Lima beans. I suppose they are healthy to eat in their own way. Perhaps if more people ate them, instead of, say, a Big Mac, they wouldn’t be fat. Maybe they even taste on the par with a Big Mac; but, who knows? I imagine that everyone is indoctrinated at a young age when Mom decided to spoon a pile of lima beans next to the slice of meat loaf and said, “No desert unless your plate is cleaned off.” One exploratory bite of a few lima beans and the question immediately pops into the mind: Just what is for desert anyway?
I’m not going to go off and do a bunch of research to make the case for eating lima beans. I’m just not interested. You see, in my case, chocolate cake wasn’t enough of a reward to eat those fateful lima beans piled onto my plate as a kid. Let’s just say I hadn’t quite yet developed an insatiable craving for chocolate. Not yet anyway, and one bite into the tough skin and the gritty guts of a few lima beans and I immediately wished our family had a vegetarian dog to clean up the mush I so wanted to spit out of my mouth.
There you have it. In one fell swoop, eating habits are cemented permanently, ingrained forever in young, gray matter. Big Mac, here we come, and there will always be more chocolate cake that isn’t attached to eating sawdust in a pod.
In time, the whole experience fades from memory. Too many Big Macs and chocolate cakes later, there’s a bucket full of lima beans on the buffet. No surprise that there’s no label, nothing pointing out that this here is the same crap Mom tried to dish out all those years ago. So, a tablespoon is dipped and a small pile finds its way to the plate in hand. We all know what buffet food tastes like: It’s just hospital food that we willingly pay for just because someone else cooked it. Oh, forgive me. “Buffet food” and “taste” in the same sentence is an oxymoron. One spoonful of those dreaded lima beans that taste like everything else on the buffet and the sneaking thought infiltrates: Lima beans ain’t so bad after all!
It’s no wonder Moms keep trying to force their kids to eat lima beans. And, it’s no wonder Americans keep getting fatter as a result. The lesson is clear: stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets before we all roll off the planet!
