Prozac Is Passe -- It’s a Carbo-High for Me

While lunching at a small local bistro with my daughter, I asked the waitress if the restaurant had any bread to accompany an exotic variety of greenery piled high on our plates.

“Bread? Do you really want it?” Her incredulous expression combined with her youth caused me to wonder if her generation had perhaps been brainwashed to believe that what used to be known as the staff of life is, in fact, poisonous.

When a few moments later four tiny slices of finger-width toast were placed before us (enough carbohydrates for one day’s point-count, the chef must have informed her), I despaired and realized that what I’d read in the paper must be true: More people than ever are heading for the doctor on a quest for antidepressants, and many of these, not so coincidentally, are the same tortured souls who have eliminated fat and carbohydrates from their diets. Sans salty serotonin, who wouldn’t be miserable, unable to determine the meaning of life?

In four crouton bites, we consumed our table allotment of wicked white flour as I recited to my daughter the memories I cherished from a kitchen childhood. She couldn’t imagine that we had come home from school each afternoon to Swedish butter cookies, still slippery-warm on the baking sheet, and she scoffed at our teenage idea of cutting back on calories -- to only a brick of Monterey Jack and just a box of full-fat crackers.

And on Sundays, the religious experience of breakfast at Pasadena’s Huntington Hotel was the spiritual incentive to get out of bed and accompany my mother to church. The bacon was extra crispy, the softened butter so sweet.

A close second was Taco Treat, where we went for a refried bean burrito -- and trust me, there was no such thing as boiled black ones or whole-wheat tortillas. Late afternoons, we tripped the light fantastic over to 31 Flavors for a double scoop of jamoca almond fudge.

Then there was dinner at my grandmother’s house. Mun’s mantra was butter, gravy, sugar and cream. We would gather around the dining room table on Berendo Street near Griffith Park, salivating, impatient for grace to be said, so we could eat. In the summer, Mun’s idea of our seaside vacation dessert was to cut a chocolate cake into four wedges. My sister, my two cousins and I would each grab a slab, devouring it as we walked around Balboa Island in Newport Beach, barefoot and not a carbo-care in the world.

We were quicker to smile then, prone to laugh in the face of potential catastrophe, and although I always chalked up such natural ease to the unadulterated innocence of youth, I now wonder if my devil’s food diet had something to do with it.

Yes, I know it’s not heart-healthy. I too have been known to raise my glass (red wine only) on hearing, after the annual physical, that my LDL and HDL cholesterol levels have crossed the finish line in the correct ratio. But I also get a supernatural high as my husband and I head toward the hot dogs, salted peanuts and beer at Angel Stadium.

Now I have to confess: I have been a champion of Omega 3, and bit hook, line and sinker into the idea of soy supremacy. Between classes at the high school where I taught for a time, I threw down handfuls of the stuff before each bell rang, until one fateful Friday when the In-N-Out Burger catering truck pulled into the parking lot. In a moment of temporary insanity, I wolfed down a double-double cheese with fries and decided right then and there that if I ate even one more soy nut, longer life or not, I would commit suicide.

Can I ever find a way to look forward to a salad with no dressing at a table with no bread? It may be better for my body, but it is certain sorrow to my soul. Life is not about quantity; it’s all about quality -- and soul, which sadly, we seem to be confusing with prescriptions.

So please pass me the poppy seed Prozac. By next week, recipe research will no doubt uncover the savory solution for our inability to cope with the madness: Bread and butter has been, all along, the manna that fed us all in the wilderness.