Snack Wheel (Chiu)

Maybe he’s going through a growth spurt. He is a 12-year-old boy, after all. Or maybe he’s like me and he’s eating his feelings. He’s bored, he says. This family is so boring. Nobody ever wants to do anything. He asks for more screen time to play online games with his friends.

His hunger is constant. He snacks several times a day. Sometimes, he’ll have cereal, depositing the empty bowl in the kitchen sink afterward with a few Cheerios stuck to the sides. Sometimes, he’ll grab a fruit cup and a spoon, leaving sticky syrupy residue on the dining table. Sometimes, he’ll shake a mound of tortilla chips onto a plate and microwave it for a few seconds to have a warm salty snack. Sometimes, he’ll dump a tin of tuna into a bowl and add a handful of black olives. Sometimes, he’ll mix the tuna with pickle relish and spread it onto Ritz crackers.

We’ve been self-quarantined for 22 days now, and I spend large chunks of each day in the kitchen, cooking meals at the stove, loading the dishwasher, handwashing the wok and cast iron skillet, cleaning spills from the countertops and floors, taking inventory of the refrigerator and pantry, and wiping everything down. 

Along with the snacks he prepares for himself, the sixth-grader has devoured an assortment of food I’ve made for him since the statewide stay-at-home order: stuffed peppers, a berry pie, red lentil soup, toasted pita with hummus, fish sticks, sloppy joes, bowls of pasta and meat sauce, banana bread with raisins, two loaves of pumpkin bread, fried rice, potstickers, lentil vegetable soup, baked cod, couscous, baked apples. 

Tonight, during dinner, as he shoveled down spoonfuls of Spanish rice and ground beef, he turned to me and said, “What else can I eat? Could you make me a meatball sub?” He is always thinking about his next snack. He makes grocery wish lists: Lunchables, Oreos, Fruit Gushers, Capri Sun. 

The other day, hungry and bored (because his family is so boring), he made three meal wheels, one for snacks (bread, chips, crackers, pretzels, almonds), one for dips (salsa, jam, ketchup, mustard, marinara sauce) and one for drinks (water, milk, orange juice). Each wheel also includes “you decide!” as a possibility. 

Because he is always hungry, I am always thinking about food too. Tomorrow, we’re going to make Chinese dumplings together. We’ll sit at the dining table, filling flour wrappers with spoonfuls of ground chicken, ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil. We’ll place them in the bamboo steamer and then lift them out with chopsticks when they’re finished cooking. 

The sixth-grader will be ready to eat. 

Lisa Chiu is an Asian American writer whose work has appeared in anthologies and publications including People Magazine, Ohio Magazine, The Plain Dealer, and San Jose’s Mercury News.