The Omnivorous Fish

When I was a wee lad, I discovered that not all restaurants had the same integrity when it came to preparing the food they served. I learned this in a small town in North Carolina when someone I was working with exclaimed, “Awesome, this is Stouffer’s.” And I said, “It tastes like Stouffer’s lasagna?” How disappointing, I told myself. “No,” he corrected me, “this is fucking Stouffer’s lasagna.”

And it was.

Years later, I saw the package of Stouffer’s lasagna that diners and coffee shops the nation over serve as their own. And let’s face it, as inauthentic lasagnas go, Stouffer’s is as good as or better than what your average crappy diner would come up with. So I ate it.

It turns out that Stouffer’s has a whole institutional division, facilitating all of America’s favorites: macaroni and cheese, meat lasagna, salisbury steak, chicken pot pie, christ only knows what else. Who knew?

When I was a kid on the road, those diners and coffee shops became more to me than food; good thing, too, because the food was awful. They were like little families I could fall into for a week, a day, a night. And they served terrible coffee that I drank too much of; provided ashtrays, which I filled to the brim over and over; and had beautiful, rock-hard old women in identical orthopedic shoes and grotesque masks of makeup, which served both to be pretty and to hide the years of disappointment. They were nice to that unique breed of lonely men that congregate around the counters of diners, and the drunks and the nit-picking old ladies filling plastic bags with the cheese bread. They laughed and popped their gum and smoked extra-long menthol cigarettes and growled out ‘Thanks, hon,’ as they dropped the check on the table.

I don’t eat like that anymore- much. Sometimes, though, grilled cheese with rock hard tomato or chicken soup with chunks of bouillon cube still floating around in it- or fucking Stouffer’s lasagna- take me back just far enough to remember I never want to go there again.