Healthy Like It Or Not

My mother (bless her heart) is one of those unique individuals who justly can be described as a “health food nut.” My father was not. He would eat anything that was not moving under its own power. That divergence of attitudes created some degree of philosophical conflict in our household growing up. Mama said, “You will,” and Daddy said, “Why bother?”

There was a stretch of time when we were given two particularly unsavory products on a daily basis – rose hips and cod liver oil. Neither of them is fit to be put into a human mouth, but we had to do it. We were going to be healthy, even if it killed us.

Rose hips have always been somewhat of a mystery to me. Frankly, I was not ever aware that roses had hips. Perhaps not all roses have them, only the ones that have overindulged and need to go on a diet. Anyway, such things do exist.

I can tell you now that they are about the sourest substance I have ever tasted. If you are contemplating a pleasant evening of smooching with your sweetie, just eat a mouthful of rose hips beforehand and you will have enough pucker to last the entire session. I do not necessarily dislike sour foods, but rose hips are a little too much of a good thing.

I never had to take castor oil, but I can imagine that cod liver oil is about the same thing, except that one comes from beans and the other from fish. Imagine going out to the shop and swallowing a tablespoon of WD-40 and you have a good idea of what it is like to take cod liver oil.

The cod is a fish, of course, and I cannot imagine that a cod’s liver can be all that large. Since the task of rummaging around inside slimy fish carcasses looking for a particular organ cannot be a very inviting task, I would imagine that those factories have a little trouble keeping help, especially in these days of Covid-induced worker shortages. Regardless of how they are procured, I can tell you that the oil extracted from those livers is guaranteed to gag a not-very-particular alley cat.

So, if you meet me on the street and I appear to you to be the picture of good health (not likely), you will know that I owe it all to flowers and fish, or at least to their assorted parts.