Omnivore Atlanta

Playing ketchup

By Russ Marshalek

I first discovered ketchup as a weight-loss tool when I was in my early teens. My Marietta trailer-park youth contributed to some serious adolescent obesity in terms of me shopping the husky section of Wal-Mart for cheap jeans (which my family called “dungarees”). Around the age of thirteen, three major turning points happened in my life. First, I got really, really physically ill, as a result of weighing somewhere close to a billion pounds. Second, I became a vegetarian as a direct result of said illness. Third, I realized that (and this only applies to then, not now) I really, really hated most vegetarian options available to me.

Growing up on fast food, my new-found attempts at healthier eating and vegetarianism found me alienated from my family in regards to food. It was possibly a cool, crisp autumn day, or maybe a stinking hot mid-summer afternoon, or all/none of the above, when I was standing in line at a Wendy’s with my folks and suddenly realized that a plain baked potato, with no butter or sour cream, would, in fact, be the healthiest option on the menu.

Upon ordering and digging into the foil-wrapped bundle steaming with the blandness of a tennis ball covered in a sneaker, I realized that baked potato ordered from a fast-food establishment and eaten entirely plain was way better in theory than in actuality. I frantically scoured the restaurant for something, anything, to make the potato better: salt? My minimal knowledge of health and food was enough to know that “salt=bad”. Pepper? My limited taste palette had yet to experiment with it. Ditto with mustard (thank god — a plain baked potato covered in yellow fast-food mustard? Ugh). Ketchup? Ketchup … my still-acclimating-to-healthy-eating-choices brain raced: Ketchup works on French fries. French fries are potatoes+death. Remove death and you still have potatoes. Ketchup!

And thus, it began.

Ketchup saw me through many a plain, mealy veggie “burger”, actually patties made of cardboard-o-foam, sawdust and hate (god bless Gardenburger these days, eh?), many a salad made of nothing but cheap bagged spinach and fat-free cheese, many a bowl of white rice boiled in half-water, half fat-free unflavored creamer. I’ve had many a ketchup sandwich with melted Kraft Free singles in my day, and can say, officially, that they are in fact, quite excellent.

As is evident, an attempt at teaching myself healthy, vegetarian eating resulted immediately in my having the most un-refined tastes imaginable. It’s not something I noticed immediately, but ketchup on everything is actually the least of my crimes against food. When my girlfriend and I moved in together two years ago, it was the first time I’d actually had someone observing the amount of processed, scientific “stuff” I feel constitute food. Pick up a bag of Fat Free Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles and read the ingredients, and you’ll get a decent idea of what my idea of edible is. Now though, my food crimes are much more audacious, as she will cook a delicious lentil soup, or prepare immaculate new vegetable dishes, only to find my topping the whole thing off with a healthy squirt of Heinz 57.

Old habits die hard, and my tastebuds will eternally be playing ketchup.

If you’d like to contribute to Omnivore as a guest blogger, please send your ideas to besha.rodell@creativeloafing.com.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Tags: cooking with ketchup, guest blogger, ketchup.