So much Suddenly Salad!

I tend to obsess over a particular food once I discover it. Say a new type of soup hits the stores and I taste it and like it, I will have that soup for weeks afterward. This is a family trait that affected me a great deal in the late 1980s.

At that time in my family history, my sister was taking over as the cook of the family and she was getting pretty good at it. So almost every night we had some interesting home-cooked meal and we became dependent on her as the family chef. Then things in her life started to get more chaotic and she didn’t have time to make full-blown meals and instead resorted to packaged foods to prepare meals.

That was fine with me. I love Hamburger Helper and Manwiches and we had plenty of both of those. Then one day my sister discovered this product called Suddenly Salad. She thought it was the best thing since sliced bread and thus began the Suddenly Salad Phase of 1988. For nearly 2 months, dinner was based on Suddenly Salad.

We all wanted the madness to stop, but we were also very lazy and none of us really wanted to cook. So given the choice of voicing our concerns or shutting up and eating food we didn’t like for weeks on end, we chose the latter and just secretly complained behind her back. We did that up until the day she said at the dinner table, “I am getting tired of this stuff, how about I make something else tomorrow?”

The sigh of relief could be heard from space.

I never had Suddenly Salad again. We still bring it up to my sister from time to time and she feigns ignorance of the entire event or dismisses us as ungrateful, which we were. I kind of feel bad complaining about someone keeping me fed, but I just wished that if she was going to fixate on a food, it could have been something like Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal or Bomb Pops and not Suddenly Salad.