Small Bites

Every Christmas, my best friend from elementary school would visit her grandmother in Queens. Grannie O had an equally elderly roommate named Kathleen, who wasn’t nearly as lucid and often struggled during meals. One night at dinner with the family, Kathleen started choking on a bit of holiday roast, initiating a wave of panic across the table. Meanwhile, Grannie was completely unfazed and calmly continued eating, having apparently seen this life-threatening dog-and-pony show a time or two to no tragic end. After someone finally succeeded in assisting Kathleen, willing her to live another day and sparing her fellow diners the PTSD of her pot-roast induced asphyxiation, Grannie O nonchalantly chastised her friend. “I take small bites, ” she said, with all the haughty superiority of a woman whose table manners were surpassed only by her quantity of original teeth.

After sharing that story years later with my husband, “I take small bites” became a shared euphemism for any situation where “I told you so” just didn’t have enough gravitas to resonate all the way down from one’s high horse. When peppercorns cascade across the kitchen floor because someone attempted to refill the pepper mill without using a funnel, “I take small bites”. When someone over-complicates a situation and fails miserably—I take small bites. It’s basically our catch-all clapback for someone biting off more than they can chew, metaphorically or otherwise.

The same childhood companion whose story gifted me that priceless phrase had friend in middle school who’d suffered a similar near-death experience with food. Having narrowly escaped choking a one point in her youth, this friend often avoided eating. To me, who could easily destroy a carton of Entenmann’s Rich Frosted Donuts without taking a breath, the avoidance of eating for any reason seemed a fate far worse than death by choking. On the one hand, it seemed like the solution to traditional dieting. Who needed to waste time giving up carbs when you could just develop a healthy fear of choking? On the other hand, having regularly inhaled up to eight pieces of Little Caesar’s pizza at a time, developing a fear of choking seemed less likely than the possibility that my face opened on a hinge anchored to the back of my neck.

Plus, I had nearly choked once. Around the age of four, I sucked a full grape into my windpipe between bites of peanut butter and jelly. I’d panicked, momentarily watching my brief life of Barbie Dolls and booger-eating flash before me, until the grape popped loose like a short-sleeve crewneck shot from a T-shirt cannon at a hockey game. Maybe I told my mom, who was just across the kitchen with her back turned at the sink. But more than likely, I said nothing. A fair amount of jackassery had likely led me to choke in the first place, and “goddammit I told you” is the momspeak for “I take small bites” that no kid cares to hear. Nearly choking certainly educated me on the benefits of sitting my ass down and paying attention at the table, but when rabidly attacking food, I soldiered on with undaunted courage.

As childless adults, my husband and I hosted some friends and their 2-year-old daughter. Upon arrival, the 2-year-old was pumped full of snacks, which is standard procedure for delaying a meltdown until at least one adult conversation can be completed. After watching with bewilderment as she sucked her juice box inside out with the sustained inhale of a Dyson, we let our attention wander back to small talk as the child moved on to her pile of grapes. Her dad was mid-sentence when he realized she was choking and grabbed her by the ankle to shake her upside down. Not unlike my own childhood experience, the grape rocketed out within seconds. Her dad then placed her calmly back in her seat—well before my husband and I had the time to shit our pants over the possibility of a toddler choking to death in our kitchen. Fortunately, the little girl was fine. But my suspicions were effectively confirmed: grapes are the Devil’s side dish.

Years later, when my own two kids were safely consuming solids, I vehemently refused to serve grapes without slicing them in half. This was perfectly acceptable to my kids, until a trip to visit their younger cousins revealed that slicing grapes was not, in fact, a legal requirement for children as I’d implied. While failure to strap kids into car seats is clearly illegal, serving uncut grapes is more of a moral gray area than I’d made it seem. When my kids realized parents wouldn’t actually be jailed for negligent grape preparation, they were compelled to inquire: Why do the cousins get to eat whole grapes? Well, naturally, their mom either loves them less or trusts them more, I explained. And while I didn’t actually mean the first part (or even say it out loud), I presented the rest as God’s honest truth.

In terms of trusting my kids with their own welfare, the bar was set low based on an abundance of evidence. For kids who regularly waved their hands around with overturned raspberries on their fingertips or draped string pasta over their top lips like an angel hair Fu Manchu, safety was not their top priority at mealtime. They had been physically separated during half-a-dozen dinners, one at the foot of the stairs and one on the back deck, just to keep them from laughing at each other until bits of biscuit became lodged in their nasal passages. Although I’d sworn repeatedly that I would cut their godddamn grapes until they were 18 years old, the unfortunate exposure of my nonexistent legal argument forced the eventual amendment of my personal philosophy on grape service.

Ultimately, I agreed to permit the consumption of whole grapes in the presence of a qualified adult. This, however, did not apply to school lunches, in which all grapes would be sensibly sliced in perpetuity. Not that school staff was somehow unqualified to oversee the safe consumption of whole grapes, but as a former elementary school educator, I knew to expect some level of variability in the general attentiveness of otherwise watchful adults. I’d done my time on breakfast duty in the cafeteria and knew how easy it was to tune the fuck out. Small children regularly ate “bagel sticks” the consistency of leather belts impregnated with cream cheese. Practically the definition of “choking hazard”, a grown man couldn’t wash these processed monstrosities down his esophagus if a gallon of milk was administered afterwards via fire hose. Nevertheless, my attention was almost always diverted from choking prevention by staring straight ahead in silence from sheer boredom or by helping mop up the inevitable spillage of the syrup packets that accompanied another popular menu item, the “French Toast Stick”. Based on experience, I knew the specific blend of intensity and ennui swirling inside the average school employee was no match for the insidiousness of an uncut grape. Any lunch I packed with grapes would be “certified sliced” until my kids left for college.

About a month ago, we were eating dinner with our 5- and 7-year-olds when the older son started to choke. While I always hoped my reaction time in a crisis would be appropriate, I had also admitted to myself that “deer in headlights” might be a more realistic response. After all, I was infamous for freezing up in the drive-thru lane at fast food places, instantaneously paralyzed and confused by the simple task of yelling my order into a faceless speaker box. Fortunately, when my moment of truth arrived, pumping a wad of poorly masticated pork chop out of my kid proved to be considerably less difficult than deciding which drink to pair with my combo. I set him down after pounding on his diaphragm in a backwards bearhug and took a few steps away from the table. My back turned to the family, I paused to contemplate whether I might vomit, either from the nauseating terror of what might have been or from the sickening sound of wet meat-pulp, plopping out onto the hardwoods like a blob of body fat leftover from liposuction. My husband, my 7-year-old, and I all had lingering tears in our eyes when I turned back around. My husband and I then spent the next several minutes simultaneously ensuring that the 7-year-old was ok and wondering out loud what the fuck he’d been thinking, trying to ingest a Fred-Flintstone portion of pork chop in a single swallow.

Once we were all safely seated back at the table, we noticed the 5-year-old’s shit-eating grin and self-satisfied demeanor, similar to the look he usually gets right after his brother gets yelled at for something he wisely opted out of. “I swear,” my husband said, glancing at me and then back at my younger son. “If you say ‘I take small bites’...” And he didn’t. But we all knew.

He was thinking it.