Food Fight

by Peter Eichenberger

When I was in elementary school, there was a lunchtime game only the foolhardy played. The object: stuff as much of your lunch into a half-pint milk container. Peas, peaches, potatoes, candied yams, all forced into the too-small maw of waxed paper boxes.

I am courageous, but I didn’t even have the balls to play. The penalty? One had to consume the admixture before the rest of the lunchroom crowd, a visual aid sure to make all but the strongest stomachs blanch with nausea.

This game’s effect etched into my mind the image of food as ballistic weapon.

Growing up as we did in bellicose, gun-toting America, the Woolworth store provided all sorts of dangerously realistic toy weapons. A 50 cent allowance and a measure of Scandinavian inventiveness led to the fact that, instead of the factory plastic pellets, dried field peas provided an endless, nearly-free supply of ammunition for an injection-molded Walther automatic so brooding and perfect it could get you capped in a dark alley.

There were more: rotten walnuts and a sling that would nearly knock the victim out, not to mention leave an indelible mark. Plums and paper towel rolls: the concept most recently displayed by my little nephew at the hospital visit. The little tyke was well into some serious work on developing a 25-caliber pneumatic blowgun that fired plugs of mashed potatoes. “You ain’t gonna get them things nowhere but in your own bed,” I said, later courageously exposing myself to a direct line of fire.

A cucumber once served as solid shot in an unsuccessful attempt to silence my dead cat Pookie. I warmed it on my woodstove and introduced it into lovemaking without my partner’s knowledge. Not wanting anything to go to waste, frugality led to cleaning off the filth and cat hair, slicing it and dredging it in vinegar before serving to her parents the next day.

The most ambitious would have been the Chicken cannon, conceived when David Weaver and I became aware that Raleigh was going to lose train service in lieu of Charlotte. Short meetings determined our course of action. Raleigh boasts one of the steepest railroad grades on the east coast.

David and I reasoned that a fantastic way to express our displeasure would be to use cheap and plentiful lard to lubricate the railroad tracks, just as N.C. State University kids used to do it every year back in the forties and fifties. Heck, it was overdue.

Then we’d assault the train with a gun I’d engineered while boozed on whiskey. Long ago, Prairie Home Foods sold an entire chicken, plucked, cooked and packed into a can. I reasoned that with a piece of plastic tubing I could concoct a propane-fired chicken cannon. It’d work like a potato cannon.

One of my old motorcycle buds once shot a duck out of a tree with an apple out of a potato cannon.

Even before grad school in English, I marveled at the layers of meaning of a flightless, headless, plucked, otherwise flightless bird arching through the morning sky and smacking into the side of a passenger train amid a great spray of gelatin.

The Gods intervened. When I went to the Wynn Dixie for the chickens, I was horrified. “They quit stocking them last week,” the smiling clerk said.

Stalled, but not out of the game, I considered making my own, until subsequent research uncovered a Brit Rail paper that showed that cleaning lubed railroad tracks entailed not solvents, not soap, but grinding. The wheel sets and track had to be mechanically ground before a train could go over that section without slipping.

Even in pre-911 USA, it looked like a hitch in prison. The project was sadly abandoned.

(Exploding cantaloupe from askobac's flickr stream, and the hurtling dog courtesy of schoolio.)