“Are you hungry?”

These three words are the ones my mother speaks more than any others. To her, happy people are people who are eating. My dad used to call her the “food pusher,” and I believe he’s right.

Mom gets her food obsession honestly because her mother was a food pusher, and I was on the receiving end of those pushes my whole childhood.

We didn’t walk in the door without my grandmother giving us something to eat. But that piece of cake or fried chicken came with a side helping of interrogation.

On a summer visit to my grandparents’ house, I learned just how sneaky she could be. One morning, my grandmother put a plate heaping with creamy scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, a stack of toast and gobs of jelly down in front of me. She pulled up a chair and pointed to the overflowing plate.

“Your mother, does she cook like this?” she sweetly asked.

In truth, nobody cooked like that but I was stuck – if I said she didn’t, she’d mutter under her breath that my mother was starving us. If I said Mom did cook like that, the answer would be that the food couldn’t possibly be as good as hers.

I threw my mother under the bus, shamelessly catering to my grandmother’s ego, and then let my unsuspecting brother suffer the same fate.

He didn’t know that a big breakfast had a side helping of spill the beans. He innocently asked for bacon and eggs like I had. She outdid herself on his plate, adding sausage to the lineup. When he saw all that food, he told her he couldn’t possibly eat it all.

“What?” she asked. “Don’t you love me?”

When he said he did, she sat right next to him, making sure he ate every single bite, all the while grilling him about the meals our mom cooked for us.

Luckily our mom doesn’t interrogate us, but she’s got the “what-do-you-want-to-eat” routine down pat. When she asks if we’re hungry, the answer can never be “no” because she acts as if she never heard us.

The best example is when my brother – yes the same younger brother who got ambushed by our grandmother – stopped in at Mom’s around dinnertime one evening.

“Are you hungry,” Mom asked, just as she did whenever anybody walked in the door.

“No I just ate,” said my brother.

“I could make you a sandwich,” my Mom said, reaching for a loaf of bread.

“No, I just ate,” he replied. Mom thought about that for a bit and then offered to make him some pancakes.

“Mom, I just ate,” said my brother, a little exasperated.

Still, Mom did not give up.

“What about some left-over ham? I have some in the refrigerator,” she said.

“Mom, I just ate,” my brother practically yelled. To her credit, Mom backed off a little. Later, my brother said his goodbyes and headed outside.

Right before he got into his vehicle, my mom appeared at the back door, holding up a paper sack.

“Pears,” she yells. “We have pears.”

That “we have pears” appeal has become the tag line in every Hebert food story, and all of us keep a can of pears in the pantry, just so we know the correct answer in case someone says they’re not hungry.

Because refusing food is never the right answer. The correct answers are: “I’m starving,” “I’d love a full-course meal” and “Eggs Benedict, please.”

No matter if we just came from a restaurant, my mom loves nothing better than feeding her family whatever they want, from scrambled eggs to pork chops.

All served with a side dish of “spill the beans.”

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.