Parents Talk Back

Late afternoon was receding into early evening, and my dinner plans were starting to feel a little desperate.

Dinner is a highly anticipated meal during Ramadan, when we fast from dawn to sunset. My energy level dips significantly midway through the month, and I start running out of ideas of what to make.

On this particular day, we had a packet of ground beef in the fridge and few other ingredients. No tortillas or shells, so tacos were out. No buns, so forget burgers. I had made keema with peas last week and didn’t feel like anything heavily spiced. My husband suggested spaghetti, but it sounded uninspired.

I turned to the internet and searched for easy ground beef recipes with limited ingredients. The first result -- Salisbury steak -- took me straight back to elementary school. My mother, who is an exceptional cook, prepared delicious Pakistani meals for us nearly every night. While I enjoyed everything she made, my siblings and I looked forward to the special nights when we got TV dinners.

Looking back, I can imagine how my mother must have felt about our excitement when she pulled those aluminum-covered trays from the oven. This was the only time we had "authentic" American food at home for dinner -- that sectioned meal of meat with gravy, steamed peas and carrots, mashed potatoes and a little square for dessert.

Dr. James H. Salisbury promoted this faux steak dish, which is a pan-fried hamburger patty covered in gravy, in 1888 as part of a meat-centric diet he was pushing. I had no idea of its history, but it sounded exotic in our home. In the TV dinner version, the meat patty was adorned with fake grill markings on top, making it look like a steak’s poorer relation.

Deep in childhood nostalgia, I announced that I would be making Salisbury steaks for dinner. My husband looked confused by the selection but didn’t argue. When you are hungry, any food cooked for you sounds good. I combined two recipes, one from Pioneer Woman and another that declared this was not your childhood Salisbury steak. Both recipes called for ground beef seasoned with an array of condiments and mild spices. They also included recipes for mushroom gravy, but we didn’t have any mushrooms.

The last time I went grocery shopping while I was fasting, I ended up with two bags of chips, popcorn, a pint of ice cream and sugar cones. I decided we could make do with the jar of thin, store-made gravy I had on hand. I made mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables for the full TV dinner effect.

The Salisbury steak was certainly edible. It helped that I was starving by the time we broke our fast on this dinner.

Some foods taste better in your memories.

I went back to the internet to find photos of the exact brand we ate in the 1980s and read a description that made me gasp. All those processed Salisbury steak TV dinners were made of beef and PORK.

Muslims do not eat anything that comes from a pig. I couldn’t believe it. I guess we didn’t have the wherewithal or experience back then to suspect there was pork lurking in something that looked so beeflike on the container.

My mother, who is a deeply religious woman, has only ever eaten meat that is Islamically butchered (similar to kosher). She never once touched a TV dinner and would have been devastated to know that her children devoured those meat patties spiked with swine.

“Don’t tell her,” my husband advised.

This was not the Ramadan news I wished to share with her, but I couldn’t keep the Salisbury steak secret to myself. I alerted my siblings in our group chat, who were also horrified. This bumpy trip down memory lane taught me that we should have been more grateful for our mom’s cooking.

Neither of the contemporary recipes I found online included pork in the ingredients. I think the gravy might have made the difference in my first attempt. My husband ended up buying a pound of sliced mushrooms the next time he went grocery shopping.

I’m giving the leftover Salisbury steaks another chance.

When political leaders and their administrations lie, their reasons are typically obvious: They’re trying to either get out of trouble, exaggerate their wins or justify bad acts by manipulating the public.

It’s such a common part of political discourse that most Americans are willing to overlook some level of dishonesty, especially when a politician is advancing an agenda they personally support.

Democrats didn’t make a big fuss when former President Joe Biden backtracked on his promise not to pardon his son, Hunter Biden. He justified the pardon by saying his son was politically persecuted. Some agreed with that, and some didn’t. But most people can recognize a father wanting to protect his son.

Many of former President Barack Obama’s biggest whoppers involved him exaggerating his accomplishments -- the “biggest middle-class tax cut” was not, in fact, the biggest -- or minimizing his mistakes: He blamed “90% of the deficit” on his predecessor, George W. Bush -- also untrue.

We expect this kind of hyperbole and blame-shifting from political leaders across the board because we recognize the motivation instantly. Bill Clinton’s infamous lies about his sexual encounters with a White House intern were transparently about trying to avoid embarrassment and save his job.

We may know people who have lied in order to get a job. So, it wasn't as shocking when Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly said that Roe v. Wade was “settled as precedent” -- and then proceeded to overturn this “settled law” after he got the lifetime gig.

One of the most destructive lies of a previous administration -- the Bush administration claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when he didn’t -- led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The administration was set on invading Iraq and sold a story to the American public to justify it.

Those heinous lies had recognizable motivations: vengeance and greed.

But now we have the most prolific and bizarre liar in the White House. Now, many of Donald Trump’s lies are standard-issue self-aggrandizement and blame shifting. But a significant percentage are an outright denial of reality. When confronted with evidence disproving a lie, he doubles down on it.

For example, he keeps repeating the deranged, fake claim that the Biden administration funded surgeries on “transgender mice.” He seems to think “transgenic mice” are transgender -- they are not -- but even when repeatedly corrected, he’s doubled down on this insane lie.

He did the same thing when he was called out on his strange lies about his administration blocking $50 million in funding for condoms for Hamas. There’s not a shred of evidence to support this ridiculous claim. And the media scrambled for a day trying to figure out what might have led him to believe such a stupid thing.

Of course, he’s told far more serious and damaging lies, like saying Ukraine started the war (Russia did) or that the Jan. 6 rioters were peaceful (they incited deadly violence). Still, even his opponents can see the motivations there: to support Putin and reward the violent element in his base, respectively.

But listening to him and his minions repeat the weird lies about transgender mice and Hamas using U.S.-provided condoms to make bombs leaves rational thinkers deeply unsettled. What motivates a leader to intentionally look like a fool and laughingstock? An easy explanation may be that his people are trying to distract attention from open corruption, their more consequential lies or the cratering stock market and rising prices.

Here’s a far more unsettling explanation: Conditioning people to accept the most outlandish lies is a step toward leading them to accept true atrocities. If you can get enough of the population to believe in transgender mice, you can convince them to accept things that may ordinarily violate their moral code or established social norms.

Students of history have seen that play before.

Listening to the most powerful people in the country make claims that are so detached from reality makes the rest of us question their sanity and stability -- and fearful of how this has become acceptable in society.

The less obvious motivations may be to turn more of his loyalists into followers who cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy and to embed fear and confusion among his detractors.

When parents are trying to teach children to be truthful, they talk about the consequences of lies and the morality of truth. Young children may still be figuring out the difference between fact and fiction and developing morality around lying. Trump’s weirdest lies make us question whether the 78-year-old leader of the free world believes his made-up alternative reality and if he has the mental capacity of a toddler. Or is he so devoid of moral fiber that lying is as natural as breathing?

Either way, he doesn’t care if these lies make him look insane and foolish in the short term because they serve an authoritarian purpose.

Those of us who oppose his administration’s destructive policies -- creating a trade war, detaining legal residents without any charges and shutting down government agencies and departments -- are left wondering whether a debate about policy is even possible with people who believe in transgender mice.

Trump clearly grasps the concept of a lie since he rightly accused the Bush administration of lying about the disastrous Iraq War.

But he lacks the self-awareness to realize he’s become our very own Baghdad Bob.

I was reaching into a bag of Hill’s Science Diet dog food to scoop out Frankie’s breakfast when I noticed a brown foreign object the size of my palm inside.

It looked like a large piece of bark made of dough nestled inside the kibble. The discovery startled me. In all the years of feeding Frankie, I’d never found an unidentified object inside a bag of commercial dog food.

Frankie had been gassier than usual and didn’t want to eat anything that morning. I wondered if something in his food was making him sick.

I took a picture of it, then called the company to report it. They took all the information from the bag of food and asked me to email them the photo. I also filed a pet food safety report online with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

I wanted to alert the federal agency that is responsible for assuring the safety of our nation’s food supply, drugs, pet food, medical devices and cosmetics -- just in case this was part of a larger problem that could affect other pets.

Just two days before this incident, the Trump administration announced that it is seeking to close the FDA office in St. Louis as part of the slashing of jobs and government agencies by the Department of Government Efficiency task force run by billionaire Elon Musk. Since then, the decision was abruptly reversed.

No word yet on how many FDA workers might be fired. Musk and his DOGE accomplices have cut more than 100,000 probationary employees nationwide from the federal workforce -- mostly new or recently promoted employees. Trump and Musk will begin firing permanent employees later this month. The cuts have hit agencies across the country: the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Park Service, the Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Institutes of Health and others.

As Sen. Elissa Slotkin pointed out in her response to Trump’s televised address to Congress, Musk and Trump have fired workers who protect our nuclear weapons (many had to be quickly hired back), people in critical safety positions that keep our planes from crashing and researchers trying to find cures and treatments for cancer.

In addition to the concerns about what so many job losses and the Trump trade wars will do to an economy that has already started to weaken under this administration, I’m worried about what these haphazard mass firings mean for our public safety. Think about all the ways we rely on the government to function: for instance, the elderly who depend on Social Security payments and anyone who uses the U.S. Postal Service to deliver payments and bills.

On Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this month, Musk declared: “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” That’s a slap in the face to workers who have spent their careers paying into it. Musk and his team have also started meddling with key payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid, which insure the elderly and lower-income people. He has said “big money fraud is happening” with these programs. We have no idea what kinds of cuts he’s planning.

I’ve thought about the small ways I’ve interacted with government agencies just in the past week. After an inexplicable experience with American Airlines in January, I filed a complaint, with documentation, to the Department of Transportation. The airline had already reimbursed us for unfounded extra charges, but this week, after receiving the DOT complaint, American sent a letter of apology and a flight credit, admitting our experience had been due to agent error. Prior to this, during weeks of calls and emails, I had been unable to get a single customer service agent to explain what had happened.

Also this week, a Russian cybercrime group, Qilin, claimed responsibility for a ransomware cyberattack on my employer’s parent company, Lee Enterprises. The appropriate federal agencies have been notified. However, the Trump administration also announced that it was rolling back efforts, at the FBI and other agencies, related to countering Russian-based digital and cyber threats. I have no idea how this will affect the ongoing investigation at our parent company. But when your company is threatened by foreign-based criminals, you realize the importance of government agencies that investigate these crimes.

Closer to home, I received a quick reply from the makers of Hill’s Science Diet after I sent the photo. The manufacturer said the object was a clump of crumbs, which may have been coated with fat during the production process. They said these kinds of clumps are typically removed by screening the kibble before packaging.

I hope it’s as harmless as a mass of congealed crumbs, and that the FDA will inform me, and other consumers, if it finds otherwise. But what if we had no independent agency to look into these kinds of problems?

What if we were out of luck and on our own?

We might soon find out.