Who is Margaret Holmes, you may ask. Margaret Holmes is a brand of canned vegetables.
For too many years I have avoided all commercially grown vegetables, because even what was “certified organic and gluten-free” contained enough glyphosate to give me celiac reactions.
There are those who would be happier if celiac reactions, mine and those of other people, were just generally getting worse across the board—or even if we could be persuaded that they are—because of our mutant gene, not because of glyphosate. I’m delighted to disappoint them. My celiac symptoms improved drastically in 2020 when just one popular glyphosate product, “Roundup,” was pulled off the U.S. market. In 2021, the EPA claimed they’d be warning farmers not to spray glyphosate directly on food, and the result was good. I ate several commercially grown vegetables, and fruits, without a reaction.
Now when we get spraying glyphosate or any similar poison into the air criminalized, as should have happened years ago, and the market for glyphosate scaled down to occasional use as an insidious poison for use in covert warfare, I’m sure I’ll be symptom-free. Years ago I said to my husband, “I don’t want to be able to eat wheat bread again. I’d be satisfied if there were just a way that if a trace of wheat flour gets into a corn or oat flake, eating that cereal won’t make me sick.” In a glyphosate-free world, for most of us who have the celiac gene and probably all of us who’ve had celiac-like reactions in recent years, that will happen. Thousands of people will enjoy normal lives again. Many of us will be able to eat wheat bread.
Which brings us back to Margaret Holmes, which specializes in “Southern” mixes of canned vegetables like the lima beans, corn, and tomatoes that was on sale last week. I had missed that mix of lima beans, corn, and tomatoes. I remembered it as a nice savory mix of three delicious vegetables with just enough salt to preserve their natural flavor and texture in the tin.
So I added a can of lima beans, corn, and tomatoes to a pot of rice, and well, you know—things can be like people and places: Avoid them for a few years and they may have changed beyond recognition by the time you get back to them. “What is this supposed to be? Flippin’ Boston Baked beans? Bleep the bleeping bleep—Margaret Holmes is supposed to be Southern! Send this garbage back to bleepin’ Boston!”
Back in France, it seems, someone discovered that vegetables that are just starting to rot often taste sort of like a mix of olive oil, sugar, vinegar, mustard, and preferably a mix of every other strong-tasting thing you have at the back of the cupboard too. Mixing these non-food items and dumping them over food made it easier to overlook the fact that the veg were not what they ought to be. It did not make any vegetable taste as good as nature intended that vegetable to taste, while fresh.
I don't like sugar in beans. I don't like vinegar in anything. All I could taste in that pot of rice were sugar and vinegar. It was disgusting.
But I ate my share of it, nasty though the flavor was, and set out generous portions of veg for the animals.
Note to any kids reading this post: Yes, there are foods adults don’t like, and when adults buy these foods and believe they’re safe to eat but they don’t taste good, we say “Never again” as we eat them. Many adults feel more respect for kids who have mastered this life skill, too.
The cats ate the meat and a little of the rice, as usual, and left the pricey but now yucky lima beans, corn, and tomatoes for the possum. Cats don’t like sweet or fermented food. Possums do.
And the possum had a sniff, took a bite, and left the Margaret Holmes veg.
The possum.
The animal who is nobody’s pet, who stays near my home for only one purpose, which is eating what the cats bury in their sand pit.
Margaret Holmes has branded a vegetable recipe that the possum won’t eat. I'm sure it's just an unholy combination of the flavorings from Boston baked beans with lima beans, corn, and tomatoes, but Parva Possum has given us its nonverbal word that this combination tastes worse than cat litter.
Congratulations Margaret Holmes—that has to be a first!
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