Hortus Deliciarum

On Sunday, my husband and I went to get an oil change on my sister’s car (she lives in uber-hippie-paradise Portland and doesn’t need it, so we borrow it) and, thanks to the HOUR LONG WAIT, toddled over to Top Food & Drug across the street.

Grocery store love, my friends, grocery store love. It probably falls somewhere between a Safeway and a QFC/Central Market and has a nice selection of foods we can’t find at our local Safeway. I bought a couple of old-fashioned cinnamon sugar doughnuts, a couple of lemon yogurts (why is lemon such a hard flavor to find in yogurt?!), a bottle of Pinot Noir, and something else that I have now forgotten. While I was walking through the meat section, I was seized with a violent craving for cotto salami.

Now, you have to understand…my parents were po’ when I was a kid. They’re still not rich, what with the part-time pastoring and the self-employed contractor thing but when we got back from Africa, my mother was a stay-at-home parent and my dad was a contractor, so their wallets were not overflowing with cash. We never ate out. Literally never, unless you count the fast-food that my mom let us have on Fridays when she was still homeschooling us. Oh, and the occasional pizza meal from Little Caesar’s (buy one, get one free!) with crazy bread.

So for lunches, we got leftovers or cheap sandwiches. My brother and sister loved bologna. I couldn’t stand it but LOVED cotto salami. My favorite way to eat it was to stick a slice of bread with a slice of salami on top in the microwave and cook until the salami went bowl-shaped and the juices sank into the bread. Then I’d put on a second piece of bread and eat the whole thing. DELICIOUS.

When I started reading ingredients and listening to the Michael Pollanites of the world (as well as urban legends about how they sweep up the floors at the end of the day and make hotdogs/lunch meat out of it), I stopped eating cotto salami. In 2003, when I discovered Overcoming Overeating and began the long, wonderful, occasionally painful path toward size acceptance and food freedom, I started eating things again. On our monthly? bi-monthly? visits to Burger King, I let myself have mayonnaise on my BK Broiler, a Coke instead of iced tea, and French fries. Yesterday I had a few Cheeto puffs, reveling in their faux-cheese. I even eat “real” salami. But in that grocery store, standing wistfully in front of the cotto salami, I looked at the ingredients label (beef, beef hearts, blah blah) and put it back.

I can eat cinnamon sugar doughnuts (the only kind I’ve wanted lately, passing up other doughnut-eating opportunities because I knew they wouldn’t have the right ones), Cheetos, chocolate mousse cake, French fries, and just about every other food I wouldn’t let myself eat during my dieting days but the voice is still calling a foul on the cotto salami.

Nothing in that salami will kill me (well, barring an unfortunate salmonella incident). Nothing in “beef, beef hearts” is so terrible, except to first-worlders terrified of offal, and I wanted it. Why could I not pick it up and purchase it as freely as I purchase other formerly forbidden foods?

Why did I forbid myself the salami, when I truly can’t think of another food that I’ve been unable to purchase in the last seven years? Why?

Why are psychological obstacles so difficult to overcome?