Photo Caption:
A child is attended by a doctor wearing a bio-hazard protection suit in the area where people suspected of having contracted the swine flu virus are treated at the Naval hospital in Mexico City, Sunday, May 3, 2009.
#515. Taking a sympathy scoop from the dish no one eats at the pot luck.
As I mentioned last week, I’m OK with using the phrase “Pot Lucks.” I’m sure the dictionary definition of luck is something like, “a word meaning lottery and gambling and all varieties of awfulness that make the Holy Spirit want to punch you,” but I just can’t bring myself to say “Pot Blessings.”
Luck is a more accurate description of the food you’ll find at church events, where everyone brings their own dish. They’re not all blessings. Some of them are gross. Upon tasting them your mouth does not think to itself, “I have just been blessed.” It might think, “Wow, I have just been cursed.” And now you’ve got a “Pot Cursing” on your hands, which seems like something a drunk crock pot would start doing if you bumped into it and spilled its drink at a nightclub.
My favorite part of a Pot Luck is the way that the grossest dish is so quickly identified. No one ever calls out the taste offender, but early on in the event, people start to recognize the outcast dish. Even after only a few people have gone through the food line, it becomes easier and easier to see which casserole will be the head engineer on the gross train tonight. It’s not that it won’t be touched or completely ignored. Most of the time, a tiny bit will be scooped out, indicating one of two things:
1. The first person through the line could not determine what was hidden under some gooey, potentially delicious layer of cheese and had to crack the outer hull of the casserole to determine that something funky was lurking within.
2. The first person actually tasted a tiny bit and moved on as fast as they could with as little as they could.
And since this is a Christian event, your heart breaks for this person. Don’t make eye contact with the dish. Love your neighbor by moving down the line. Or at most, give it a sympathy scoop, heaping extra onto your plate, and throw it away later when no one is looking. There’s nothing to see here, folks.
But what if it’s yours? What if you’re the owner of the dish? What if you brought it? Oh, the shame, the food-related shame you must be feeling right now. Fear not, I have a few ways you can lessen this daunting experience:
1. Stir it up
If fewer than seven people have gone through the line, there’s still a chance you can trick some people into thinking your dish is delicious. The best way is to take the Bob Marley approach and stir it up. Make it look like lots of people have been digging around in there, scooping out big helpings of awesome.
2. Distance yourself from the dish
If more than seven people have gone through the line, but less than 14, stirring won’t work. Instead, start to distance yourself from the dish by saying things like, “Oh look, someone brought Tuna Caper Strawberry Jam Surprise! I think I’ll try some.” In addition to getting another scoop out of your dish, you technically have not lied. Someone did bring that dish. It just happens that someone was you.
3. Leave a man behind
If everyone has gone through the line once and it’s obvious your dish is the shame-garnering meal, be prepared to do something the Marines would never do–leave a man behind. Don’t reclaim the dish. Leave it behind so that the stink of the shame doesn’t spill on you when it’s the end of the night and people are probably carrying out their empty dishes. Go ahead and say a whispered farewell to your dish if you need to because it’s about to enter the bowels of the church kitchen, never to be seen again. “I’ll miss you. You were such a good dish to me. I’m sorry I cooked that in you. That was so unfair to you. Don’t look at me that way. I’m sorry.” And then just get in your car and never look back.
I had a fourth, much more violent solution that involved turning over the table that all the food is sitting on so that every dish instantly becomes gross as it cascades upon the floor, but my wife felt that was too violent. I argued that this was exactly the same thing Jesus did when he cleared the temple with a whip, but apparently the word “casserole” does not appear in the New Testament. (I could have sworn it did.)
