Chocolate, Raisins, and Faulty Memoirs
The stories we tell about ourselves and how they're always wrong
Hey this post is about the stories we tell about ourselves with a couple of examples. Thought it might be nice to just get that out of the way this time. It’s got a bit of a rambly intro about campfire cooking that gets there, then we’ll talk about raisins. It will be fun, I think.
See, there was a point in my early adult life where I thought that an interesting thing about me was that I grew up poor. There are these crystalized moments in my memories as a kid that I would revisit over and over. My dad got laid off. My mom struggled to get us through with an underpaid teacher job. Us kids were left to fend for ourselves. We would have a dinner sometimes that was hamburgers without buns. Or we’d have to eat microwave hot dogs on slices of wonder bread. We stood in line for government cheese. One story my mom loves to tell is that once we had no bread, so we walked around the neighborhood collecting cans until we’d collected enough to buy some at the day-old bread store. We even collected enough for each of us to pick out a treat!
I thought we all needed a story and if it’s one where we overcame adversity, that’s the narrative we tell each other all day every day because it’s the one we were raised on. Most of us know now that the reason Bill Gates dropped out of college and started Microsoft in a garage wasn’t the plucky underdog story we thought it was; it’s because he went to a private school that happened to be one of the only high schools in the country that had a computer. It didn’t hurt that his mom was a businesswoman who was on the board with the head of IBM. That’s just one of many entrepreneurs whose business hinged on early investments from parents.
It makes me too tired to get into all of the “came from nothing,” stories in the music industry. Kid Rock told the story of how he was a “hustler from a young age.” “Whether it was selling tapes out of my basement and designing T-shirts or setting up my own light show and traveling around this country for years with a U-Haul trailer and a minivan.” Says he’s straight out of the trailer park. He leaves out the story about how he grew up on a $1.3 million dollar estate, complete with private orchard, horse stable, guest house, and full-sized tennis court. This kind of thing goes deep.
Since those early days when I felt like I had something to prove among other people my age who seemed footloose and fancy-free with their big grad school degrees and cool pickup trucks, I no longer would tell anyone I grew up poor. I’ve learned what poverty really is. I’ve seen firsthand the kinds of decisions moms have to make while fleeing domestic violence and have helped them move into new apartments with barely enough possessions to fill one box. I was never hungry. When I thought food was scarce by the end of the pay period, it wasn’t all food. It was food I really liked. We would get these epic Costco runs on pay day where all the good stuff was replenished. My wife teaches kids at her school in a firmly middle-class neighborhood for whom that Costco run equivalent is the food their 1st grader gets to take home from the table where other kids put on the sharing table the fruit they didn’t want. I lived in the same house my whole life. I had my own room. We had a dang rec room with a pool table. Kids whose only regular meals are at school and hot dog on wonder bread Howie are not the same.
Things get tight in my household now, and sometimes we make pancakes or homemade bran muffins because the cereal is out. But if I ever heard my kids telling the story about how they “grew up poor,” I would laugh and laugh (and laugh.) I have other cute little personal narratives I’ve had to discard since. Most of them left out the part where I am a tall white guy who looks and talks and shares a cultural background with 95% of everyone who works in my career path. Some of them had to confront the idea that what I thought a “nice guy” meant and the idea that being not actively horrible was a replacement for an attractive personality.
Increasingly over time I’ve had to accept the idea that every story any of us tells about ourselves is tailored around an intentional or unintentional narrative we think defines us which changes as we do to fit wherever we are now. And all that is based on faulty memories. How many of us have asked our parents or siblings if they remember some formative event you’ve thought of every day pretty much and they don’t. Did it happen? Also, if someone from the outside tried to tell our real story instead, they’d only give us an almost comically incomplete view. Here’s my thought: nobody on earth is telling the whole story about how any of us got here. That kind of blows me away.
I had a post go kind of viral about a family tradition we do called “Woof’ems.” They’re called that, I’m told, because you “wolf them down.” If you’re camping you need every food you cook over a fire to have an apostrophe in it. This law is as firm as the unfortunately apostrophized Led Zeppelin song “D’yers Mak’er” is bad (oh oh oh oh no). Woof’ems are pieces of Pillsbury can biscuits stretched over a rounded wooden dowel and then baked over a fire. You fill this biscuit cup with fruit pie filling or pudding and top it off with whipped cream and from there it’s a one clean bite or two messy bites affair. Still no sponsorship offer even after a combined 4 million views across tik tok and instagram - still waiting for that call, Doughboy. You coward.
It reminded me that once while camping we had some Hershey bars in the cooler for s'mores. Now I don't get s'mores myself. I don't think I've even asked for s'me, let alone more. But when you camp, you're supposed to bring the “some more” fixins or the camp host will dig through that metal tube until they find the envelope with your fee in it and they will tear it up in your face and throw the scraps in the fire. I've seen this happen and it's demoralizing to all parties. They need that money to keep those outhouses to the standard of cleanliness we all have come to expect and, yes, love.
We actually forgot to bring graham crackers that day (which if you need jokes about origin stories, the the one about the graham cracker is the best one you'll read today), but that has nothing to do with this metaphor and is just the set-up to this picture, which is amazing and good:
Anyway, I was looking at Hershey's bars and thinking about how thrilling it must have been for soldiers during World War II to bite into the milk chocolate in their D-rations and told my kids about it. Oh, what sweet joy to rip into the packaging of that little taste of home, and how much sweeter it must have been given the hardship. "Imagine," I said, while we looked into the fire and my kids visibly vibrated from a sugar high. "Imagine being in a foreign land and scared for your life and tasting something so American as Hershey's chocolate."
Then I told my own experience away from home. I served a 2-year Mormon mission in Mexico, and while the food and drink there was amazing, there was just one thing missing: root beer. Mexicans hate root beer like we hate candy with chili in it and their music and also soccer. They think it tastes like medicine and now that I think about it, it kind of does. I hadn't had root beer in over a year and one day while walking through a street market I did a double take. There at a stand was a man selling A&W by the can. I bought it and lo, even at room temperature it was a little slice of home, if you could slice a newtonian liquid.
Being a missionary isn't as hard as being a soldier, but it's dang hard. In real life I only kind of like root beer, but like how raisins can be almost barely tolerable if you're on a very long hike, plain chocolate or root beer seem like exotic delights when the going is particularly tough.
Furthering the metaphor, this is the ending screen for the unreleased California raisins game.
Were the costs too great? The rewards too sweet? Let the player decide.
Here comes the twist, though. The World War II “D Ration,” which is what they called the Hershey bars that were included in their meals, were nasty af. It was apparently a failure in every way.
The combination of fat and oat flour made the chocolate bar a dense brick, and the sugar did little to mask the overwhelmingly bitter taste of the dark chocolate. Since it was designed to withstand high temperatures, the bar was nearly impossible to bite into. Most men who ate it had to shave slices off with a knife before they could chew it.
Nevertheless, and knowing full well that most of these ended up being discarded, Hershey’s was paid to crank out 3 billion of these bricks and have sold us a lie about what a yummy treat those bars were for our boys. Congraturaisins.
Oh, and the California Raisins? If you were around during the late 80s, they were as ubiquitous as today’s Minions. Maybe more so. Have the Minions produced four studio albums? I’m genuinely asking. I don’t want to look it up and ruin my targeted ads for the rest of my life with those little yellow beasts. Have the Minions starred in a 3-D comic book? OK, almost certainly. I don’t want to talk about Minions anymore because they (again I will not look this up) have never existed as poseable figurines available only at Hardee’s.
The anthropomorphic motown dispensing shriveled grapes we knew and loved so much were the brainchild of an advertising firm looking to Make Raisins Cool Again, funded by the California Raisin Advisory Board. The firm worked with Vinton Studios (now Laika of Paranorman, Coraline, and Kubo fame), who also created the Domino’s Pizza Noid and the once-unfortunately-deceased-at-the-hands-of-Tucker-Carlson-because-they-stopped-being-sexy-may-they-rest-in-peace-oh-wait-they-came-back-during-the-super-bowl-I-guess M&M mascots.
My understanding was always that while the California Raisins were so hot that Paul McCartney asked for a tape of their music video so he could watch it over and over again, they didn’t actually sell raisins. Again. I was wrong. Like the aforementioned M and/or Ms (as far as I can tell there’s no statistical guarantee you get both in every package), the California Raisins were also allegedly massacred by a money-grubbing weirdo, according to this pay-walled article that may or may not be readable through the app Pocket.
Raisin sales spiked. But success bred discontent. Even as Sun-Maid benefited disproportionately from the ads as the biggest brand in town, Barry Kriebel, then the company’s president, worked to limit his competitors from profiting in the same manner. He was dead set on restricting the way that the dancing raisin was displayed on the packaging of other brands — and Sun-Maid, which now represents about 40 percent of the industry, was big enough to put the pressure on.
Essentially every raisin grower paid for the campaign, but Sun-Maid insisted that only they could use the characters. The farmers petitioned to end the funding in 1994 and have struggled to come together on an ad campaign since and instead just blame millennials for not liking raisins. Only recently are they now attempting to woo millennials with the bald-faced lie that they once enjoyed the field trip lunch dispensed tiny boxes of one solidly fused raisin-adjacent rat king shoved into one of the corners.
Will it work? I can’t imagine raisins being nostalgic. They currently have the one move, which is ruining oatmeal cookies. You can put chocolate chips in oatmeal cookies, too. You all know that right? In my house we called them “cowboy cookies” and they were my favorite. Cowboys were barely real, too. You know, while we’re talking about historical revisionism.
Now my examples have all been about how the stories I told myself weren’t as bad as I thought. Or made me into a hero when I wasn’t. I want to make it clear that there are people real whose real stories are worse than what they tell about themselves. Their brains are trying to protect them from trauma. I’m not qualified to talk about that at all, but I don’t want you to think I’m not aware of you. I hope you’re finding help and doing OK. If not, I hope you will be soon.
Where do we go with the knowledge that everything we’ve ever known or thought about ourselves is a lie? I’ll go with my general guide of getting out of my comfort zone (usually when considering a bike or snowboard ramp) and ask myself three questions: is this helpful, is it harmful, or is it dangerous? Some of the stories we tell about ourselves are benign. Some motivate us to do better and progress in our skills/careers. Some make excuses about why we’re where we’re at instead of confronting tough truths. And some are actively disingenous, influence policy in ways that hurt others, and give us excuses to dismiss someone who is in pain.
If I’m going to tell the story of how I hustled as a college student while also having at minimum 2-3 jobs, at least one baby and eventually 3, I also have to tell the part about how I did so with the help of government grants, with free child care from family members, and at the expense of my wife’s schooling and career opportunities. Yes, I worked 16 hour days on 106 degree oil field days sweating in full fireproof ppe, a hardhat, and a bug net. But I only could do that because my wife managed a household by herself, aspects of which were difficult, isolating, terrifying, and depressing. I still learn new angles of how hard that was for her almost 20 years later.
Why would I wish that on someone else rather than advocate for better access to child care so that families didn’t have to choose one career to support? Do I just shrug my shoulders when I hear that marginalized groups struggle to get a foothold in a natural resources career and assume it’s because they “don’t want to work?” Or do I selectively use my own narrative as a trite explanation for the gender wage gap? I hope not.
I also don’t want to spend my time fretting about how things could have been better if it weren’t for some scapegoat. Especially if that person or group or whatever is already being dunked on by the layers of systems that have been intentionally put in place to keep them down. It’s frickin hard enough to get our stories straight without clowns telling us a new easy tempting version to get something out of us at someone else’s expense.
This isn’t news to anybody by now but there are just a handful of powerful people who need to ensure that we all don’t realize at once that they’re depending on us turning on each other at the slightest provocation. If we realize that our lives could be easier if we worked together, it also means their donations dry up. The reason it’s hard to make it to the next Costco run is because of the worse hoarding of wealth in American history. But that’s a story that if we start telling it to ourselves leads to things like unions and community care. And that means people aren’t getting (as) rich anymore. Easier to blame someone else, so they make a news broadcast about drag shows. Or immigrant convoys. Or any number of “the sky is falling” narratives about how the only thing or person holding us back lives in our community and not hundreds of miles away in the biggest house any of us would ever see in our lives.
In other words when you’re trying to write your own story, don’t let someone put raisins in your cookie when you know there should be chocolate chips in there.
Instead, as a treat, tell me how your story has changed over time in the comments. It may boost this post a little and therefore this whole newsletter.
My story of my parents’ marriage and divorce and my mom’s subsequent second marriage have been questioned by my mom and I have learned a lot of things I didn’t know as a child during those events. However, what my mom’s version can’t change is how those things, the way I saw them, made me FEEL and how they impacted my life. Definitely a lot to unpack!
In relation to your story, I also have a “I grew up poor” story, but I never once was unhoused or went hungry - I just didn’t get Doritos every time I wanted them or new clothes when I wanted them. I now definitely realize what a spectrum poverty is and how far we were from the poor end.
Most of my stories have been too dark to share with anyone, so I have few to share. But as a survivor of some pretty harsh things, I carry narratives in my head that come from others, and I have learned to change them over time so that I can become a different person than they tried to make me. I think there is a power in changing our stories. I can buy into those narratives, and become self-destructive, or I can create new ways to walk and be in this world that allow me to interact with others in positive, life affirming ways.
I work with children, and it is important that I model trust in relationship, and conflict resolution when problems develop. It is because of my nightmares that I am drawn to helping them have the tools to live in the light.
The stories I can and do share are mostly all of moments in my life that I experienced joy or awe. Those tend to be accurate. I do get what you are saying, though. Our memories are subjective and changeable. However, here is an "awe" moment. When I was a little girl, our family was driving up the west coast highway in Washington State. Suddenly, the sky grew dark, and then everything was orange and black. All the traffic stopped on the highway for nearly 15 minutes. For as far as you could see, we were engulfed in a sea of monarch butterflies. It took them 15 minutes to pass before we could see again. They were migrating north to Canada. It was both real and magical at the same time. When I ask my siblings, they remember the event the same way.