My Culinary Guilt Trip

When I was a couple weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday, the air force sent me to Keesler Air Force Base at Biloxi, Mississippi.  Basic training in Texas had transformed me from a civilian into an air force enlisted man; at a school in Mississippi, the air force was going to turn me into an electronics technician.

Biloxi is on the Gulf Coast, near the western end of an arc of coastline that today is called the Redneck Riviera.  Casinos dominate the area these days, but I remember the place as a strip of waterfront with a nice beach, a few restaurants, and a large multi-use hall operated by the USO, the United Service Organizations.  The USO is a charity enterprise that often serves as the GI’s home away from home.  I appreciated the Biloxi USO building as a quiet place off base where I could sit in a comfortable chair and read.

Once a month, on payday, I rode a bus from the base into Biloxi and ate dinner at a beach-front restaurant.  I always ate the same thing:  chicken-fried steak.  I don’t remember the air force mess halls serving chicken-fried steak; nor do I remember eating it at home, but somewhere along the way I had tasted it and become hooked on it.

Why not?  It was tasty although being of dubious, probably negative, health benefits; tasty is all that counted.  Back then most of us knew little about cholesterol, and the word triglycerides could have referred to a kid’s toy.  I like it, folks, and I’m gonna eat it.

And it was popular.  I spent most of my first year in the air force stationed in the Deep South, and restaurant menus there gave me the impression that chicken-fried steak was the national dish of the Confederate States of America.

So here I am, a lifetime later, once a week going to Perko’s to eat chicken-fried steak.  If you’re unfamiliar with this culinary delight, you can watch a YouTube video and see how a piece of beefsteak is breaded and fried and served with a cream gravy.  Right there I can start to feel my arteries begin to clog up.  I get it with green beans and a baked potato slathered with butter and sour cream, more clogging of arteries, and a glass, okay two, of cabernet.

Of course, it’s not a good meal for a diabetic, or anyone for that matter, and it’s definitely not top-tier dining.

But it comes with a fringe benefit:  good old Christian guilt.  Christ may have died for my sins, but I’m willing to be that he didn’t know one of them would be chicken-fried steak.

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