Plain Kid

“Why don’t you mix your peas and your mashed potatoes?”

“Because I’m not flavor-impaired.”

This is pretty much the gist of a conversation I had with a friend during high school. We were eating dinner together. I was eating my dinner in what I thought to be the normal manner: eating each part of the meal one at a time. Apparently, however, this distinguishes me as the Cro-Magnon of eaters. But aside from arguing belligerently that mixing peas and mashed potatoes was a dumb idea, I thought no more of the event.

This summer, however, I was having a conversation about sandwiches (over lunch; my entire life is not consumed by talking about food). More accurately, one of the guys had his girlfriend make him a sandwich, and found it completely inedible because it had mayonnaise in it. And thus began a heated conversation over what constitutes an appropriate sandwich ingredient. And one’s opinion clearly depended on this question: Were you a plain kid?

There are several defining characteristics of a plain kid. One is that all you wanted in your sandwiches as a child was meat. No mayonnaise, no butter, and definitely no lettuce or garnishy crap. You thought chicken nuggets and fries are best eaten without ketchup. And finally, mixing foods was absolutely unacceptable. Everything on the plate was to be in its discrete place, and it was upsetting if some of the vegetable juice dribbled into any of the other items. Green bean juice touching the steak? Disastrous!

I, for one, was a stereotypical plain kid. My idea of a ham sandwich was white bread with three slices of evenly distributed meat. Salad dressing angered me, and I cringed whenever my mother put salt on anything. My father’s liberal application of ketchup over the pile of fries made them inedible. And while I liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I really preferred plain jelly sandwiches. I have since grown out of my plain kid-ness, but my continued satisfaction with my nothing-but-turkey sandwiches reflects my plain-kid past.

Stuff kids, on the other hand, love mixing flavors. These were the kids who would ask for two ice cream flavors in the same cone. They wanted garlic, cheesy fries and experimented by putting onion rings in their hamburgers. A stuff kid definitely came up with and spread the word about the Flutter Nutter. Marshmellow fluff and peanut butter? That sounds terrible - let’s try it! You can tell who former stuff kids are by behaviors like taking two sauces at a fast food restaurant and mixing them with a chemist’s accuracy before applying them to their fries.

Plain kids and stuff kids will never agree, and their battle, even into adulthood, is epic to the degree of that between pirates and ninjas.