A beef with greasy burgers and chocolate

JAKARTA (JP): I recently took two nephews to one of those hamburger joints in town. Not because I'm the kind of doting uncle who will do anything for the offspring of a collection of sisters and brothers, but because I'd been asked to sort of baby- sit for an hour or two.

They don't really need to be baby-sat, what with one of them being 15 and the other about two years younger. I think that what the sister who gave birth to them wanted more than anything else was to make sure that she had a house to come home to.

You see, the elder son was presented with a chemistry set about a year ago (from a doting aunt). Fascination with it seemed not to have waned, with the result that on one occasion mom and dad had to shell out quite a lot of hard-earned rupiah to replace windows; on another, dear son had to have the blackened walls of his room repainted and thoroughly aired (it stank for a day or two).

The younger lad is a bit on the quieter side, but he, too, has an inquisitive streak which once led him to put three chicken eggs among his clothes, hook up a bulb in the wardrobe for warmth and wait for the proud moment when three chicks would appear and chirp "mother!" at him. Guess who also had to have his room totally sprayed and aired after about five days when he accidentally busted two of the eggs. Of course, the incidents earned them a good dressing down, but mom and dad did not inflict any real punishment. After all, the explosions and hatchings sprang from an enquiring mind, not from any real nasty plot or scheme.

Actually, on my part taking the two out of the house was something of an act of self-preservation. I didn't want to be a victim of a possible explosion, so one way of preventing that was to put a distance between the chemistry set and them. Besides, they asked for hamburgers.

Apart from the odd occurrence now and then when they throw the house in turmoil with one or the other experiment, they're really rather nice, and share with millions of their peers around the world an inordinate fondness for junk food. So here we were at the hamburger joint with me watching them, fascinated, wade through two mountains (one each) of french fries and jumbo monsters (two each), you know, the ones that have three slices of bread. The lot was washed down with three chocolate malts (the younger wanted a second). I confined myself to a coke and occasionally dipped into the abundant supply of french fries.

I admit that I had some misgivings about them chomping down the stuff. Not so much because of such life-threatening elements like cholesterol and fats, but what to me looked like a very low level of taste. Me, I'm not a fan of beef and chocolate, which doesn't mean that I don't eat them. Let's just say that if one of these days a decree goes out banning the consumption of beef and chocolate, I won't burst into tears or throw myself out of a 10th floor window.

How did I get that way? A longish story, so let's just say that at one time in my early years, mom, the force majeure, fed us beef and other parts of cows for about one week solid. Can you blame me for a diminished taste for beef? As for chocolate, every time we had a tummy ache (which happened fairly frequently during childhood), mom fed us something called "brooklax" containing chocolate to unstop certain channels in the body. Since then, my chocolate associations have been unpleasant.

Mind you, I won't refuse a well-made beef bourguignon or chocolate mousse, but hamburger and chocolate malt? No, thanks. Next time I take out the nephews it'll be to a place that serves really good cuisine, if only to make them aware that there's more to food than hamburgers and chocolate.

-- Jak Jaunt