An anti-culinary challenge fills 30 minutes

By Mary Ann Cook

My mother is a home economist, and her sisters, even though they are nonagenarians by now, are both foodies. My own sister is a gourmet cook, justly famed for her dinner parties. And I like to cook. So, when we are all together (as we were recently, back home in Indiana), it's not hard to imagine what the conversation sounds like.

We like to think of ourselves as bright and socially concerned people, interested in a myriad of subjects, endlessly questing about for global trends such as skirt lengths and mascara viscosity. But if ever our conversations were to be taped, I think we would quickly be disabused of the notion that we could use the word "multifaceted" to describe ourselves.

First, we have to decide what's for dinner. Then we have to agree on where we'll have lunch. After those two major hurdles are out of the way, wouldn't you think we could drop the subject? Oh, no. It's disgusting, really, a one-track tape.

Enough is enough, I thought to myself one morning, knowing that I was bucking overwhelming odds. But I was determined to do something about this one-sidedness, to set the five of us a challenge.

We had ahead of us a 30-minute ride to our chosen luncheon spot in another town. The challenge I laid down was to see if we could reach that destination without the subject of food or any of its related genres being mentioned.

The test was to be run like musical chairs with one victor remaining, whoever could eschew the dread topic for a full half hour.

The challenge was greeted enthusiastically and not undertaken lightly. People have trained for Le Mans with less dedication. Equipment was rounded up. One entrant brought knitting. Another, who trusted herself and her tongue even less, brought reading matter.

The silence in the car was uneasy, unsettling, unreal.

Several times one rider would clear her throat, start to enunciate, then catch herself. Outside, the southern Indiana landscape rolled by. We skimmed alongside fields of corn, which evoked images of dripping butter, popping corn, movies. That helped bring on conversations about movies, then movie-star gossip was elicited and traded. From there the game switched to books and thence to authors.

There was desultory and scattered comment about an upcoming town event. But then the speaker realized it was a pig roast, so that talk was quickly squashed. But not before the speaker and responder had been disqualified.

Perhaps 10 minutes had passed at this point.

Had the peach cobbler been adequately covered? was the question from the knitter. And now the score was three down, two to go. I don't mean to claim there is as much violence involved, but doesn't football employ much the same terminology and require a similar amount of concentration and forbearance?

We were halfway there and only two of us were still standing, metaphorically speaking. An anecdote about a wedding brought the subject of "wedding cakes I have known and rated" into the fray. Some "ding, ding, dings" pealed out, à la TV game-show sound effects, to register another disqualification.

Now only the driver remained. But she, it was revealed, had "forgotten" to put in her hearing aid. So was that really legal? Besides, she had caved in at the 20-minute mark. Even without the corrosive undermining of hearing what the others were talking about.

By this time the entire carload had given up any pretense of trying to abstain from talk of digestibles. There were grumblings that it had been a long and dreary ride, seemingly twice as lengthy as usual.

And I was actually relieved. Now I didn't need to worry about thinking up and handing out a prize for the winner, since there wasn't one. Besides, the only prizes I had been able to conjure up had all been related to--well, I don't have to tell you.

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Mary Ann Cook is a Los Gatos Weekly-Times columnist

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