Open Writing

My wife, Sandra, is a very intelligent, highly educated woman. So why then is it that her view of contagion, infection and contamination flies in the face of reason and science? While she happily shares my bed, she would die before she’d share my towel, or in an emergency, my toothbrush. I’m healthy, and as far as medical science is concerned, free of communicable diseases; yet, in Sandra’s mind, I ‘m a walking plague about to happen.

In my younger days, I followed with keen interest the work of the National Cold Research Center in England, perhaps because colds were the only sickness I was fortunate enough to have to deal with. What struck me at the time was how difficult it is to deliberately catch a cold. Volunteers who spent a week at the center were subjected to all the conditions that, anecdotally, people thought would lead to an infection. Sleep deprivation; standing naked in a draughty corridor after taking a shower; sharing a room with a person who already had a cold and so on, all to no avail.

The prime objective of the research was, of course, to find a cure for the common cold, and sixty years later the search is still on, though recently I read that the cold virus genome has been decoded. While the UK research didn’t come up with a cure, or better still, a method of prevention, it did give the lie to all the old, folk beliefs of how colds are contracted. My mother was convinced that just being out in the rain without a coat was enough to bring on a bout of the disease. Sandra believes that still.

Though I’m content to let her hold on to her beliefs in that regard, a parting of the ways comes when matters of domestic hygiene are involved. The mantra of my wife’s family, where food is concerned, is “Wrap it and refrigerate it.” On the rare occasions when I could persuade Bertha, Sandra’s mother, to put fruit in a bowl and leave it out, the minute I turned my back she would, with great agitation, wrap each piece in paper towel and cover the bowl.

Probably Bertha’s greatest fear, next to being wiped out by some virulent disease, was that she would have unexpected guests and not have the makings of a meal to hand. Accordingly, she packed her refrigerator with every conceivable commodity, all of them wrapped in plastic, or aluminum foil. What’s worse, none of these mystery packages were labeled.

There was so little space for air to circulate that the outermost packages often were locked in solid ice, and this was not in the freezer compartment. Interior areas were insulated so much by their surroundings that the food in them had either putrefied or perished. And there’s the dichotomy. My wife and her mother shared the philosophy that one should save food and leftovers in the refrigerator until they go bad, then throw them away.

So, no matter that the refrigerator contained enough salmonella to wipe out a whole neighborhood, at least the food wasn’t out in the open. After over twenty years of our marriage, Sandra, very reluctantly will leave out a few items of fruit, and perhaps a bulb or two of garlic in a bowl, but it’s still a struggle with her past. Even though I point out that such items as oranges, grapefruit and tomatoes aren’t refrigerated in the supermarket, and that they should know, the spirit of Bertha is sitting on her shoulder, whispering in her ear that she shouldn’t listen to me.

But progress has been made. The other day, when we were expecting guests for dinner, I was amazed to see that Sandra had taken some cheeses out of the refrigerator so that they would be at room temperature when our guests arrived. I was tempted to be thrilled that my long crusade was finally over, but I knew better. It was a small step for me and a giant leap for Sandra.

To be fair, my early food storage experiences were diametrically opposed to hers, growing up as I did in England, where, at the time, refrigeration was a rarity. Pantries and stillrooms were the thing. The farm where my mother lived for several years had both. The stillroom that abutted the house was a cool, stone built structure with stone-flagged floors. On long, thick sandstone slabs could be found the day’s milking, along with cream, cheeses, and whey. Sometimes there’d be hard cider and lemonade.

Across the lane was a two-holer outhouse and midden, built into the wall of the kitchen garden. It was a simple matter periodically to shovel out the midden from the garden side onto the compost heap. The nutrient rich soil and the sun’s warmth, trapped by the high, stone, kitchen garden wall, grew the most wonderful produce I ever hope to see, or taste. By today’s standards, it’s a miracle we survived, but it doesn’t surprise me.

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