Elimination Diet / A Buen Tiempo

Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera

TITLE 
          Elimination Diet / A Buen Tiempo: an analysis of food scarcity and abundance, of presence and absence, of care in its simplest form

AUTHORS
          V___ R__, Y; V___, M; et al.

          Ages 16 and 13: Papi has picked me up from school late. The electric-blue sky has mellowed to indigo by the time we come through the garage door. He power walks to his room and shuts the door behind him. There are no stairs in this house, not like the one before Mami’s accident; the whole thing can be walked in ten paces. I bristle at his show of excess energy. I never have excess energy. I walk to Mao’s room and ask how the calculus test went (she snorts and rolls her eyes), how band practice was (she snorts and rolls her eyes), how dinner at her best friend’s house went.
          She had potatoes and fish and asparagus. It turned out that she liked asparagus, which I take note of for the grocery trip that should be coming soon, before excusing myself to my room. Instead of changing out of my uniform, I sit close to the edge of the bed, within view of Papi’s door, which I hope will open soon. I sit, breathe through the stomach gnawing, ignore my suspicion that Papi was late because he stopped at Chick-fil-A before picking me up, and hope. Surely he has noticed that we haven’t gotten groceries in weeks; surely he will leave his room again to take me to dinner.
          He doesn’t.
          Ages 28 and 23: We don’t have cars, so the grocery trips, like all of the trips out of the cabin, are ultimately in the hands of the friend in the group who does. This doesn’t seem like it’ll be a problem, especially when the morning after the long drive I wake up to bird songs at dawn. This vacation away from the city with our friends is a fantastic idea, and the simplicity of this thought spreads over me like a balm. Mao is still asleep so I take my morning survey of the land around the spacious cabin alone, noting that these woods are less impacted by deer than the ones we’re used to. There’s a hot tub and a fire pit behind it, and the weather is perfect for using both. Mao and our friends wake up and join when I’m back inside. We play our early 2000’s reggaeton playlists loudly on the TV and scrounge up some coffee; we make puzzles, go on hikes, and finish the car snacks; we plan a trip up the local mountain, and it’s idyllic.
          When it’s time to go to the grocery store, neither of us end up joining to make room for the folks with the most eating restrictions. They’ll handle it, we figure, and continue watching competitive cooking shows and drinking tea. It seems like a perfectly fine arrangement until they come back from the store with fewer bags of food than we were expecting. “It’s only a week,” one says to us, rolling a shoulder. “Yeah, we figured, how much are we possibly going to eat in that time?” says another. And even though it’s probably fine, and we can go back to the store later if the food runs out, and we probably shouldn’t buy it all at once anyhow, Mao is holding the smallest bag of spinach I have ever seen and looking at me with so much rage and panic and shock that my understanding of the situation multiplies, compounds, gets layered with fuzzy memories that don’t belong in this time and place—empty pantry cabinets, dishes smashed in a recycling bin, the cold light of a refrigerator bulb shining on molding sofrito and nothing else—so even though I mean to smooth things over, when I say “yeah, it’s okay,” everyone knows that it’s not.

INTRODUCTION
          A buen tiempo is what you say when you walk into a room and people are eating. It’s one of the reeds that make up the cultural basket of the food I grew up eating. It’s the acknowledgment of the role that mealtime plays in the community, an apology for having infringed upon it once by not being with your own, eating where and when you should be, and twice by interrupting this communion for others. It’s ingrained so deeply that it’s automatic for me to let it slip, even to this day, even, sometimes, among white people—if what they’re eating smells good enough. It’s one of the few parts of food culture that Mami managed to instill in us before her accident.
          Another example: You have to make the sofrito on a Sunday. It’s too time consuming, with the piles of fresh cilantro and oregano, and the hours of cross-legged floor time with the pilon and entire heads of garlic, for a weekday. But because we make it in huge quantities, it’s not every Sunday. Once every few months we grind, blend, pour and repeat until we have at least a half-gallon jug of it.
          Another example: You have to buy the chicken whole; we are made of tenacity and skill, not money. So Mami teaches nine-year-old me how to hold the knife, how to sharpen it once, twice, and then use the thinnest edge to slice the skin across the breast and legs, where the meat is thickest, so we can get the sofrito deeper into those parts. Then, we position its blade flatter, angling it to find the exact pressure point, so that the ball and socket joint will pop apart and the knife can cut through skin and minimal muscle on its way to creating a separate leg, breast, and thigh.
          All the food rituals—the ones we know and the ones we don’t, the spoken ones and the ones to be acted upon—are means to the same ultimate ends. They’re an address, an acknowledgment, an attempt to answer the question, “Don’t you understand that without all the community ties, food is actually nothing?”
          An elimination diet is the opposite of a buen tiempo. Its inherent soullessness stems from the kind of abrasive pragmatism that science adores, a divorcing of food from joy, community, and ritual to isolate its connection to muscle and bone and, in my case, stomach lining, duodenum,
jejunum, and ileum. Like any divorce, it’s ultimately a brutally clinical approach to improving quality of life. More explicitly: it’s what the specialist closest to your high school campus says you should try when you’ve come back negative for Celiac and Chron’s, but you’re still shitting blood (well… how much, exactly, would you say?) and losing weight (but you say you’ve always been thin, right?) and not keeping much down besides peanut butter so you’ve sort of given up eating entirely (have you ever been diagnosed with an eating disorder?). It’s a GI specialist’s final Hail Mary six years later, the one after they look up from your chart in your colonoscopy follow up appointment to meet your eyes and say, or accuse really, “this just doesn’t make any sense.” It is, in short, an attempt to answer your follow up question, “Okay, but can we make it make sense, though?”
          I know a lost cause when I see one. So I have to clarify that this study is a futile effort. The odds that good science will answer these questions are slim, I know. If my undergraduate degree taught me anything, it’s that good science isolates variables so that cause and effect, or at least correlation that eventually can be proven as causation, can be determined. But, as someone who was there across all of those years, I can tell you—the only thing I know for sure is that hunger and illness are variables that arrived together, in an impenetrable knot, shortly after a simple subtraction problem: working class life minus one income equals the disappearance of essentials. While I resent the idea that these variables are so related as to be in causal relationship with one another, I have no evidence that they are not. When a strand of one was pulled, inevitably so was a strand of the other.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
          It’s pretty cut and dried. For the first part, as its name suggests, you eliminate everything that might be causing distress for three weeks. For the second part you slowly, one at a time and a week apart, add it all back. It’s good science this way, so long as you take enough time in between the new additions to properly note your symptoms, so long as you’re able to keep your stress levels relatively consistent throughout. In order to land on what exactly is upsetting your system, or at least what discombobulates it the most, and then eliminate that from your diet permanently.
You won’t need much. Groceries (good luck affording them), and strength of will, mostly, which for me is summoned easiest through memory:

          i. Creamy pasta
          Anyone who’s been hungry knows how it blurs time. So this recipe is from sometime in high school, either right before or right after the Thanksgiving that Papi ruined by coming home in the middle of an ill-timed nap to find the sink full of dishes. I had started setting aside all of the ingredients I could scrounge up in the kitchen for a carbonara. I had fought him—an ugly and embarrassing display of my American entitlement he would not let me forget for the next three grocery trips—for a cheese I still cannot pronounce confidently to this day (mascarpone). Or maybe I had made it already and, overcome with the sleepy warmth of being full of carbs, had left the kitchen mid-clean-up. Regardless, the before or after wasn’t the problem.
          The problem, I told myself as I picked out forks and spoons and plastic cups from between shards of broken ceramic and glass at the bottom of the recycling bin, was the house layout. The garage door opened to a hallway in which the designers had haphazardly installed a fridge, a sink, two square feet of laminate-covered countertop, and called it a kitchen. So when Papi came in after his long long day at work, the first thing he saw was the sink of dishes. The second thing he saw was my sleepy, bleary-eyed confusion when I appeared in the doorway in response to his screaming that we just didn’t respect the rules, didn’t respect his work, didn’t respect his effort, everything that he had to do for us by himself, and if we couldn’t do something so simple as wash the goddamned dishes then we would just as simply have no dishes at all, and over our screaming protests—Mao has now joined, less sleepy but equally baffled—brings in the recycling bin from the garage, throws every dirty dish into it, handful by handful, then goes for the clean ones in the cabinets too, until there’s only one plate, one bowl, one fork, one spoon, and one cup. This way, he says on his way back out the garage door, when we need a dish we have to wash it.
          He’s gone for two days. The last slamming of the door behind him reverberates all the way through Thanksgiving, leaving us silent, uncertain of when (if?) he’ll be back, wondering which would be worse. Mao has only been 14 for a week, but in just another week I will be 17, I think as my mind spirals outward and hovers over the two of us, watching from a cool distance. Even if he doesn’t come back, we probably won’t be evicted before then. It was fine.
          Technically, I joke to Mao aloud as I pass the macaroni and cheese, this is a more apt celebration of the rebranded genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples. She doesn’t respond, but she does stop crying and eat. I wash the dishes after she goes to her room. I won’t eat carbonara again for a decade, unable to shake the deep queasiness it triggers. So the second time the doctor says dairy is the main thing I should be eliminating (I ignored him the first time), I choose this memory to tie to the decision, and hope that as my consolation prize, I get to banish them both.

          ii. Tortillas with cheese:
          Before we were hungry, before Mami’s accident meant she could no longer live stateside, where healthcare and home care is next to impossible to afford, our biggest problem with the kitchen was that we just weren’t allowed in there. The kitchen was like our parents’ room—even if we managed to sneak in there, anything we touched would be discovered, would explode like the bottle of Sprite we accidentally sprayed onto the ceiling floor light, and leave us with far-reaching consequences to suffer.
          So the few times we got to experiment, under Mami’s watchful eye to ensure we didn’t play with or waste any food, we were thrilled. We grabbed pans and slowly melted butter on them and we were brilliant. We got tortillas handmade by one of Mami’s coworkers and added them to the pan and we were geniuses. We flipped them when they were golden, covered them with soft shreds of mozzarella and folded them over and it was a revelation. We couldn’t believe how perfectly toasty and melty they were. We had to name our discovery, it was such a sensation, but we were 7 and 10 so the only thing we could think to call them was tortillas with cheese. Mami, with one of her rare smiles, lets us call them that for years. So long that, eventually, when we order quesadillas at a Mexican restaurant for the first time and they arrive at our table, all we can do is laugh.
          I try not to focus, as I call on this memory to help me bring dairy back into my diet, on how far back I have go for a simple recipe that isn’t fraught, isn’t riddled by anxiety and lack.

          iii. Repeat with every food group.

RESULTS
          As both the experiment’s Principal Investigator and dependent variables, I am the only witness (1) of the process, the same way I’m the only witness of my illness, or my hunger. Even still, the plan feels organized and manageable at first. Like I can write it out on a chart, label it Table 1, tally points for pain, physical activity, and calories in each day, and plot them as points on Figure 1. As an undergrad who already spends most of my time in the lab, in the world of experiments, it feels within my grasp. For about a week. Then my mind starts to scramble, to fry—first in oil, then in stomach acid; it starts to turn into the vomit itself, or the specter I am, looking at it. How many times today? Three? Or was that yesterday? Or was it once a day for three days? Or was there a day I didn’t vomit at all? Just watched the wall turn rose-yellow with morning, then dust-white with afternoon, then tattoo-blue with evening, then the warm comfort of black, of night, of an off switch. Was that the day I scared the campus health center nurse? Gripped her arm suddenly, voice lashing out of my chest like a whip, saying I don’t care what it is; I just need it to stop. Why won’t it stop? Did I cry or did she? As she loaded me into the ambulance after my “no”s dried up and I couldn’t make any more words, could only pull in tight, to give the coil as little space as possible to burn and push and pull, containing the many-tentacled fit of rage. But wasn’t it right to explode in incandescent fury? a small voice whispered. Who was I to judge, when I wanted to do the same? What was I, besides a splinter in the handle of a tool that used to be good for something—though what, I really, really couldn’t recall anymore?
          Was that before or after the day of freewheeling through my to do list as if it were a playground? Because I was up, in my shortest pleated skirt so that the sun could cast its smile all down my legs, and the breeze whispered joy through my hair, through me and to my friends (2), so happy to see me proving I could do calculus after all, could do an entire Shakesperean
monologue, could do a perfect cartwheel, could do the most heart-wrenching verse of O Mio Babbino Caro in the original key, could eat an entire pizza, all eight slices, tip to crust, oil and red pepper and extra parmesan and all, laughing a sing-song a buen tiempo to my friends, as I lick the salty oil from my fingertips.
          I’ve lost the plot, I think as Papi and I trade jokes on my visit home in the line to pay for the new case on my new phone and my empty stomach twinges and aches and aches. I’ve lost the plot, I think when I wake the day after the entire pizza and head straight to the bathroom, where I patiently wait for hours, ready for the pain and fire that never comes, not for days, not for weeks. I’ve lost the plot, I think as I pull back the curtain after a too-hasty shower, because I’ve been a little busy but otherwise good. So good. But I am caught by the sight of my bare chest in the mirror, caught by the rib bones I can count—all of them. Every single one, all the way down.
          But I can’t have lost the plot—the data was never conclusive enough to make one. Not the time I try the elimination diet in high school, not the time I try it in undergrad, not even the time in year right afterward, when I was certain I was old enough now, I could handle it now, I could do it. Every time, all the doctors confirm: they do not know the cause of the vomiting. One tells me some people just have a lot of pain and sends me home with nothing; another asks if I’ve told my psychiatrist about any of this and sends me home with three refills of the highest grade anti-inflammatory allowed, which I take by larger and larger fistfuls until I get an ulcer and am back in front of another doctor.
          I don’t have a psychiatrist. I just have that voice, getting louder every day, offering and re-offering me the only conclusion that has crystallized over the years: I deserve this3, somehow. It echoes back from the toilet bowls, the floors, the beds I spend my most vulnerable hours with. There’s a sense to it, an air of logic that follows ritual as closely as a shadow at noon, a predictability not unlike a haunting (it will always be back) but one that’s calming, grounding.
          Almost as good as a linear regression, but not quite.

DISCUSSION
          It all could have been easier, if it weren’t for the fact that cooking under duress, like raising children without the person that helped you make them, is more of an art than a science, characterized primarily by:
          i. Miscalculation. Not just the big one, the failure to take into account Mami’s unforeseeable accident and her departure shortly thereafter, but also the smaller ones. Failure to factor in the way the little, more obvious things would add up, the mundane impending blackholes for time. AP classes and after school tech week rehearsals that go ‘til 8pm. Late nights of reading turning to early-morning reading response drafting, of quizzes on words I cannot pronounce, that I take in between stumbling trips to the bathroom to get sick—but sick of what, we’ll never know. When would Mami have fit into this mess the hours of trial and error it takes to learn to make a proper meal? Even if she could have stayed, how could she have done it before it was too late, and my adult self was standing in front of a mess of charred ingredients I couldn’t really afford in the first place, nursing my burn? Where would she have found the time to tell me that the pot of arroz has enough water in it when the cucharón stands by itself in it for a full second before falling? That sancocho is the solution to the too-much-but not-quite-enough ingredients in the fridge problem? That stateside plátanos don’t age quite right (pesticides, etc.) so you have to wait ‘til their yellow skins blacken, until just before the fuzzy patches of white mold start showing up, if you want them to fry into perfectly sweet amarillos? No, there would never have been time to learn the gentle way, even if there’d been no accident. At age 10, the summer of sneaking into the kitchen pantry and spraying Sprite onto the ceiling, that would’ve been the time to make me stand at her side at the stove. Instead, I spent it sitting at my perch behind the island, squinting at my own handwriting as I read aloud to her, asking for notes on my dystopian Guardian Angel Unicorns series. Why are the children in your stories always parenting other children? she could’ve asked, but didn’t. What’s romantic about the disappearance of parents to you? About a kind of hard-won survival that I know and you don’t? Why do the unicorns have that weird-ass accent? None of that. Instead she nodded and encouraged me, told me it was great to hear all the progress I was making, that she couldn’t wait to find out how it ended. The reality of her kindness in this regard grows exponentially the older and more able my brain is to hold it.

REFERENCES
          1. V____ B___, R.; Full time teacher, Full time airline ramp employee, Newly single father
          My face is in the carpet on the ground. I meant to change out of my uniform. I meant to drink some water and lay my head gently on the pillow on my bed—just a foot to my left—but just after I made it through the room door I had to double over. So I wait. Then, as if rewarding my patience, the heat-licks of pain slow and lessen to an uncomfortable warmth and my body goes slack with exhaustion while I watch the last of the sunlight leach from between tree limbs, darkening the dust-blue sky.
          Papi’s footsteps sound in the hall, and the realization that I have left the door open stirs me a hair too late. When I turn my head he is in the doorway watching me silently. “It’s my stomach again,” I offer. Two beats, then, When was the last time you vacuumed that floor? I blink too many times in response, which he takes as an answer, snorting es por eso que estás enferma. Then he disappears, closing the door to his room behind him.

          2. Hansen, M, et al.; Friends
          “A buen tiempo is what you say when you walk into a room and people are eating,” I tell my high school friends as I sit on the grass where they’re having a picnic. We’ve started doing this because sitting in the lunch room has an even more distinctly pretentious vibe now that the weather is gorgeous and the blades of grass are green-soft and green-new. “What do you say when you walk out of a room and people are eating?” they ask and we volley the joke back and forth over smiles and sandwiches. And the more time passes in banter after my arrival, the more I relax, palms sinking into the earth beneath the grass and ankles crossed under the pleats of my skirt. And the more the sun warms me just enough the more certain I am that today, no one will ask why I’m not eating. Today, I’m in no pain besides the vague, passive gnawing of hunger. Today, I’m just a teenager in the sun in spring.

          3. V_____ R____ A___, A.; Mother
          We were raised with a chorus of there is rice at home and do you have McDonald’ s money? so when Papi, after an uncharacteristic day of staying in the house, comes down the stairs and says ¿Quieren ir a Wendy’s? Mao and I whoop and holler in excitement. We get ready faster than we ever have before, with no debating of which stuffed animals will join us for this special excursion. We pile into the car and Johnny Ventura sound-tracks the ride, with Papi boisterously tapping away at the steering wheel with a long skinny dowel he keeps in the car for this exact purpose. We rush straight to the register inside and order loudly and precisely—no pickles, no onions! and then settle into our seats laughing and savoring the fried chicken and spicy mayo that’s more mayo than spicy and then Mami calls.
          Papi’s face falls. Mao and I go still watching him listen to her, mollify her, explain that we were just restless and that we’d be back soon, that it was just a quick thing, but she hangs up. Mao and I exchange a look, then turn our attention back to Papi, who sighs. We shouldn’t have come, he says. We knew she was sick and we should have stayed home with her. Mami never got sick, after all. It wasn’t right. I say nothing, but I’m seething with what I think, at 11, is righteous anger. I am livid that the one time we do something for fun and without worry, this is how it ends. Mao and I finish eating quickly and hug our stuffed dogs and hurry back to the car when he tells us to. We go home and sit in front of Mami who dresses us down simply and with very little heat, by saying that she hopes we never wake up one day, sicker than we’ve ever been, and discover that our family has left us to rot for some fucking fast food.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
          Now, I always over order, no matter the restaurant, especially when my bank account is perilously close to overdrafting. Those are the days I get an appetizer first, or stop at the gourmet grocery on the way home for organic artichokes, or stroll through the farmers’ market until I happen across blueberry-infused maple syrup from Vermont, or eat so many happy hour oysters that my stomach starts to imitate the sloshiness of their original homes. The buzzing in my ear that starts when I pick up a menu, or squint at a sticker in grocery store and think we can’t afford this; we can’t have any of this, won’t stop until I’ve given my last twenty to the bartender for perfectly fried calamari, for an order of truffle fries, for one more exquisite mediterranean olive at the bottom of a martini. On the way home, when my breathing starts to pick up even though I’m walking very slowly and I start to lose the feeling in my fingertips even though it’s very warm, I think of Papi. The first step in comforting myself is always to think of him. I think of Papi as an eight-year-old boy, starving in a way outside the capabilities of my imagination—a way that stood out even amongst the baseline poverty level of his barrio, Haina. And still. Even within this starvation, when an onion sandwich was placed in front of him by the only family in the neighborhood that could afford to feed others’ children, he took one bite and tried to refuse it. I think of how he described this sandwich to me at what seems like every turn of my childhood, how he still does; the completely intolerable texture, a filmy crunch-slime that left thin rolls of clingy confetti all along his teeth and tongue, a stomach-churning metallic edge to the flavor with no sweetness to cut it. But through shaky breaths and hot tears of rage, he ate it. A natural consequence of this: him refusing to ever eat an onion again. A less natural consequence of this: me taking more than 25 years to discover the gorgeous tang of onions fresh out of the sautee pan.
          When my bank account finally does overdraft, I take deep breaths and I count colors and I think of Papi and I both being so tenaciously and tenderly human, to the point of refusing to do what we should to survive. To try and comfort us both, I think of how curious the sting of the time loops we’re both caught in is, how hard these loops are to recognize when they’re happening. How even in that tense middle time—when he wasn’t hungry anymore and I wasn’t hungry yet—we couldn’t really see the signs or what they were trying to tell us.
          Lucky for us, we will have so many other shots at making sense of it all, because all time does is loop back around, forcing consideration of the same events again. Resurfacing them, but with new scintillating shards of memory this time. Memory shards that, like glass in the digestive tract, rake new microscopic lacerations as they are processed. Like the morning last winter when I stood in my kitchen, struck by the recognition that I had actually eaten onions on my own volition as a child. The memory came back to me in the dust blue light of dawn as I watched coffee drip into the pot: my 11-year-old self drawing attention at our neighbor’s cookouts, because I would ignore the carne asada on the grill, even the churrasco that everyone agreed could make a grown man cry. Ignoring everyone’s bemused confusion, I would refuse all of the tender, smokey meat and leave the table where Papi sat, oblivious to me wandering around the yard, eyes tilted up to the moon, eating only grilled onions, by the fistful.