The Tomato Juice Betrayal
by Ellen Notbohm

I didn’t set out to betray my mother. What a horrid way that would be to repay her years of selfless devotion. But betray her I did. The instrument of my treachery—a tiny glass of tomato juice.

Sayler’s Old Country Kitchen, a legendary steak house in our town, is a longtime family favorite of bygone times. The decades of sizzle-infused memories of birthday celebrations and loved ones visiting from afar will live on in me forever. Every meal began with a small tray of carrot and celery sticks, a basket of garlic bread, and a petite glass of tomato juice served to each diner.

My mother harbored a pathological hatred of tomato juice. It made no sense to me. She adored fresh tomatoes, and anything made with tomato sauce. Why the extreme animus to a cousin form? In today’s patois, I can’t even. Maybe a metallic aftertaste from the can it came in? The overbearing saltiness, when juice is supposed to be sweet? The clammy viscosity? She was a tender and caring health professional, although as a physical therapist, she never dealt with blood. Perhaps a buried allusion lurked in there, a whiff of recall from dissecting cadavers in grad school?

I never asked. But I accepted her silent simmering revulsion each time that dewy glass landed in front of her as a warning that unpleasant consequences would be mine if I didn’t follow her lead. Like what? I wondered, imagination running amok. Bellyache, Montezuma’s revenge, farts and sharts, tossing cookies? All this could be mine if I ignored her wisdom. She knew me best, and I was, after all, according to her, a picky eater.

My first job away from home was as a “shit shoveler” in the college dorm commons, the affectionate name for cafeteria line workers dishing up blobbulous mac and cheese, mysterious casseroles, grease-slicked franks and beans. Fearing the infamous “freshman fifteen,” I quickly retreated to the safe harbor of cottage cheese and green salad in the evening, scrambled eggs and toast before classes started in the morning. It wasn’t “picky.” It was self-defense.

Moving through the breakfast line one morning, a friend noted my (unintentional) fascination with her taking a glass of tomato juice and adding a celery stick, a lemon wedge, and a stiff dose of pepper.

“It’s a Virgin Bloody Mary,” she explained. “My parents used to make them for us when they were having the real thing on Sunday mornings.”

“You drink tomato juice . . . for breakfast?” I couldn’t take my eyes off her colorful drink. It smelled good too.

“Sure. It’s a juice, isn’t it?”

Sure, it’s a juice. And I liked them all. Orange, grapefruit, apple, grape, pineapple . . . tomato?

I told her I’d never touched the stuff. Her simple response: “Why?”

Why indeed? I too loved tomatoes in all their incarnations. My first sip of tomato juice that morning was revelatory. A train in my brain left the station. On it were all the other things I realized that “picky” me had never tried because my mother loathed them and had slapped a virtual Warning! label on them. Cream of Wheat cereal, potato salad, pumpkin pie, Greek food, cola drinks.

She married my father at 23 with a master’s degree, a budding career, and an admission that she didn’t know how to boil water, let alone cook. My father, at 29, had been on his own since leaving the Army some years earlier, forging his own career as a forester in the backwoods of Minnesota and Wisconsin. They had many things in common: Chicago roots, love of the arts and the outdoors, desire to help others—and zero cooking skills. While my parents called me a picky eater, my brothers and I made fun of the fact—we thought it a fact—that our dad would eat anything. “Peee-yewww!!!” we’d whisper to each other as he ate sauerkraut. When he dolloped chopped liver on his plate, we’d signal fingers down the throat. When he sucked down peas like candy, we nearly gagged for real.

One day, with gentle exasperation, he corrected us. Yes, he ate whatever was put in front of him.

“Did it ever occur to you,” he asked mildly, “that your mother knows what I like and don’t like, and doesn’t make things I don’t like?”

We fell silent as a beef tongue sandwich. With horseradish.

“Did it occur to you that I wouldn’t order things in a restaurant that I don’t like?”

Wow. His logic deflated us like a pin to a soap bubble. But we then saw that he was only slightly more adventurous in his eating than our stick-to-the-basics mother. Dinner was meat and potatoes at 5:30 when he walked in the door from work. Their idea of ethnic eating meant Chinese or Italian. Never once did a taco or souvlaki or pad thai pass their lips.

As a child I drew my own line in the sand, an overwhelming aversion to both the smell and taste of cooked green vegetables, over which I had no control and which followed me into adulthood. In that adulthood, it struck me as hypocritical. Why would my mother, who was never intentionally unkind, make an exception to mock this very personal preference when she herself clung to militant attitudes about what she wouldn’t eat? I felt her silent but piercing look the first time she saw me quaff that glass of tomato juice at Sayler’s. She seemed to take it as betrayal when, emboldened by that tomato juice, I tore aside the warnings; I tried and loved Cream of Wheat, pumpkin pie, potato salad, cola drinks, and Mediterranean food. Her defense of why she never served us these things as children? “You wouldn’t have eaten it.” Here, Mom, let me edit that for you: You wouldn’t have eaten those things. Wouldn’t even try.

But I’m the picky eater. Right.

“You’ve never seen such a fuss over a few peas,” I overheard my grandmother sneer to a relative. In a letter found after my mother’s death, my father wrote to her, on a visit to her parents across the country, how tiresome he found my resistance to certain foods (I paraphrased that kindly). Yet at one memorable white-tablecloth restaurant dinner, my father pushed several slices of beet to the edge of his salad plate and quipped to the tuxedo-ed server who removed his otherwise clean plate, “I don’t eat beets.” The server deadpanned back, “I don’t blame you, sir. I quite despise them myself.”

But I’m the picky eater. Right.

These weren’t contemptuous people, so why the high emotion about personal taste preferences? It never occurred to them I wasn’t being belligerent. That my own personal taste buds were issuing warning signals. Why did my dislike of a few things seem so threatening to them, when those dislikes were greatly outnumbered by the things I did like? My mother made delectable rotisserie chicken decades before one ever appeared in a supermarket deli. We gobbled her fork-tender brisket and homemade applesauce like there’d be no tomorrow. French toast with homemade plum jam, toasted cheese sandwiches, pear compote, salmon with lemon slices. She lovingly turned out cookies beyond number, including her signature mint meringues that her grandchildren fought over well into adulthood; doubling, tripling, quadrupling the never-enough recipe. When she could no longer make the brisket, the applesauce, the cookies, we understood that a piece of life as we’d known it had ended.

In hindsight, I’ve come to see the whole food thing as part of a childhood in which I was expected to accept my parents’ overall views as my own, whether about food, religion, recreation, whatever. Like an inheritance, an obligation I couldn’t escape.

But escape I did.

I came to understand that when my mother said she abhorred something, she’d never even tried it. I sorely doubt her Depression-era parents forced Coca-Cola, pumpkin pie, souvlaki, or tomato juice on her, telling her she had to sit at the table far into the evening, until she ate them, as did my parents with those abhorrent green beans and peas. It took them a long time to catch on that I’d gladly sit in front of my dinner plate until bedtime, considering it a victory that I never ate those things that made me gag, something I knew to be true because I had tried them.

Those stalemates did my own children a backhanded favor—I never once insisted they eat something they didn’t want to. No three-bite rule, no suppertime stand-offs. If they didn’t like the smell of something, I knew it to be their biology, not belligerence. As my mother did with my father, I didn’t put things in front of them I knew they didn’t like. With limitless food choices in the world, it wasn’t hard. They grew into two of the healthiest eaters I know. One became a professional cook, enjoying many things I decline. The other, autistic and necessarily selective due to gut issues, nevertheless eats things I won’t touch. I smile (from an olfactory-safe distance) watching him cooking and scarfing his special green beans with sumac.

Mom’s transition to full-time care became a constant battle with food. First in rehab, then in memory care, staff bent over backward to meet her near-interminable list of likes and dislikes. In rehab, they let me make her favorite soup and store it in their freezer, doled out in portions to last several days. But most days were filled with diatribes about “There’s nothing here I can eat,” although a generous list of everyday menu substitutes was available and constantly repeated to her—things she did like, and could be had at any time. She refused them all. A speech therapist called in to help her with swallowing problems confided to me that she’d never seen such a comprehensive list of dislikes. No hot cereal, pancakes, croissants, hash browns. No white bread, yogurt, puddings. No canned vegetables. No dressings or condiments of any kind . . .

The wing of the care center where she lived after rehab included a small kitchen where family could cook for their loved one, or bring favorite things to be stashed in a refrigerator and served later by staff. She refused my attempts to do so with such vehemence that my startled inner child backed down and stopped asking.

No one called her a picky eater. The staff just kept trying to please. “She loves soup,” they said, bringing her bowl after bowl. “And does she ever love her ice cream. With Oreos. Lots of Oreos.” They in turn loved her giving them instructions for how to make a black cow and a root beer float. I had to put aside her lifetime of careful oral hygiene as a dentist’s daughter and bow to the enjoyment bordering on glee those Oreos brought her, something I never saw her eat in her earlier life. The impish look she gave me, shoveling those Oreos in when she knew I wanted her to ease up on them, reminded me of my long-ago self, reveling in her disbelief at my discovering and liking her forbidden foods. What could I do but give in and beam back?

As we age, the caregivers told me, the taste buds shrink and lose sensitivity. The sense of sweetness is the last to go.

The ultimate irony came when, no longer able to feed herself, she simply ate whatever was put into her mouth, including the things she had long ago warned me off. Our last Thanksgiving together ended with bittersweetness as I fed both of us slices of pumpkin pie. One bite for me, one bite for her.

Her smile served as the perfect bookend to a long story.

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Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the acclaimed novel The River by Starlight, the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew, and numerous short fiction and nonfiction pieces appearing in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies in the US and abroad. Her books and short prose have won more than 40 awards worldwide.

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Artist Statement: Food. Huh, yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely everything, from basic sustenance to social recreation to … self-righteous judgment. For the crime of being a kid who disliked foods other people liked, I endured a childhood of “picky eater” mockery. I was well into adulthood before realizing that the scorn underlying that pejorative is nothing but a comparative to the name-caller’s own preferences. In The Tomato Juice Betrayal, I sought to examine why I was expected to follow my parents’ food preferences, to a degree charged with peculiarly high emotion. I wanted to work through why my otherwise wonderful parents felt they had to do this to me, what it took for me to break free of it, build my own definition of nourishment and allow my children to do the same, and how it all came to a bittersweet full circle at the end of my mother’s life.

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Featured Image: Photo by Klara Kulikova, 2019.