Sick as a dog, from a dog
The words would reverberate through our holidays. So loud were the echoes, only now can we utter them again without retching.
“It was the hot dog.”
The farmer spoke the words one morning just before Christmas. He’d been up all night, sick as not one dog but two – the sick that causes the bed to spin and makes you fear that you’ll faint on your way to the bathroom for the dozenth time.
“That hot dog didn’t smell exactly right but I ate it anyway,” said the farmer during a break in the, um, action.
This is nothing new, this willingness of the farmer to give the benefit of the doubt to things that are slightly lacking in decency. He is a forgiving man.
But more to the point, he doesn’t believe in wasting food. This may harken back to his years spent on his farm in Argentina, a country where people see the value in things that most of us would toss to the curb. When he moved back here, he was struck by what he saw as the wastefulness of Americans.
That last 2-day-old chicken thigh in the fridge? The one I passed by a dozen times while scrounging in there for lunch? He would eat that. The heels of the bread? He’d make himself a strangely concave PBJ sandwich with both of them. The yogurt that’s two days past its expiration date?
“Eat it,” he would say. “Yogurt already starts out half bad.”
We circle back to this discussion a few mornings a week, about the coffee. He reheats and drinks the coffee left over in the pot from the previous morning. I won’t drink it. My favorite mornings are the ones with the freshly brewed pot, but it pains the farmer to pour anything down the drain.
But that hot dog. I remember seeing it in the fridge, the sad wallflower wrapped in its original plastic. I passed it over for other, newer things. Had the farmer not come along, that wiener would have been stranded there in the meat drawer like a castaway, growing shriveled and crunchy until the day I cleaned out the fridge, unearthed it, and tossed it in the trash after concluding that it was an old carrot.
But where most of us would have raised an eyebrow at the hot dog, the farmer raised a fork. He fried it up in a pan, put it in a bun, buried it under hot peppers and mustard and ketchup, and ate it for lunch.
And then the hot dog ate him for lunch. It didn’t take long for the dog to attack. I’ll spare the details because you know what happened next, but let’s just say it was majestic.
Unlike the yogurt, that package of hot dogs did not start out bad; I’d eaten some a week earlier and felt fine. Something diabolical happened to that last one.
Where most bouts of food poisoning last a night, this one went on. The drama peaked at about day two, but the farmer didn’t completely recover for several more days.
It’s estimated that Americans waste more than a billion tons of food every year. It’s shameful, and the farmer doesn’t want to be a part of that. His dreadful wiener week is tinged with the glow of noble intentions.
We got a new refrigerator yesterday, a shiny stainless steel beauty. We bought it because the old one wore out. But we could make up a better story – the one about how the toxic hot dog killed our refrigerator.
And brought down the mighty farmer.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.