Are You Going To Eat That?

"Are you going to eat that, Mom?"
I about fell over, considering that the food item in question wasn't a) a french fry or b) a frozen dessert.

Indeed, this was an unprecedented scavenge request for a piece of healthy, grilled, non-ketchup-laden protein! Who IS this boy, and why are his pants too short all of a sudden? He must have snuck in while I was retrieving food from the hurricane stash. Apparently all our food evaporated overnight.

I'll admit, I ought to have identified this food evaporation trend sooner. The problem is that empty food containers have been posing shamelessly as full food containers.

When the children were small, I could make a grocery list simply by scanning the contents of the fridge and pantry. Now, establishing our family food needs qualifies as a contact sport. Never mind finding an occasional ravaged frozen waffle box; I'm talking pot roast. It could be completely hollow - eaten from the inside, there's no way to know for sure until I actually pull it out and weigh it in my hand. This takes forever, and I feel like a real idiot treating every item like a cantaloupe-of-dubious-ripeness. But what can you do? Mother Hubbard didn't know how lucky she was. She knew exactly where she stood.

I don't know what the kids hope to accomplish, putting all those empty containers back in the cabinet. They know how the process works: namely, that the food doesn't spontaneously generate in empty cardboard wombs, but that you have to actually go to a store (where food spontaneously generates on empty metal shelves) and physically purchase it. Maybe they feel like the other empty containers get lonely. Or maybe they're just trying out their "put it back where you found it" skills that ought to apply to books and clothes and toys, but somehow doesn't.

Thinking back, food has been disappearing steadily since we began letting him cross the street. Under ordinary rules of logic, these events may seem completely unrelated - but when he started crossing the street, you see, he joined the "pack" of little neighborhood kids. These wild hyenas trot from house to house, eating all the most desirable foods, like Cheetos and Popsicles. Then they do the rounds again, scavenging for second-tier foods, like cereal. In a pinch, they will take anything that remotely looks like food. (Hurry! Hide the wax fruit!)

Thank goodness for popcorn! Popcorn is the miracle food for sprouting kids. Really, whoever invented popcorn has saved many a dangling limb. It takes two minutes to make, and (write this down) more than two minutes to eat. This means that the little guys can munch indefinitely, without interruption. In fact, since chewing is a fairly boring and mundane activity involving very little in the way of high-tech sound effects or sporting paraphernalia, chances are, they'll grow bored of eating before they've completely run through the Volkswagen-sized box of microwave popcorn we keep for emergencies.

But even taking into account the ravenous pack, there is still an alarming disparity between our food stores and grocery receipts. Someone is cooking the books, I tell you. And I hope he's using sauce, because it's all we have for dinner.

Judging from the dishes, my son eats about 15 times a day.  He's only nine! Aren't these growth spurts supposed to politely wait in the wings until the teens? Even in restaurants, the children's menu stretches into the double-digit ages. Still comfortably in the single-digits, my boy is polishing off a Flintstone sized rack of ribs, and then inhaling whatever anybody else we might have missed. "Are you done with that?" Well, no…but OW! Hey! That was my FINGER!

If you're looking to drop a few pounds, I suggest adopting a 9-year old. You won't be able to keep food in the house, and you can bank on roughly 10 years of subsiding on the little crumbs that stick to the inside of discarded wrappers to achieve your target weight. No special meals. No membership fees.

I, on the other hand, have made the grave tactical error of finally hitting "lean" just as the kids are entering adolescence. When all along, I should have been packing it on like a grizzly heading into a 10-year hibernation.

From now on, I'll be hanging around the grocery store on  "free sample day" with all the rest of the starving parents. We'll ask each other, "Are you going to eat that?"