As an adult I now realize that as a kid, I had some real misconceptions about what it meant to be "wealthy." I used to think only "rich" people shopped at JC Penney and I thought anyone who owned a pool was rich, which is why my best friend and I would walk to school every morning and chuck the remains of our breakfast into pools ... even though they were located in what amounted to be back alleys behind a liquor store and a dive bar in a bad neighborhood. I don't know what the hell we were thinking.
This skewed way of thinking also applied to food. I used to think my grandpa was like, the richest man alive because he'd give me twenty bucks whenever I saw him once a month and because he put canned beets in his chef's salad and knew how to make homemade mac and cheese with chunks of ham in it. I also thought it was incredibly "fancy" that he'd make grinders for us and use oil on the bread instead of mayo.
I also remember being a kid and going to Sizzler's for the first time and being blown away by their buffet. I remember thinking, "They have a seafood buffet? It must cost SO MUCH to eat here!" I guess that reasoning came from the fact that the closest thing my family ever came to fresh fish was frozen fish sticks. I remember asking for "real" fish, like the kind on the PBS cooking shows and my mom said, "You've got champagne taste on a beer-bottle budget, Queen Elizabeth."
Did anyone else have any major misconceptions about "fancy" food when they were kids? What kinds of items did you think were the be-all-end-all?
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