concoction in a can generally called tuna fish.  And as that‘s all he knew of tuna I can’t say as I blame him.

By the way, why is it tuna fish?  Is there some redundancy necessity?  It’s not t-bone cow or ham pig.  And it’s not an aquatic vertebrate anomaly; it’s not salmon fish, even though in Minnesota salmon was also a gloppy concoction in a can.  It was generally served mixed with bread crumbs and baked in a pan as salmon loaf.

But beyond that, I’ll eat almost anything.  Yes, I gave up meat in 1985 largely as a cholesterol thing.  Or so I’ve always said.  If it was really about cholesterol I would have given up ice cream and chocolate too, and then shot myself.  Truth is I gave up meat, which is to say red meat, anything that once stood on four legs, because a girlfriend didn’t eat meat.  So I thought it would get me somewhere if I stopped too.  A year later, when she dumped me, I couldn’t digest meat and still can’t.  I’ll eat something with meat in it once in a while, and my stomach will do the talking for me for the next day and a half.  And it is a cholesterol thing, now.

So I haven’t ordered a burger, fries and coke since McDonald’s advertising campaign was about how clean their stores were.

Grab a bucket and mop

Scrub the bottom and top.

Tell me what does it mean

At McDonald’s it’s clean.

All right, so with those few exceptions – peanut butter/jelly and tuna salad sandwiches, beef, bacon, ham, pork, mutton, veal, lamb, goat, deer, moose, elk, horse, buffalo, dog, cat, llama, camel, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, coyote, fox, wolf, tiger, lion, rat, mouse, chipmunk, squirrel, dingo and koala – I’ll eat anything.

Except grapefruit.  I like grapefruit a lot but it’s a cholesterol thing.  A cholesterol medication grapefruit reaction destroy your liver thing.

When I was in second grade our parents went on a vacation with the Blanchards and spent ten days in Florida.  They left my brother and me with our neighbor Bertha who moved in to take care of us.  Every morning she would cut a grapefruit in half and sprinkle it with liquid Sweet-10, a sugar substitute that I think advertised that one drop was equal to ten pounds of sugar.  So with a liberal drenching of Sweet-10 on our grapefruit it was gaggingly sweet.  We hated it.  Isn’t tart the whole point of grapefruit?

Not only that, but she didn’t use the curved serrated knife Mom used to carve around the rind and separate every section.  She just doused it with Sweet-10 and served it to us.  That left us to poke at it with a spoon and leave it a mangled, partially dissected sickeningly sweet mess.

As good boys, it never dawned on us to tell Bertha we didn’t like our grapefruit that way.  Instead our solution was to hide the Sweet-10.  But because I was in second grade and my brother in fifth, we hid it in the same cupboard where it was supposed to be.  Had we been older, or more cunning we would have put it in our parents’ dresser or in the garage.  But we put it in the back of the cupboard and every morning she found it and destroyed our grapefruit again.

It’s not eating unusual things that bothers me.  I like that. We didn’t have a lot of “unusual” food in Minnesota. Unless you count lutefisk.  That’s about as unusual as it gets. But by and large it was a pretty meat and potatoes place to grow up. I never saw an avocado or artichoke in Minnesota. Most of the year our fruits and vegetables came from a truck. If they were fresh when they got there, they had started their trip very, very green.  Most often they were in a can or frozen in a block of ice, which was okay because much of Minnesota was frozen in a block of ice.

So people went looking for flavor elsewhere.  I grew up among people who put sugar on tomatoes.  Tomatoes were to be eaten with salt and pepper.  Everyone knew that.  I’ll admit to salt on watermelon, but not sugar on tomatoes.  And most vegetables were better with a can of cream of mushroom soup poured over them.  That’s gourmet.