During my youth we ate a lot of salmon. Salmon was cheap in those days because each year, particularly in the spring, great runs swam up the rivers of the Northwest until all the dams got completed during the last century.

In the 1950s I remember the bobbing lights of drifting gillnets in the Columbia opposite the Portland Airport, and in the markets of town huge fish whole, in steaks or fillets crowded the ice with fish of other ilk; all of it abundant and affordable in earlier, if not better, days. During World War II, I recall, we suffered the hardship of having to eat great quantities of salmon in all forms: fried, baked, creamed on biscuits; salmon loaf was popular, as was salmon salad, not to mention smoked salmon, though in my neighborhood we had never heard of lox.
 

We didn’t realize it then, of course, but all that salmon was good for us. All that fish oil Roto-Rooterizing our arteries and balancing the depredations of all the macaroni-and-cheese, Spam, eggs and whatever, not to mention cigarettes, that today, we’ve been told, will eventually drop us like a sledged ox.  There was rationing, of course. And this limited all the really good bad stuff: sugar, butter, red meat, booze and etc., so that most people, if you look at old photographs, were much thinner and tougher looking. Since gasoline was rationed, more people walked, and farther, and they worked longer and harder for less.

Today, it seems, everything has gone to hell. Despite a plethora of diets and exercise information, thereare more fat people than ever before, many of them children, victims of idleness and junk food.  Living as a 64-year-old diabetic in America, particularly now during the holidays, is to navigate a minefield of dietary speculation and misinformation, so much so that in weak moments one considers throwing it in and committing suicide by cigarette and Snickers bar.
I have been active and exercised religiously throughout my life, a regimen begun as a boy. Even on the foulest days, which in Oregon were much damper then, my neighborhood chums and I preferred constant movement than being trapped indoors. We took to the woods, more accessible in those
pre-suburban days, and romped about in pursuit of  crawdads, squirrels, the construction of forts and general mischief.

On crude vacant lots or open fields we played vigorous games of unsupervised softball and football, establishing our own pecking orders and relishing conditions that challenged our toughness and brought us home muddy but unbowed.  Ravenous, after all this activity, we swarmed our family refrigerators, there being few, if any, fast-food outlets in our neighborhood. For snacks of that ilk, if you had the money, there were hamburger and
hotdog “stands,” and drugstore counters, where, compared to today’s Mc-offerings, the offerings were haute cuisine.

Brown-bag school lunches were the usual fare: peanut butter-jelly, tuna fish, cheddar cheese, bologna, pimento loaf (remember that?) -- all of it on Wonder Bread spread with oleo (mixed at home), mayo, mustard or Miracle Whip. Oh yeah! An orange, apple or banana; carrots, maybe a couple cookies, milk at school. Kid stuff.  Post-war home food: oatmeal, eggs and bacon; meatloaf, hash, leftovers, macaroni-and-cheese, fish, fried chicken on Sundays, brussel sprouts (Jeez!), vegetable from cans because you couldn’t get fresh stuff out of season, though some frozen.

I had two grandmothers, one lived in the country, the other in town. My country grandmother had cows and chickens, made her own butter, baked bread and canned fruit and vegetables. My city grandmother had, as a young woman, been a cook for a wealthy family in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, hence there isn’t enough room to recall her fantastic gastronomical repertoire.  It is enough to say that on Sundays, when the family gathered, there was a rush to the pantry to see what grandma had contrived, while the plump old woman stood smiling by and admonished in broken English, “First we eat, then we talk. . .”

So it should be no surprise that, a plump child, I grew into a rather stocky adult. Never quite obese, but never slender as a reed either, I have over the years kept a wardrobe of pants “fat” and “thin” (or thinner,anyway), and have during dangerous  periods lived life as if participating in an extended Bacchanal.

All of which catches up with you eventually. I haven’t had a drink in many years, a consequence sustained less by willpower than by fear; I no longer smoke; and since my diabetes shifted into a higher gear, I am no longer comfortable eating just about anything.  Which seems fine, because as you read today--or tomorrow, or yesterday--everything is either good or bad for you. 

I recall in the good old bad days when to live a healthy lifestyle was to eat steaks the size of catchers’mitts and salad. Guess what? They’re back!
Carnivores are fond of quoting from that old Woody Allen movie, “Sleeper,” in which Woody discovers that in the future steaks and cigarettes have been found to be good for you. Exclude cigarettes and we have Dr. Robert C. Atkins, M.D., who rocked the medical establishment some 30 years ago by proclaiming that, genetically, we are still prehistoric creatures who should thrive on meat, lots of it; cheese, cream, eggs and other fats and proteins to the exclusion of carbohydrates, which are stored as harmful fat and make us diabetic.

Atkins’ dietary conclusion were considered outrageous by the legitimate majority, and my own doctor, on mention of his name, went up about 30,000 feet and sputtered something I shall paraphrase simply as “nonsense.” Yet, within the last few months a story appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine proclaimingsuccesses with the Atkins diet, including testimonials from physicians and nutritionists who had previously condemned the diet but found it to work quite successfully for themselves.

Whatever, I keep running into people whose eyes glaze over like cultists when they tell me of the great success they’ve had with the diet.   I remain a skeptic. Having adapted to a modified version of the diet for some weeks now, I find that I remain thin (thinner at least), but that my cholesterol has jumped significantly --Well, what do you expect?  However, a return to eating a few more “carbs” made my blood sugar jump as well, so I now remain in a quandry. 

I do recall that while serving as a Navy medic many years ago my commanding officer, Capt. Small, a man of capacious girth and a rapacious appetite for cigarettes recommended the following: Eat everything in sight for breakfast, skip lunch and eat only meat and vegetables for dinner; a regimen that allowed me to drop 20 pounds or so, though at night we consumed gallons of beer--But hey! I was only 20 years old.  (Capt. Small also ate chocolate-covered bees, ants and fried grasshoppers, which aren’t bad, actually.) 

Perhaps the only successful diet after all is to consume, rabbit like, heads of lettuce and spring water, eventually moving up to the head of a pheasant on special occasions, then running 10-12 miles a day (uphill). After a while one would assume the debauched and dissipated look of a major male model in a fashionable magazine, rapier thin and able to buy suits off the rack at Mario’s, only one day to be distracted and disappear through the slats of a cattle guard. 

A jelly donut--And to hell with it!

Text © 2002 Paul Pintarich   Rockwell graphics are from the Art Renewal Center.   The salmon photo is from the Mckenzie River Reflections, and may be an ODFW shot. The photo of  Dr. Atkins is a link to his diet website.  The WWII poster is a hotlink, as well.