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Food for Thought

A Culinary Tale

There once was a man wan and pallid, he
Suffered from a mysterious malady:
__He ate carrots and greens,
__Ripe tomatoes and beans,
But eschewed anything that’s not salad-y.

Now his wife, she was plump, but quite purty,
Euphemistically “big-boned” or “sturdy”;
__Which is no great surprise,
__Since her diet of pies,
Cakes, and cookies was strictly dessert-y.

Someone wisely suggested combining
Their respective odd habits of dining:
__Then his cheeks they grew pink
__And her girth it did shrink—
The result of their palates’ refining.

.

.

Looking-glass Lament

There once was a girl who, no matter
What she chose from her wardrobe to flatter
__Her plump figure, she failed,
__So in anguish she wailed,
“Why does everything make me look fatter?!”

.

.

Of Vice and Vittles

I’ve kept away from drugs and smoking,
Avoided gambling and drinking,
But I’ve been caught, I say—no joking.
I’d missed this trap, through all my thinking,
But I can tell you with conviction
It’s something quite beyond all treating,
Because my vice and my addiction
Is simply that of social eating!

.

.

Spice of Life

Variety may be the spice of life,
Ensuring that our days are not too bland,
But for a solid base to build upon,
I think consistency is also grand.

It’s fortunate the two pair up quite well;
Just one without the other won’t suffice:
Variety’s whatever you cook up,
Consistency—that plain old bed of rice.

.

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A Pennsylvania native now residing in Colorado, Anna J. Arredondo is an engineer by education, a home educator by choice, and by preference, a poet.  She also has poems published in Light, The Lyric, and Time of Singing.

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24 Responses

  1. Lawrence Fray

    Great cheery verses—thank you! I ‘ll declaim them to my middle school class, too!

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Lawrence,

      Thanks for your comment! I hope your class received them well. What do you teach?

      Reply
  2. Lannie David Brockstein

    The classicist ideal of beauty is a voluptuous woman, as is historically depicted in classical paintings and sculptures, unlike the modernist ideal of “Twiggy”.

    The narration in this historical news footage from the 1960s of her begins with “Girls are to look even more like boys.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jrUADTpdDs

    Unlike the gender confused modernists whose production of hormones has been artificially changed by Big Pharma’s endocrine disrupting pollutants, we classicist men love the ideal of women being “plump, but quite purty”—as G-d designed the fairer sex to be.

    Reply
      • Anna J. Arredondo

        But curves (plural) can only be found
        On shapes other than “stick thin” and “round.”
        One’s proportions, I deem,
        May avoid each extreme —
        There’s a middle somewhere, I propound.

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        It’s OK if her middle is thin,
        Like her fingers, her nose, or each shin.
        But her bosom and rump
        Should be rounded and plump
        Because those are the gateways to sin.

      • Anna J. Arredondo

        🙂
        Thus,

        For the woman of form AND persuasion,
        Where monogamy joins the equation,
        She must have wit and strength
        To maintain at arm’s length
        Those who’d think her gates apt for invasion.

  3. Roy E. Peterson

    Anna, I love your wit and wisdom combined on a silver platter. I immensely enjoyed these rollicking verses. I have several foody poems and may try to post them someday. These encouraged me to do so.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Thanks for the comment, Roy! I look forward to reading your foody poems someday soon.

      Reply
  4. Sally Cook

    Hi, Anna –

    Had something ready to send, and the horrible machine completely destroyed it. Just to say that to my mind poets who love food are the best poets;
    You are one such poet.
    So, I conclude that I must be brief;
    Computer is a clever thief
    A fake, a fraud, and we’ve been had
    And double-crossed, which would be bad
    Enough if we had not lost our minds
    Among bad spuds and grapefruit rinds.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Sally,

      Thanks for your comment. Your poetic complaint resonates with me as well. 🙂

      Sometimes you have to pull the plug
      When your machine’s a meddling thug.
      There’s hope we’ll find our minds again
      By taking up notebook and pen!

      Reply
  6. Cynthia Erlandson

    Anna, these are all tons of fun, but especially “A Culinary Tale”! Pallid-he/malady/salady is hilarious, as is purty/sturdy/desserty. “Euphemistically big-boned or sturdy” not only made me laugh, but it displays the anapestic meter so well. (I also smiled at your additions in the comments above.) I hope your home-schoolers have picked up your writing talent. I’m sure your sense of humor must help them to enjoy school.

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Cynthia,

      Thank you for your feedback. A Culinary Tale was loads of fun to write, and I love the picture Evan chose to post with it! “Euphemistically” and so many other nice big ‘intellectual’ words are great invitations to write a limerick. 🙂

      All three of my kids have tried their hand at poetry here and there, and I definitely squeeze in little lessons when I have the opportunity. But perhaps it’s my example that has more influence — two days ago my youngest (9yo) showed me, with great pride, a short (coincidentally food -related) poem he wrote in his little pocket-sized notebook, like the kind I carry around everywhere. I have high hopes for all of them!

      Reply
  7. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Anna, I love your creative romp through the culinary labyrinths of delights and downfalls of diet. I love the innovative employment of the ‘y’ in “Food for Thought” – my favorite! Sharing a bed and a dinner plate is the way to go!

    “Spice of Life” reminds me of a wonderful poem called “Bitcherel” by Eleanor Brown. I love fun poems, and these are huge fun! Thank you!

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      Susan, thanks for your comment! I’m not acquainted with that poem, I’ll have to check it out.

      Reply
  9. Allegra Silberstein

    You bring delight to body and mind…and a great way to romp in this food for my day!

    Reply
    • Anna J. Arredondo

      C.B.,

      What are (some of) the specific spots/issues that you see?
      Upon rereading them just now (and based on your past critiques of some of the poems on this site) there are one or two things I suspect you might take issue with… But I can’t do too much with the general comment vaguely applied to all four of them.

      Reply
      • C.B. Anderson

        Anna, I was going to write: You should be able to figure that out on your own, and I still believe that, but you are absolutely correct that a general comment without pinpoint specificity is fairly useless. Now, I won’t go through these poems line-by-line, but I will touch on a few points.

        In the first stanza of the first poem, in line one you have “pallid, he” and a comma is insufficient punctuation to separate one complete sentence from another. Try a period or perhaps a semicolon.

        In line two you have “suffered from a mysterious” where “-fered from a mys-” is four consecutive unstressed syllables, which fits no metrical scheme of which I am aware. The ideal limerick is structured like this:

        A anapest/anapest/anapest
        A anapest/anapest/anapest
        B anapest/anapest
        B anapest/anapest
        A anapest/anapest/anapest

        Now, sometimes amphibrachs are used to good effect in limericks, and the important thing is to be consistent in the matching lines. A lot of writers take liberties with the meter, but this leads, in my opinion, to a jumble of unspecifiable rhythms, forcing the reader to wrench the meter in his mind’s ear in order to meet expectations. It takes a lot of work, I’ve found, to write a limerick the way I think one ought to be written.

      • Anna J. Arredondo

        C.B.,

        Thank you so much for coming back to answer my question (and for going with the longer response).

        I am ashamed of the comma splice in the first line. I shouldn’t allow the reputation of the limerick as an often “nonsense” form to lull me into sloppy editing. And with the four unstressed syllables, you are right; I myself wrenched them to fit the galloping meter of the limerick, and expected the reader to do the same. Believe it or not, I also dislike “limericks” which are anything but, and which just leave it up to the reader to unnaturally stress in all the right places to make it “work”.

        I feel like I have seen other acceptable (but acceptable to whom, I guess, is the question) exceptions for the limerick meter, such as, for instance,
        iamb/anapest/anapest
        as in “There once was a girl who, no matter”… Would you give that a pass? Or would that only be acceptable if ALL the corresponding lines followed that meter? Or, not at all?
        Of course, I could add a word such as “well” or “oh” to the beginning, to conform it to the anapest/anapest/anapest format:
        “Oh, there once was a girl who, no matter”

        I appreciate very much your taking the time to point out some of the unsatisfactory places in my poem. I don’t know of any forum where I can get feedback from other poets, besides this site, and here it can happen only once the poem is already published (with all the errors that slipped past me).

        Here is my reworking of “Food For Thought”:

        Oh, there once was a man wan and pallid; he
        Had a strange and mysterious malady:
        He ate carrots and greens,
        Ripe tomatoes and beans,
        But eschewed any food deemed unsalad-y.

        Now his wife, she was plump (but quite purty) –
        Euphemistically, “big-boned” or “sturdy” –
        Which is no great surprise,
        Since her diet of pies,
        Cakes, and cookies was strictly dessert-y.

        Someone wisely suggested combining
        Their respective odd habits of dining:
        Then his cheeks – they grew pink,
        And her girth – it did shrink,
        The result of their palates’ refining.

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