Dieticians are Just Folks

At The Annual Meeting of the American Dietetic Association in New Orleans, I lived in constant fear that the dieticians would find out what I had been eating all week. The discovery would be made, I figured, by an undercover operative---some strict diet balancer who normally worked as the nutritionist in a state home for the aged but was posing as a mad-dog glutton in order to trap me. ''How were the oyster loaves at the Acme today?'' she would ask casually, chewing on a Baby Ruth bar and fixing me with a look of pure food envy.

''Not bad at all,'' I would say, thrown off my guard by having met an apparent soul mate in an exhibition hall that included displays for such items as ''textured protein granules with beeflike flavor'' and some evil-looking powdered substance for which the most appetizing boast was that it was rapidly absorbed in the upper intestine. ''I had to have two oyster loaves, in fact, which left room for only an ordinary-sized platter of red beans and rice and homemade sausage at Buster Holmes's place on Burgundy Street. I think if I hadn't had so much beer at the Acme, I might have been able to go a few pieces of Buster's garlic chicken, but-----''

''Get him, girls!'' the agent would shout, whereupon a gang of dieticians would fall upon me and hold me down while the chairman of the public-policy committee poured carrot-and-raisin salad down my throat.

''Oysters are extremely high in cholesterol,'' a lecturer would say while the force feeding was going on. ''If one must eat oysters, oysters on the half shell rather than the fried oysters in an oyster loaf would be a better choice. Buster Holmes's homemade sausage defies scientific analysis.''

''There were (continued on page 240) Dieticians are just Folks (continued from page 121) some good carbohydrates in the beer,'' I reply weakly between bites. Nobody is listening to me. A line is forming behind the dietician who is dishing out the carrot-and-raisin salad---a dozen determined-looking ladies holding plates of green vegetables and gray meat. I spot the dietician from Southwest High School in Kansas City, Missouri, standing patiently with some Brussels sprouts I left on my plate in 1952.

My fears, as it turned out, were without foundation. I should have realized that on the first day of the meeting, when I was having breakfast at the Four Seasons, a pastry shop on Royal Street that has made me happy to be awake on a number of mornings in the past. I had figured that a week during which not only the dieticians but also the franchise operators of Roy Rogers Family Restaurants were meeting would be a good time for someone who is interested in both eating habits and conventions to be in New Orleans, but I had no intention of permitting an inquiry into other people's eating habits to interfere with my own. When I'm in New Orleans, my habit has always been to eat as much as I possibly can---partly, of course, as a precaution against developing some serious nutritional problem like remoulade-sauce deficiency in the event I don't make it back to town for a while. On that first day of the dieticians' meeting, I was demonstrating my usual lack of restraint with Four Seasons croissants. After the first few bites, I was in no mood to worry about being observed by some special agent in the pay of the American Dietetic Association. The dieticians, after all, did not have the only game in town for a convention buff. The Independent Oil Compounders were having their annual meeting at the Royal Orleans, right across the street. The National Screw Machine Products Association was meeting at the Royal Sonesta and the Louisiana Nursing Home Association was meeting at the Fontainebleau. The Roosevelt was harboring a slew of narcotics-control agents. I looked around at the other breakfasters defiantly. I was astonished to find myself surrounded by women carrying the program of the annual meeting of the American Dietetic Association. Some of them were even wearing their identification badges. None of them were spying on me, because they were all too busy eating. The woman at the table next to me was attacking not merely a croissant but a croissant filled with cream and covered with chocolate. Tortes and sweet rolls were disappearing all around me. A lady across the room was wolfing down a huge piece of cheesecake. At nine o'clock in the morning! I should have known then that I had nothing to fear from the dieticians. They are obviously just folks.

• • •

If I had any suspicion that the Roy Rogers people might not be just folks, it should have evaporated the moment the first executive I called in their national headquarters picked up the telephone and said, ''Howdy, pardner.'' Unfortunately, my first reaction was that I must have reached the wrong number. According to the information I had been given, Roy Rogers Family Restaurants was owned by the Marriott Corporation, with headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and ''Howdy, pardner'' is not my idea of how a corporation executive in Bethesda, Maryland, is likely to answer his telephone. I have to admit that I was harboring one suspicion that concerned the Marriott people---the suspicion that some of the cardboard and balsawood food I have been served on airplanes had been delivered by the Marriott catering-service truck I always see pulling away from the plane just before take-off. Every single day, it turns out, Marriott provides the airlines with 150,000 meals, none of which contains anything a steady patron of Buster's would recognize as food. (I have never blamed Marriott for my own absent-mindedness that day between St. Louis and New York when, confusing two of those little plastic cups that are always on the meal trays, I poured cream on my salad and French dressing in my coffee, but I do think it's fair to blame them for the fact that I did not become aware of my mistake until it was called to my attention after I had eaten the entire meal.) The 150,000 airline meals are all prepared in one huge kitchen, the location of which Marriott would do well to keep secret, just in case a traveling salesman who also happens to be a discriminating eater is someday driven to terrorism by the breast of chicken he is served between Miami and Chicago. Discovering that all Marriott airline meals are prepared in one kitchen intensified a fear I have had for years---that someday all meals eaten by everyone in the United States will be prepared in one single gigantic kitchen. The Government will ruthlessly enforce the system, using something like the problems created by farm surpluses or the necessities of civil-defense preparations as an excuse, and those of us who refuse to go along will have to go underground---living in caves in the Arkansas hills with an ace barbecue man who somehow managed to escape the roundup of decent cooks, and maybe sneaking out at night to forage for fresh vegetables and to buy contraband chopped liver made with real schmaltz.

I later learned that some Marriott executives assigned to the Roy Rogers Family Restaurants division actually mosey around Bethesda in cowboy boots. The Roy Rogers people like to emphasize that their restaurants have a Western atmosphere that can be enjoyed by the entire family. In the fast-food industry, of course, family means people who spend quite a bit of money but don't wreck the furniture. The merchandising method of the industry, as far as I can gather, is based on luring the entire family by appealing to the children---a shrewd device, since even the best-brought-up children seem to like bland food, particularly if it is served by a cowgirl or wrapped in a package that is shaped like a down. When I discovered that Marriott owns both the Roy Rogers Family Restaurants company and the airline-catering operation, I became more convinced than ever that the sudden proliferation of fast-food franchises a few years ago was no accident. Children can now be lured into the fast-food restaurants and exposed to Styrofoam hamburgers and confetti cole slaw at an impressionable age. Then they enter school and the dieticians take over with a gray-meat and carrot-and-raisin-salad diet that goes on through college, interrupted only by Marriott airline meals flying to and from home at Christmas vacation. By the time these kids are voting age, they will obviously be easy marks for the forces intent on putting over the One Gigantic Kitchen conspiracy.

To test this theory, I asked a friend of mine in New Orleans where her grandchildren like to eat when she takes them out to lunch. I conducted this bit of market research during a dinner a few of us were having at Pascal Manale's, a restaurant that specializes in a dish it calls Manale's Original Barbecue Shrimp---a school of huge shrimps, still in the shell, floating in a sauce that is made of butter and pepper and a number of other ingredients that, put together in some other proportions, could probably power a small speedboat. I considered the children in question less vulnerable than most to the machinations of the One Gigantic Kitchen conspiracy, since they not only have a grandmother who appreciates Manale's shrimps but also a mother who makes crawfish étouffée in her own kitchen and a father who, at the very moment of our conversation, was devouring one of Manale's crabmeat casseroles while wearing an expression of otherworldly bliss. ''We always have to go to two places for lunch when I take the kids,'' my friend replied. ''Nancy insists on going to Roy Rogers' for a roast-beef sandwich and then we have to go to McDonald's so Steven can have one of their hamburgers.''

''Very interesting,'' I said, instantly deciding to change the subject so that my friends would be spared knowing what I knew about what the future held for us. ''Do you think the Nobel committee would look kindly on a suggestion that Mr. Manale be given the Peace Prize this year for these shrimps?''

• • •

On the first day of the dieticians' meeting, I was walking from the New Orleans convention center, a flashy new building in a cluster of flashy new buildings near the river front, when I passed a place called Joe's Jungle Bar. Joe's Jungle, as it is also known, has the look of one of those bars that the patron saint of construction workers always makes sure are left standing in otherwise bulldozed urban-renewal areas so that the people doing the renewing have some place to drink a beer after work or to watch the baseball game during the lunch break. It had a sign on the window that said. Welcome, american dietetic association. Although I was in a great hurry at the time---I was on my way to a place that is renowned for a ham-and-roast-beef po' boy sandwich---I immediately went into Joe's Jungle. Could it be, I wondered, that I would find eight or ten dieticians at the bar drinking Regal beer from the can and loudly cussing the New Orleans Saints' backfield? No. There were no dieticians in Joe's Jungle. Just-folksism only goes so far, even during a convention.

I don't mean that the dieticians behaved very differently from the other people who had some tax-deductible reason for being in New Orleans for a few days with a lot of old acquaintances. After all, the days when conventioners seemed to spend most of their time throwing things out hotel windows are over---partly, perhaps, because a lot of hotels, trying to hoard their expensively produced cold air, are sealed so tight that even a determined Shriner holding a balloon full of cold water would have difficulty finding a suitable bomb chute. Like any other conventioners, the people attending the American Dietetic Association meeting spent a lot of time in New Orleans restaurants, although I don't know how those who spent much time in the exhibition section of the meeting managed to keep up their enthusiasm for eating. Before dinner at Galatoire's one evening, I made the mistake of reading a list of what various corporations were demonstrating to the dieticians in the exhibition booths, and I was put off my feed to the extent of being able to order only a dozen oysters en brochette and some soup---passing up the eggplant stuffed with seafood, a dish I have always believed New Orleans city authorities ought to erect a statue of in Jackson Square.

The salesmen manning the booths at the dieticians' meeting used the same kind of patter one might expect to hear from salesmen at, say, an oil compounders' convention, but most of what they were selling sounded considerably less appetizing than petroleum. ''This is your total diet, not a supplement,'' a salesman at one booth would say, holding up a tiny cardboard box. ''This has your amino acids, your carbohydrates.'' A few booths away, a young woman would offer passers-by a cracker covered with a gray substance and would say, as cheerfully as she could manage, ''Have you tried our meatless chickenlike product?'' Recipes were being distributed to show all of the imaginative dishes that could be made from products like ''modified chicken breasts'' and ''dinner-balls'' and something that comes in what look like gallon milk cartons and is called Versa 'Taters. (''What it is is a multipurpose potato,'' the man at the Versa'Taters booth said. ''You just put it in a pan, fill the pan with tap water, let it sit for thirty minutes, and you have cooked potatoes.'') Whenever I found a booth that was displaying something that actually sounded edible---Sara Lee pastries, for instance---the salesman would hand me a chart that gave a complete analysis of what, say, Sara Lee's Double Chocolate Layer Cake consisted of, including the calories. I cannot think of any information I want to know less than how many calories are in a piece of Sara Lee Double Chocolate Layer Cake.

Somehow, the dieticians managed to clean their plates every morning at the Four Seasons anyway. And, like any other conventioners, they had drinks in hospitality suites (the hospitality, in their case, being provided by companies like the Coldwater Seafood Corporation) and bought gifts to take home (I myself left New Orleans carrying a suitcase bulging with Zatarain's Crab and Shrimp Boil, despite my fear that an air marshal might find it in my luggage and rule it an explosive) and went to Pat O'Brien's to sing along the college songs and wandered up and down Bourbon Street trying to remain aloof from the barkers inviting them into the strip joints. Except for the fact that almost all of them were women, the dieticians were hardly distinguishable from the oil compounders or the members of the National Screw Machine Products Association. Although there are people along Bourbon Street with no shirts on---including, of course, some of the waitresses---conventioners tend to be dressed quite formally, having just come from an annual banquet or an important cocktail party. Watching the crowds on Bourbon Street, in fact, it is tempting to interpret the American convention system as a Government-subsidized program to provide middle-class people with an opportunity to wear their best clothes.

• • •

One way the dieticians differed from a lot of conventioners I've seen is that they seemed conscientious about attending the lectures and panels that had been scheduled for the annual meeting. Sensing that something important must be going on, I resolved one day to attend an entire afternoon of such events myself, even if it meant hearing some balanced-diet talk that I would ordinarily go blocks out of my way to avoid. I have always had trouble following speeches at conventions and sales meetings and annual meetings and conferences---mainly, I think, because so many of the speakers use what my high school speech teacher called ''audio-visual aids.'' Whether the speaker is a Marriott executive telling Roy Rogers franchisers how they can put over Roy's new Double-R-Bar-Burger or a committee chairman of the American Dietetic Association explaining how dieticians can work for the passage of important Federal legislation, the speaker always seems to be pointing to a chart or a slide that lists Key Words. I am always left with such a strong impression of the Key Words that I can't remember what they were meant to be the key to---and the words themselves provide no clue, since they always seem to be the same words no matter what the subject of the speech is. One of the Key Words is always action. I can never remember if that refers to action in developing an effective advertising campaign or political action or, as might be possible at a dieticians' conference, peristaltic action.

I decided to attend the afternoon meetings, anyway, right after I had lunch at Buster's. Although Buster's looks like a corner bar with a lunch counter added, it may be the finest restaurant in the world outside of Kansas City. A serious meal had been arranged there by a friend of mine who helps run Preservation Hall---a place in which New Orleans jazz is played by some of the black musicians who are talented enough to have helped develop the form and intelligent enough to eat many of their meals at Buster's. We started with a huge plate of fried oysters. By the time we were halfway through, Buster's waiter had brought a bowl of spaghetti with a sauce that would probably have brought tears to the eyes of Pascal Manale (as well as to the eyes of anyone who reacts normally to pepper). We ordered a couple of more quarts of beer to help us with the sauce. I could see that I might miss the first speech of the afternoon at the dieticians' conference. I knew we would have to spend at least 40 minutes eating fried chicken alone. Buster's fried chicken tastes as if it is made from chickens that have spent their entire pampered lives strolling around the barnyard pecking contentedly at huge cloves of garlic. As we were finishing the chicken, the waiter brought out some beans and rice, along with some of Buster's hot sausage. Empty quart beer bottles were all over the table. An hour later, we were still eating. Finally, knowing I had to get to the conference, I pushed back my chair and resolutely placed my third apple turnover on the table unfinished.

''My compliments to the chef,'' I gasped, and staggered out into the sunlight.

By the time I reached the convention center, I was puffing ominously, although I had taken a cab the entire way. I walked into the first lecture room I saw---my breath coming in noisy gasps, my pockets rattling with Gelusil tablets. In an attempt to fight off Buster's sausage, I was eating a Gelusil, chewing some gum and sucking on a Life Saver at the same time. The lecture turned out to be on obesity. The lecturer had a slide flashed on the screen and pointed at a word. I assumed the word was action, but I really couldn't see very well. My eyes were watering. The lecturer started talking about the diseases that obesity could be a factor in---gall-bladder trouble, gout. A wave of heartburn passed over me. She began to discuss diabetes and hypertension. I felt slightly feverish. I broke out in a cold sweat. Finally, I managed to make my way out of the room and into the fresh air. I knew from previous experience what had happened to me: I had come close to going into garlic shock.

I made my way back to my hotel and resolved to become more sensible about eating right away. I decided that I would even forgo a trip I had planned that evening to Mosca's, a roadhouse whose baked oysters I revere. I knew it was important to begin taking care of myself. I had heard that Buster was serving spareribs as his special the following day and I had no intention of missing them.