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Tell the Kitchen Madonna What You Eat,
and She Will Tell You Who You Are
July 13th, 2006

One summer, I had a cowboy living in the bunkhouse behind my house. I was new to the ranching life, and Winston was new to adult life. He would graduate from college the following spring, and he liked to talk to me about the kind of girl he wanted to marry. The kind who would be happy on his family's ranch in Kansas. The more meatloaf sandwiches he ate at my kitchen table, the more he talked.

One Monday evening when the coyotes had already started to howl, he knocked on my back door and asked to come in. I was cleaning up after dinner. I offered him some leftover pork roast with carmelized sweet potatoes. I do this by searing the pork in a dutch oven by splashing apple cider vinegar and letting it evaporate. That leaves a sweet, tangy residue; then I add lots of cumin and put it in the oven until it is fork tender.

After Winston ate his roast, potatoes, and cole slaw, he pushed his chair out from the table. Never try to talk to a cowboy until his blood sugar level is normalized. He had worked cattle that day, castrating, vaccinating, and ear tagging, and these guys don't become cowboy poets until they've eaten.

"Did you meet any young ladies at the dance?" We had all gone to the county cattleman's association outdoor dance the previous Saturday night. Where cowboys and ranchers waltz their sweethearts round and round the concrete basketball court while families drink beer in their lawn chairs, and children dressed in western wear run freely and with abandon.

"Seems like all the eligible girls were holding the hands of their children." Winston is undoubtedly highly eligible and not just because of his future real estate holdings. Tall and slender, he is ambitious and shrewd. He's smart too and knew that the right mate could make or break him out in Alma, population 600.

So he launched into the minefield of finding a country girl versus a city girl who most likely could not stand the ranching life. If the country girls didn't have babies out of wedlock, they are overweight, according to Winston. He was particularly impressed by what he termed, in different terms of course, the enormity of their backsides. I didn’t want to tell him he was objectifying a woman's attributes and the danger that could lead to in Theology of the Body terms, so I knew I had to take a different tack.

"Well, Winston, never trust a skinny cook. And if she won't cook for you, if she isn't concerned about what you eat when you are dating, I can tell you, she isn't going to be concerned about making you happy in your marital bed."

That made that skinny boy fold himself out of his slump and look me directly in the eye.

"What do you mean?" I had better chose my words carefully now.

I thought for a moment, then said, "Tell me about your last ideal woman and how you all eat when you are together."

He told me how this girl he is stuck on doesn't eat very much. That he usually bought them meals at fast food places, and she picked at it, and that when he visited her family, she never helped in the kitchen or ate much then. Sure enough she was skinny.

"Winston, it comes down to selfishness and it's lack. It comes down to having a healthy and realistic respect for the body and it's realistic needs, tempered by self control and the virtues of course." He started to glaze over at that.

"If she isn't generous with you at the dinner table, she just isn't going to know how to give her whole self to you after you are married. She just isn't. If she has an unhealthy relationship with taking care of her body, well, trust me, you won't be happy." We talked some more. I tried to think and speak clearly while drying the silverware.

How do you explain to an invincible 20-year old the appetites for food, sex, power and money and how they get confounded and enmeshed and downright messy from time to time?

I'm not sure I got through to Winston. I'm not sure I did a good job of trying to explain the Theology of the Body to him. He was intrigued by what John Paul II said in Love and Responsibility, especially about what men should do for their wives. In fact, he couldn't believe that a celibate old man wrote it. Those are his words.

He went back to his lonely, un-airconditioned bunkhouse. I sent some almond biscotti with him. I can't wait to hear who he marries.

I want to see a picture.

© 2006 The Kitchen Madonna