“Why is the bread holey?” I looked up at my mother with earnest 6-year-old baby blues. She’d just served me and that afternoon’s play date a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on two slices of stale wheat bread that resembled swiss cheese. Jelly was oozing out of every crevice, coating my fingers with a sticky film. I despised sticky fingers. It was making me nervous.

“It’s special bread,” my mom said, with just the faintest hint of a blush creeping into her cheeks. “I made it.”

“What’s this blue fuzzy stuff?” my playmate asked. My mom looked, horrified. I didn’t know it then, but that blue fuzzy stuff was a patch of mold missed as my mother had mauled the bread, scraping and cutting out the bad bits, trying to salvage the end of a very old loaf.

“Frosting. Just eat it.”

Such was the nature of the lunch play date at my house. While my friends’ parents served Chef Boyardee, grilled cheese and tomato soup, and Kraft macaroni and cheese, my mom dug up whatever looked the least terrifying from the fridge, arranged it artfully, and pawned it off on kids that didn’t know any better. My friends would turn their noses up and scamper back to the magic fairy land we’d built in the scary unfinished basement while I would dutifully eat every bite.

This was all fine and well until a little later in elementary school, when my mom’s lack of willingness to cater to the tastes of a child created some awkwardness in quintessential social interactions. Whereas the 6-year-old doesn’t know the difference, a major determiner in the cool-factor of a 9-year-old is the kind of food their mother keeps in the pantry: the leaders of the pack get their moms to buy stuff like Cheez-its and gushers, Mountain Dew and Twinkies. I’m not even sure my mother knew what a Twinkie was. Besides the aforementioned moldy bread, my mom oft had expired yogurt (“oh, come on, that stuff never goes bad”), shriveled vegetables, and unidentifiable tupperware container contents that resembled science experiments. The protocol when dealing with these foodstuffs was to open the lid, take a big old sniff, and if the smell didn’t make you immediately want to vomit, it was probably safe to eat.

At that age, it was also standard operating procedure to talk to your playground friends about how picky of an eater you were, and how you’d managed to force your parents to make a sandwich or buttered noodles instead of eating the gross adult food like foie gras and truffles. I always found myself silent and uncomfortable in these conversations. My mom had probably never heard of foie gras, but she had heard of the crockpot. And I’d no sooner get away with forgoing my chicken dinner, cooked until tasteless and leathery, than I would be allowed to play in traffic or stand on the corner smoking cigarettes.

It wasn’t easy to have discriminating tastes in my household. We were a family that was expected to eat anything that was put in front of us, edible or no. Generally, my mom did all right when she could use the microwave or draw on her Midwestern roots to create “salads” that contained very few vegetables and plenty of mayonnaise. But I remember distinctly a couple of absolute disasters, including an eggplant casserole, no doubt lifted from the pages of a diet cookbook, that caused a 3-day long bout of fake-vomiting and volunteering to be sent to bed without dinner.

The casserole looked relatively normal: A big glass baking dish filled with mush and specked with unidentifiable colors and chunks. It had a faint red hue, which we associated with lasagna or spaghetti pie, so we were expecting something of an Italian nature.

Mom cut big slabs of the congealed paste and slapped them onto plates with enthusiasm. We were called to the table, poured big glasses of questionable milk, and then told to eat.

The smell resembled something between microwaved sneakers and warmed death. And the taste. God, the taste. Eating that stuff was like being forced to chew on tinfoil. For hours. While standing in an overused outhouse. And we were happy to let our mother know just what we thought of her cooking, with a series of gagging noises, followed by dramatically plugging our noses and swallowing.

Most parents, tormented by the high-pitched wailing and moaning of a particularly obnoxious child, would have surrendered. They’d have acknowledged that they fought the good fight and ordered Chinese food. Not my mom. She let us cry as long as we wanted, which was about 4 or so hours for three days in a row, and wouldn’t let us leave the table until every bite of the revolting vegetable concoction was gone. And she put the dog outside so as to eliminate any chance of foulplay. This was worse than Guantanamo. We threatened to run away. We threatened to commit suicide. We threatened to call child services. She offered to do it for us. It was a useless stand. Freedom fighters finally beaten, we forced down the eggplant casserole and plotted our revenge.

For all the shortcomings of this approach to family dinner, there were a couple of distinct advantages to being raised on more than just boxed starch. For instance, when I was a sophomore in high school, a friend’s mom inadvertently served us long-sour milk. None the wiser, I gulped the entire glass in a few swallows, noticing the strange texture, but not thinking much of it. My friend’s first sip made her gag, and we all waited with bated breath to see what the horrific outcome of my actions would be. Would I vomit? Diarrhea? Never come to the friend’s house again? 4 hours passed. Then 8. Nothing. I was in the clear, my body immune to rotten food.

This immunity has paid off in other countries. Dog in Indonesia, cow entrails in Argentina, mouse brain somewhere along the line, and the only thing that ever made me sick was the package of processed cookies in Buenos Aires. And really, I’d never have eaten any of that that food in the first place if it weren’t for the fact that being forced to endure torture by dinner had made me willing to give any food a try once.

Somehow, out of that food culture, my mother managed to raise two food snobs who not only worship pork fat and homemade pasta, but who also sit around comparing brands of knives used for cooking. And with this turn of events, she had no choice but to succumb to the inevitable evolution into a more conscious consumer, or she’d be left behind for dinner excursions. As much as my mother loves the microwave, she can’t stand to be left behind. In the name of socializing with her family, even her own palate became too discerning for tuna casserole.

Old habits die hard, though. I recently had business to attend to in her house and found a tomato rotting on the counter, juice everywhere. And when I cleaned out her refrigerator about a year ago to make room for a dinner party I was preparing, I found bread crumbs. From 1997.