The English language has a good many words all basically meaning “tricked.”

On the spectrum from “benign tomfoolery” to “wilful deception” we have: deceived, fooled, misled, duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled, and my personal favorite, brainwashed.

We have all been tricked at one time or another by friends, co-workers, even family. But where do you draw the line? What is too far? When does messing with someone cross over from “we’re just having some fun with you” to “they’ll never even know what happened”?

When you knowingly misrepresent the facts to someone to convince them of something, and you have no intention of ever telling them the truth, that is called brainwashing and arguably, parents are the worst offenders. If you don’t believe me, think back to a time when you were trying to teach your infant to eat semi-solid food. Who among us hasn’t bait-and-switched creamed peas for apple sauce, or told your child those bland fruit bites were a new type of Cheerios?

Is it ethically wrong to trick kids into eating something they think is something else? Apparently not according to the 43 million search results for the phrase, “tricking kids into eating.”

But there again, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to do this with a baby, but not with a child that is 6, 8, or even 12? Well, right or wrong, it happens all the time and I’ll never forget the LAST time it happened to me.

It tasted strange. I remember that. Some of the other details may be fuzzy, but I definitely remember it tasting strange.

As regular readers know, my step-mom (Dad’s Wife #2) raised me the majority of my life. We don’t talk very much now, but that’s a different story for a different day. She was/is only 20 years older than me and I was 6 when she married my father, who was 18 years older than her.

Right after they got married in ’79, we moved to Montgomery, AL temporarily. Things were different for the year and a half we lived in Montgomery and, looking back, I suspect my dad was more miserable than the rest of us. I had no friends. Me and my brother started a new school. Everything changed in an instant. But kids are adaptable and at my young age, I made friends quickly and when I didn’t have someone to play with, I had my bicycle. Life wasn’t terrible. But dad was definitely a country boy, used to space and quiet-time. And in Montgomery, he had neither.

We lived in a sprawling, generic housing complex in a smallish house with little more than a 1/4 of an acre lot. At the time, step-mom wasn’t working, so her full-time job was keeping up the house during the day and cooking the meals at night. My brother and I were fairly self-sufficient, so we weren’t overly needy.

Without a garden for my dad to care for at home like he had back in Mobile, step-mom did her best to cook things that he liked. That meant vegetables; LOTS of vegetables. In fact, I remember many dinners without a protein, something I am loathe to do now, particularly with three growing kids at home.

To say our dinners were not what you saw advertised on television in the 70s and 80s, where the whole family sits down to a home-cooked meal consisting of a starch, a vegetable, and a protein, is an understatement. I can count on one hand how many times I ever had a friend over for a sleepover or to have dinner, and our diet was a big part of that. No kid wants to have the “weird family” label slapped on them at school. And so, instead of talking about my day at the dinner table, or cutting jokes with a friend, I ate my boiled squash quietly and concentrated on not gagging it up all over the table.

Dad loved his vegetables and he never met a part of a chicken that he hadn’t eaten more than once; neck, gizzards, heart, liver. Growing up in the hills of North Carolina, the youngest of 6 siblings, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

But even as an adult, liver was one of his favorites. And not just chicken livers either, but beef livers too. From a taste and texture standpoint, the two couldn’t be more different. While chicken livers are small and chunky, like the pre-chopped stew meat you get  wrapped in sterile plastic and styrofoam at the supermarket, beef liver is long and flat, almost like a butterflied chicken breast. However, that is the only thing beef liver and chicken breasts have in common.

Dad liked his liver fried. Step-mom would first marinate it for several hours in milk to try and draw out some of the gamey-ness, a technique I’m not entirely convinced worked. But when it came time to cook it, for chicken liver it was a basic breading (flour, salt, and pepper)–not too much, don’t want to mask the flavor of the liver with too much breading. For beef liver, it was liver and onions all the way. Little to no breading, sauteed in oil and covered in onions.  Both were served with a side of ketchup.

In my boyhood opinion, the only meal worse than liver was a meal of liver with a side of squash–an opinion I hold to this day.

But most evenings, either I or my brother would ask that second most reviled question, after “Are we there yet?” that being, “What’s for dinner?”  But on liver day, you didn’t have to ask. You’d either seen it marinating in the refrigerator beforehand, all dark and quivery in its bath of stark white dairy, or you’d immediately smell it the moment it hit the hot, oily, cast-iron skillet.

6:35 pm.

On this particular day, I had been out playing and came in, as usual, around dark-thirty right as step-mom was starting dinner. I hadn’t yet become her “little kitchen helper,” so I breezed through the kitchen and headed to my room after she answered my query with, “steak.”

A half-hour later, dinner was called and I, along with my brother and dad, tucked ourselves in around the cheap table, awaiting step-mom to bring everything over from the kitchen.

Cooked liver has a particular smell, and while I had vaguely smelled what was cooking while in my room, I’d gone nose-blind by this point so I was going purely on sight now. Step-mom placed the mashed potatoes and green beans on the table, followed by the “steak.”

In the short time step-mom had been part of our family, I couldn’t ever remember her cooking steak. Truthfully, I’m not sure I’d ever had steak at that point, so when the plate full of small, round cubes of steak were placed on the table, I gave it little more than a curious look.

The blessing said and the plates passed, I began to eat. But something was off. Not being a steak connoisseur, I couldn’t put my finger on what was strange, but it definitely tasted “off.” It had a vaguely familiar off-ness that I couldn’t quite place, so I asked again, “What is this?” Step-mom replied, “It’s steak. Eat up.”

By now you know where this is going. But, I won’t lie and say that I saw through the deception immediately, because I didn’t. Even though my brain assured me step-mom said it was steak, and even though at that point in my life I’d never known my parents to openly lie to me, I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t like this “steak.” I thought then and there that I was not a “steak fan.”

But, I finished my plate because that was what you did. Not like today where kids can leave food on their plate and we’re all like, “That’s OK; just eat what you like.” No, we had to clean our plate and so I did.

It was not until the end of the meal, as I was asking to be excused that step-mom said, “Did you like dinner?” Me, being a generally polite child said, “Yes, it was good.” Even though it wasn’t.

That’s when she sprung on me, “Well, it wasn’t steak. It was liver and you loved it! That just proves that you only don’t like liver because you think you shouldn’t.” Having been programmed by mom #1 not to talk back, and because I already knew from watching my brother interact with step-mom, that my dad would brook no disrespect towards his new bride, I said nothing.

Today

For years step-mom would retell this story as proof of her superior parenting and it was many years before I pulled together enough gumption to tell her, “No, I didn’t like it. Whatever I thought it was, I knew it didn’t taste like steak. I only ate it because I had to and I only told you I liked it because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

We agreed to disagree. Either way, I will never forget that night; not because I ate all my liver thinking it was something else. No, I’ll never forget that night because it was a revelation that parents aren’t perfect. They too, lie. They too will do whatever necessary to maintain that hallowed alpha status in the home.

Still, I think about that night anytime I’m facing a decision where my will conflicts with my kids’. I weigh the gravity of telling them the truth versus giving them some watered-down version of the truth that makes me feel better for denying them something they want. Most of the time, certainly with important things, I think I make the right decision; the moral decision.

But who knows what’s going on in their heads. Maybe they too will have a “liver dinner” situation that forever stains our relationship. I’m endlessly fascinated by the thought of how our micro-experiences color our own relationships and decisions later, and how that snowballs generation after generation.

I wonder what made step-mom think it was cool to fool a kid like that? Maybe she too had to go get a small branch from a tree; a branch her daddy told her he was going to whip her with, but then didn’t, like my dad did my brother.

I guess we’ll never know. I’m not sure I want to either. Some things are just best left unsaid and unknown.

And hey, since we’re talking about food, one of my favorite topics, remind me to tell you the story about shrimp eyeballs! That’s a good one!