You are here: Home / Archives for Food Matters / Food Philosophy

The Days of Yore When Life Was Simple and Gran-paw Wasn’t a Bigot

Posted by on May 11, 2012 6 Comments

Remember the days of Yore when life was simple and people were just good and wholesome and no one ever got murdered and food came fresh from the farm every single day and Grandma baked pies 365 days a year and no one had cancer or polio – SHUT THE FRONT DOOR! – you mean all that talk about polio crippling thousands of people and two world wars and a devastating economical depression and segregation were all LIES fabricated to sully the memory of the true glory of Yore?

I really want to love Mary Jane’s Farm magazine.  I love that Mary Jane Butters is a champion of organic farming and growing food and enjoying antiques and doing some stitchery while sipping juleps on the porch swing at the end of another idyllic day on the farm where all the pigs are clean and your back never goes out and every minute of the day is a wonderful new memory being made that you will stitch onto your memory quilt for your family to snuggle und – dammit.  Every time I read her magazine I feel the magnetic pull of the nostalgia it’s drenched with like heavy perfume that stays in your nostrils long after its trails have been cleared away by fresh air.  I get annoyed.  That magazine is painting a rarefied world where everything is in romantic soft focus and wisdom is everywhere to be snatched up and adored and nurtured and I’ll tell you something, if that’s what you’re looking for in life you better brace yourself for disappointment because it doesn’t exist.

I try to remind myself that this is how lots of people feel reading fashion magazines.  I love fashion magazines because I know it’s all about inspiration and design rather than the reality of what most people need from their clothing and what most real bodies look like.  I am unbothered most of the time by the unattractively skinny models because I am not fatter or uglier just because they are showing me their bones, I know this.  I don’t feel pressure to be skinnier because that’s what the fashion designers are showing me – I feel pressure to get skinnier because I’m obese.  True fact.

Mary Jane’s Farm is exactly like a fashion magazine for the homesteading crowd – it’s presenting a fantasy of cozy farm life and romanticizing the “Days of Yore” meant to inspire everyone to slow down and enjoy life more and reconnect with our pasts and get old fashioned.  Get in your pretty lil apron like Gran-maw and make your luv a cup of roasted chicory just like Gran-paw used to enjoy on the back stoop after the early morning tilling was done even though you know your grandma was a shrew and your grandpa still regrets the civil war and the end of slavery and uncle Mike was inappropriate with his daughter but whatevs, that was so much better than the complication of cell phones and fast cars and city life where everyone has lost their wisdom and the good life.

I stopped buying her magazines after the first few because every time I read them I found myself wanting to swear just because the writing was so gentle and cozy and clean.  No hard edges.  All hard knock stories are told in a dear and sweet way with such wholesome nuggets – dammit.  I can’t talk about this publication without slipping into that kind of grating fake nostalgia.  The only reason I’m bringing it up today is because my back is in pain and I was in bed doing nothing this morning so I pulled a stack of magazines from my bookshelf to weed through.  And I found the last copy of Mary Jane’s Farm that I bought a few years ago and I got sucked in by that mesmeric soft focus and then it just made me want to say mother-fucker in rebellion.  I don’t ever use that expression even when I’m swearing in earnest.  So I found myself thinking about why I’m so irritated by that kind of vision of homesteading and it’s because it’s much too idealized and I’m an urban girl with some sophisticated thoughts and tastes and I like the modern world and I like that I have plumbing and running water.

I’m interested in urban homesteading not being a farm girl.  I’m interested in keeping old skills alive that are still useful in a modern setting.  I want to dispense with all nostalgia for life that wasn’t romantic or mellow or remotely “simple”.  I don’t value all that gentleness, it just grates on my nerves.  I like people who live loudly and honestly and brazenly and swear when they crush their thumb with a hammer and laugh at themselves when they get out of hand.  It’s what I want to bring to my own site.  It’s what I want from others.

Yet I don’t want to destroy the enjoyment others have of Mary Jane’s vision, her cozy interpretation of life as it could be, or her gentle stories, because it’s just another way to find the same value in life that I am looking for (self sufficiency, organic living, and growing things).  I want it edgy and raw while others really need the quiet and sweet.  Let’s say it’s a case of respecting her gifts and what she’s bringing to a lot of people while knowing that to keep that respect healthy I just need to go my own way and tip my hat to her at the fork in the road.

So what tone am I looking for?  What inspires me and excites me?  Check them out:

Bad Mama Genny – She’s outrageous, funny, takes care of a bunch of cats even though she’s horribly allergic to them, and she makes cheese and booze.  What the hell else do you need to know about her?  I really want to live next door to her.

Hunter Angler Gardener Cook – His writing is rich and poignant and has made me cry.  His posts on foraging are useful and thorough and he is solely responsible for making this vegetarian respect hunting.

The Midcentury Menu – Here’s nostalgia with the proper humor and edge to carry it off.  There is no vintage recipe too disturbing for her to tackle and force her husband to taste.

Hunger and Thirst – I became a fan when I read this blogger’s funny post about the greed of mushroom hunters.  Lots of foraging and written in a very personable way.

Aunt Peaches – Craft and DIY publications can get precious pretty quick.  I love any person who can make anything from anything and not be too cute or too cozy about it.  Aunt Peaches is funny, clever, down to earth, and not afraid of offending.

Thank You for not Being Perky – It’s all right there in the title.  Curmudgeons unite against the eternally happy curs we have to yell at every day!  Minnie swears, she’s honest, she grows vegetables, sews swimsuits, crafts, and is never smug and never precious.  Her stories about parenting are similar to mine and that is a rare thing.  She’s super cool and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her in person and spazzing out at her.

Now I have to go ice my back and watch episodes of Futurama with Max.  Philip is moving down to California ahead of us on Sunday and has a job interview on Monday.  Instead of freaking out I am thinking about how I can make good use of my time left in Oregon and the first thing on that list is to go morel hunting this weekend so I can take part in an urban homesteading challenge that Hank Shaw of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is doing with his friends of Sustainable Eats are putting on this month – check it out: Take The 2012 Urban Farm Handbook Challenge*

*Sustainable Eats authors wrote the Urban Farm Handbook and are doing a challenge this whole year, a different challenge every month with prizes for entering contests.  I haven’t been following it because I didn’t know about it until now.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , ,

Defining My Dairy-Free Cooking Challenge

Posted by on April 24, 2012 6 Comments

On August 1st, 2012, I plan to stop cooking with dairy for a year.

All meals I make at home for me and Philip (and my mom) will be dairy free for one year.  Philip and I aren’t going dairy free, just our meals at home.  He’s still going to put half and half in his coffee.  We’ll still eat dairy at freinds’ houses and out at restaurants.  We’re still going to eat eggs (which are not dairy).  I’m still baking with dairy.  I don’t intend to become vegan and I don’t intend to ever give dairy up completely.  What I want (and won’t do unless I make a real commitment to myself) is to reduce my dairy consumption by 75%.

I want to learn to cook and enjoy eating food that does not have cheese, butter, or milk in it.  It’s that simple.

I eat “too much” cheese.  I am very fond of saying that there is no such thing as too much cheese but that’s a lie.  I know that for my best health I need to eat a lot less cheese.  Cheese needs to become an occasional treat.  Something I eat with reverence rather than a favorite food I eat at nearly every meal.

I refuse to disclose how much cheese I currently eat a week.

It’s not just about my figure and my arteries either.  In thinking about this whole cooking challenge I talked with a vegan friend and did some online reading about the carbon footprint of dairy products.  Of meat.  Of poultry.  I thought that by eating local dairy I was doing really well as far as sustainable eating was concerned.  I was incorrect.  I was concerned that not eating dairy would result in a less sustainable diet because I know that for me I would need to increase the tropical fruits and nuts in my diet to be satisfied.  (To replace the deliciousness of cheese and yogurt and butter.  Not because it is necessary for nutrition.  It’s not.)

I have often said that a life without cheese is not worth living.

I’ve said the exact same thing about beer.

But I wouldn’t miss cheese half so much if I could make a lot of coconut milk curries.  If I could eat even more avocados than I do.  If I could buy bananas and fresh pineapples.  If I could make sauces using cashews.  Avocados are my only constant tropical splurge.  I only allow myself to buy coconut milk once in a while.  Pineapples and bananas and cashews – never.  I haven’t bought a cashew in many years.  And I LOVE them!  Oh!  And dates.  I haven’t bought dates in years.  I love those too!

I read a lot of vegan food blogs and I’ve got to tell you that the vegan sites that don’t use tropicals do not entice me.  The most enticing vegan recipes feature avocados or coconut milk or cashew sauces.  I could give up cheese for a while for those things.  But then the food I eat will all have traveled more than I ever will and that’s kind of galling.

It turns out that all dairy (local or not) has a substantially higher carbon footprint than any imported produce does.  Did you know that?  It’s a question of how much energy it takes to raise the animals (to feed them, house them, pasture them – if they’re lucky enough to get any pasture time) and then how much more energy it takes to process them and store them.  Animals that are as big or bigger than human beings eat a shit-ton of grain.  That grain has to be grown for them.  There are often lots of pesticides involved.  It’s difficult to measure and compare the carbon footprints of different foods so there are definitely varying reported numbers but one thing is consistent among all the estimates: meat and dairy have a considerably higher carbon footprint than any imported or domestic produce.  Period.

So what I’m beginning to discover is that eating sustainably isn’t just a question of where it was grown or how much poison was used to grow it or how many miles it had to travel but also how much energy it takes to feed your food and then process it in factories.  It’s complicated.

Here’s my new model of sustainable eating practices prioritized:

  • Non-GMO foods – these are just as devastating for the earth’s diversity as directly poisoning ourselves and the soil is.  This is bad-ass evil shit.  If you don’t care about anything else, you should care about this.
  • Major reduction in meat and dairy consumption (including eggs) – because having to grow food for your food takes an extravagant amount of energy.  Produce crops need water, light, and compost but compost is naturally produced by the scraps of other produce.  It’s also free if people (farmers and individuals) are doing it right.  Plus there’s the whole animal treatment issue.  If you are a person who really needs to eat meat then just consider eating smaller portions of it at meals and maybe eating a few more meat free meals a week and buy your meat/eggs/dairy from local and sustainably raised sources.  It really does matter.  Every little bit matters.  You’ll make a difference just within these parameters.  If you can afford organically and sustainably and ethically raised meat then you’re probably rich but you’ve got my automatic admiration for making such awesome choices.
  • Local – this is still important but more flexible than I realized in comparison with the dairy/meat/eggs group.  Every one of us needs to support our local farmers as much as possible so that when China decides to declare war on us we are still capable of feeding ourselves.  Support local SMALL organic farms first, then local small non-organic, then support the big local organic farms, but never support the corporate non-organic ones.  There’s nothing in it for anyone.  Do this: locate all your local farmer’s markets, before you plan your weekly menus or shop anywhere else, go to your weekly farmer’s market every single week it’s open and base as many meals a week as you can on what is available there.  Buy all the produce and other locally produced foods you can from your local farmer’s markets.  That means you’re supporting your local economy FIRST and helping local farmers and food producers to thrive in a tough economy and that means they’ll consider selling to you (a familiar weekly face) before strangers in a post apocalyptic event.
  • Organic – because poison is just killing everything and everyone and everyone’s fertility.  Except for the Duggars.  Yes, organic can sometimes be cost prohibitive.  So pay attention to the dirty dozen list when you can’t buy all organic.  I’m not going to judge you.  I can’t buy all organic either.
  • Cheapness – we spend a larger proportion of our income on our grocery budget than we do on transportation.  We don’t have much money and we have a lot less because we choose to eat good quality food and support local farmers and food producers and we also don’t buy a lot of processed food (except for Max’s stuff).  It is our belief that the most important thing you can spend money on is the food you put into your body.  Food and water are the most necessary resources humans consume.  Without them we die.  Without a car?  You only think you’d die without a car.  But since we’re pretty broke most of the time we try to buy things in bulk, we grow some of our own food, we pick large quantities of produce at u-pick farms to preserve.

 I will include links to some of the reading I’ve been doing.  I will be doing some more reading.  I’m not starting this challenge to myself right away because I’m maximally stressed out trying to find Max a new doctor on his new lousy insurance so I can get him tested before the end of the school year.  I also need to research vegan cookbooks and find a couple that will be inspiring to me (must have tons of delicious inspiring photographs – why are so may vegan cookbooks skimpy on the photos or have depressing looking photos?) and I need to get my house in better order.

I’m looking forward to expanding my cooking skills and broadening my repertoire.

Maybe in my next post I’ll talk about all the jerks out there who are sick and tired of everyone getting all worried about the earth.  But only if you’re in the mood for a fight.

The Carbon Footprint of Food (Graphic)

A Vegetarian Diet Reduces the Diner’s Carbon Footprint

Food’s Carbon Footprint

The Most Harmful Foods for the Environment

And if you’re interested here’s a link to my previous post on this subject:

Vegan Versus Local and Spring Cleaning

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Food Fight: The Real Vegetarian

Posted by on March 20, 2012 6 Comments

What does it mean to be a vegetarian?  Am I a “real” vegetarian?  Are you a real vegetarian?  Does being a vegetarian mean I do no harm to any living beings?  Do vegetarians have to sign contracts and be evaluated by an official jury to become “real”?

In my last Food Fight post I outlined how I eat in detail.  I mentioned that I’m a vegetarian and I also mentioned that I eat eggs and cheese and that my feelings are a little mixed about it because eating cheese supports the meat industry and I’m not keen to do that yet I have not chosen to draw my line there at this point in time.  Renee, a commentor on the last post, brought up some other details about the dairy industry which I felt were valid points.  But then she told me I can’t call myself a vegetarian because I eat cheese and cheese is made with rennet (enzymes from a cow’s stomach).

Dictionary definition (Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary): A person who does not eat or does not believe in eating meat, fish, fowl, or, in some cases, any food derived from animals, as eggs or cheese, but subsists on vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, etc.

There you have it.  Some vegetarians (like myself) do eat food derived from animals but don’t eat the flesh of animals.  I can most definitely call myself a vegetarian and I most definitely am NOT a vegan.  I don’t think it can be more clear than that.

I was raised as a vegetarian from birth.  It’s the way I eat.  I didn’t choose to be a vegetarian in the first place but later when I tried eating meat and fish and fowl I made a conscious decision to remain a vegetarian but NOT because I love animals.  I did it because it feels natural to me to eat the way I was raised.  It suits my body.  I feel good when I eat this way.  I like it.  Meat is gross to me.  I’m sorry if it disappoints anyone to know that I didn’t choose to be vegetarian for noble reasons.  Actually, I’m not sorry.  Eating is very personal and I chose what’s right for me.  What’s right for me includes eggs and cheese.

My concern for the well being and kind treatment of animals is very real and very strong.  But it’s important to reiterate that I don’t think eating animals is wrong.  If it’s wrong for people to eat animals then it’s wrong for lions to eat gazelles.  If lions can’t eat gazelles, they die off.  Nature made many animals dependent on eating other animals and in the natural setting the way the food chain is set up helps maintain a balance of animals and insects that works.  Nature also made many animals into omnivores, giving them the edge of not being dependent on one type of food.  Humans are such animals.  Just because we can choose not to eat meat doesn’t make it wrong for us to choose to eat it.

I take my cues from nature.  Humans are omnivores and as far as anthropologists can know – they always have been.  I choose to be an omnivore who doesn’t eat the flesh of animals.  I respect other people choosing to eat animals and I equally respect other people who choose not to eat any food derived from animals.  The only thing I don’t choose is to ignore how animals raised for food are treated and cared for.  There is a respect inherent in nature between prey and quarry.  In the distant past of human history that respect was inherent in us.  It is only in our more recent history that we have disconnected from our more natural relationship with animals as food.  People used to have to work harder to have their meat.  A human having to kill the meat he/she eats is a lot more respectable than going to the grocery store and buying a slab of animal flesh any time you want it.  So we’ve lost our way and have, through overpopulation, ruined the balance that nature designed to keep the earth healthy.

I care very deeply about the treatment of all animals but that doesn’t mean I think it’s wrong that they are used for food.  When Max rescued a baby garter snake we fed it tadpoles from our little pond.  I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t love hunting out those babies and offering them to the snake but I knew, as all people must know, that a snake is not a vegetarian creature and it would be entirely wrong to impose on it a diet it can’t survive on.  So we fed him the tadpoles and knew that it was nature’s circle of life in action.  But those tadpoles, until we snatched them out of the pond, lived a natural life.  The frogs who live in that pond were not put there by us.  They found our pond and chose it as their habitat.  My point is (in case it isn’t obvious) is that those tadpoles weren’t raised in a tank in my house under unnatural conditions and they were eaten by their natural predator.

There’s one last point I feel it’s important to make: if you are a vegetarian because you don’t want to cause any injury or death to other living beings, you are fooling yourself to think that you can eat in such a way that you never cause harm to other living beings.  Every single person on earth who eats food, no matter what diet they choose, causes injury and death to other living beings.  It is 100% impossible to farm vegetables and grains without also causing collateral damage to mice, rabbits, frogs, voles, snakes, gophers, and sometimes the larger animals whose natural habitat we’ve claimed for raising crops pushing them to new territories where they sometimes starve to death as a result.  Most people don’t care about insects but even if you’re growing food organically, as I do, there are casualties to insects and sometimes small creatures.  When I was working in the community garden a few years ago I was weeding and accidentally speared a frog with my weeding tool.  I don’t know if it was fatal or not.  I picked the poor fellow up and put him out in the adjacent field of tall grasses.  If I, a careful and caring gardener, can injure a frog while weeding, imagine what all those tractors and plows and harvesters are doing to the other little creatures.

We all eat at the expense of other living beings.  That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact of life.

Where you draw the line is for you to decide.  Vegans do considerable less harm to other living creatures than meat eaters do, but everyone has blood on their hands.  I think the main thing to focus on is how we are treating the animals we’re raising for meat and eggs and how they’re killing these animals before they reach the dinner table.  These things matter a lot.

I said that was all but there’s one more thing I need to say: vegans and vegetarians fighting each other over little details of diet is like Catholics and Protestants fighting over how to interpret the bible and the proper way to worship.  The majority of vegans and vegetarians have some common beliefs and concerns and if we all want meat eaters to care about the ethical treatment of animals then it won’t do to fight each other.  There will always be meat eaters, there is never going to be an entire planet of vegetarians and vegans.  People are omnivores.  What is an obtainable goal is to inspire all meat eaters to care how their meat is raised and to inspire meat eaters to eat less meat over all of it can be raised humanely.  This should be a shared vision between all people.

I am a vegetarian.  Please don’t tell me where to draw my line.  Please consult the official definition of vegetarian before telling people what they can and can’t call themselves.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , ,

Food Fight: The Way I Eat (and don’t be a food bully)

Posted by on March 8, 2012 8 Comments

Everyone has their own idea about what a balanced good diet consists of and lately I’ve been feeling extremely annoyed with how aggressive people can get about their own dietary choices.  When someone starts eating a particular way and they feel great, lost weight, cured their aches and pains, or fixed all their relationships because of this plan for eating they’ve adopted it can become like a religion – it can transform people into evangelical zealots.  Everyone’s diet has scientific proof to back up its claims.  Special diets have become more than a way to eat – they’re becoming a way to fix everything in your life.  Panacea.

People are claiming that you can fix mental illness with gut health and that going gluten free can cure autism.  If the way you eat makes you feel fit, healthy, and happy, then you’re probably eating in a way that suits your body well.  What pisses me off is when you assume that the way you eat will make everyone feel the same way you do.  People have different bodies and though we all roughly have the same organs and functions – no two bodies are the same.  Eating lots of lentils makes me feel great but a good friend of mine can’t digest them.  No matter how much science can say we’re the same, clearly we’re not.  Most of my friends love sweet peppers and feel good when they include them in their diet but I cannot digest them without difficulty – we are not all the same.  It is clear that the foods that are optimal for my health will not necessarily be optimal for someone else’s health.

Outside of some ethical and environmental concerns I think everyone should listen to themselves and their own bodies to determine what way of eating is best for them and sharing ideas with friends is fine but trying to pound a vegetarian’s head with a juicy pork butt trying to convince them that meat should be a big part of their diet is a real asshole maneuver.  Don’t do it.  Likewise, a vegetarian trying to shove grains down the throat of a paleo eater and trying to guilt them about animal killing is an asshole maneuver.  Don’t do it.

More important than what kind of food or what balance of food groups a person eats is how our food is raised, grown, and processed.  That should concern everyone and it doesn’t yet.  Highly processed foods, high fructose corn syrup, and pesticides should be concerning everyone.  And it isn’t yet.  But even when it comes to these food issues about which I care passionately it isn’t helpful to be a jerk about it.  Be an example and an inspiration, not a bully or an evangelizing zealot.

My Eating Philosophy:

I am a vegetarian who eats eggs and dairy.  I eat mostly produce that is in season, locally sourced whenever possible, and organic as much as I can afford.  I eat mostly home made food and don’t eat a lot of processed food which keeps preservatives and high fructose corn syrup to a bare minimum in my diet.  The kind of food I make is largely influenced by Mediterranean style cooking with some Asian, Indian, and Mexican dishes thrown in.

I eat a wide variety of produce, legumes, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains, eggs, and dairy and I believe that’s the best way to cover all nutritional needs.  I don’t believe any of the food groups are inherently bad for you (unless you’re allergic) and the recommended balance I strive for most closely matches that of Michael Pollan and Andrew Weild.

I believe that genetically modified organisms are not food.  All “food” that contains produce that’s been genetically engineered should be labeled so I can choose not eat it.  The biggest GMO crops in the US are corn and soy so if you don’t want to eat GMOs yourself, your best tactic is to buy only organic corn and soy products because GMOs (at this point in time) cannot be labeled organic.

I believe that one of the single most important things all of us can do to is to buy as much of our food from local sources as possible.  I don’t think I’m a zealot and I certainly buy some imported foods, but I believe it’s important to make the effort to tip the scales of your food buying to local sources for both freshness, supporting local economies, and strengthening local food sheds.

The healthiest eating habits for ME are: to eat 3 meals a day, (heavy breakfast, medium lunch, light dinner).  Eating modest portions of things like cheese is important to my health.  It doesn’t feel natural or comfortable to me to eat more than three meals a day and I do better when I don’t snack often.  Eating sweets only occasionally is best.

I don’t believe in dieting but I do believe that if you are very overweight and you want to lose some it’s helpful to count calories at least for a while to see how many you are consuming in a day and to gain perspective on how many calories your favorite treats have as well as monitoring how many calories you burn in a day.  You don’t have to be scientific and I don’t think it’s ever healthy to starve yourself.  No matter what anyone else says about weight loss – there’s no magic diet or pill or method.  Calories in and calories out is still a very important aspect of losing weight.  How many calories you consume in a day does not determine how healthy you are, of course, as you could be consuming all your calories in fats or all of them in sugar.  But it’s an important factor.

I know this works for me because I lost all my pregnancy weight (40 lbs) using portion control, increased exercise, and eating what I consider a well balanced diet.  I never gave up eating cheese or bread or pasta but all of these things I ate with more moderation than I had been while pregnant and right after giving birth.  I didn’t lose weight fast but I lost it steadily and I never felt better in my life than during that period.  So for me – that’s what works and what makes me feel good physically.

The details

No Meat:

I was raised as a vegetarian so I’ve been one since I was born.  I’ve tried many kinds of fish and meat at different times to see if I really wanted to be a vegetarian and what I discovered every single time is – the flesh of animals disgusts me.  Everyone living needs to eat food that used to be alive so it’s not that the animals used to be alive that bothers me (because plants used to be alive too) it’s the carcass factor.  I do not recognize carrion as food.  Humans are animals and so I don’t see any real difference between eating cows and eating humans.  In addition to that, I loathe the texture and the taste of flesh.  The taste and texture make it very hard for me to swallow it and once I choke it down it takes some work to keep it in my stomach.  Nice, huh?  And if I manage to keep it in my stomach I then get to enjoy the fun of my body struggling to digest it (the sensation of iron balls in my stomach for days and sometimes meat-burps for a few hours).  Especially red meat.  I will happily remain a vegetarian for life.

I don’t, however, think it’s wrong for other people to eat meat IF they are only eating meat that was raised in as kind and natural a setting as possible and killed in a setting as clean and unfrightening as possible.  CAFOs are evil and so are slaughterhouses.  The only ethical way to eat meat is to eat animals that are pastured on small farms and who don’t have to wait around in a pen smelling the fear and blood of the animals being killed before them.  The most ethical and honest way to consume meat is to either raise and kill it yourself or hunt for it.

One last objection to eating meat is that I don’t think it’s a sustainable way to feed the 7 billion people on this earth.  The amount of land it takes to feed the meat appetites of humans means that the only way to meet it is through CAFOs.  Raising meat in a natural and healthy way is much too costly and takes much too much land to keep up with meat eating.  I believe that meat production is doing a tremendous amount of damage to our land (so is factory farming).  I think the only way forward for human beings as a species is to eat a lot less meat.

Or stop having so many babies in order to drastically reduce the world population.  That’s the choice but at this moment people are still eating tons of meat and having tons of babies.  The future is not looking like a good place to be for all the people being born right now.

Eggs and Dairy:

I have an uneasy relationship with eggs and dairy.  I can raise my own hens (and have) and give them a great comfortable life as loved animals and do not feel bad about stealing their eggs from them (if anyone wanted to steal my eggs I’d give them all away – unfortunately by the time mine come out they’re useless plus too small to eat).  It doesn’t harm them for me to take their eggs.  However, I can’t always have hens and buying eggs from the store is ethically unsound.  I obviously buy “cage free” eggs but that term doesn’t mean the hens are actually roaming around a nice big yard.  Sometimes all it means is that all the hens are allowed to crowd together inside a giant pen.  That’s not a good healthy life for any hen.  I try to get eggs from local people who I know have hens for their own use and are truly cage free.

Dairy, on the other hand, doesn’t harm the cow it’s coming from necessarily (if the cow is raised with care and allowed to pasture) but you can’t keep a cow in milk unless you keep her having calfs and if all calfs born were girls who could produce more babies and milk – this would be harmless.  Except that obviously it can’t work that way.  To produce dairy a number of bulls are always being born and if no one is eating them then you have animals who eat food but don’t provide anything in return.  Dairy farming only works because people are eating the boys.  This bothers me as I don’t want to contribute to the meat industry.  But everyone who knows me knows I love cheese almost more than any other food.  This is really a tough one for me and I am heading towards a personal compromise of simply eating less dairy overall.

Grains:

I have no argument with grains.  Not wheat, oats, barley, quinoa, rice, buckwheat, millet (though I don’t like millet), corn… grains don’t disagree with me or make me sick and I’m tired of people trying to convince me that I’m poisoning myself but just don’t know it.  I’m tired of people vilifying something humans have been eating without problem for thousands of years.  People didn’t start having horrible dietary issues until the mid-twentieth century when processed foods took over the food scene.  So enough with this!

Many people DO have allergies to wheat and those people need to cut it from their diet.  I respect that.  Most of those people had health problems that eventually led to a discovery that wheat was destroying their intestines and preventing them from absorbing or using all the nutrients from their food.  That’s serious shit.  That’s real and it matters – but don’t tell me that everyone is allergic to wheat because it just isn’t so.  Also – if you want to not eat any grains because you think that’s the best way to eat – good for you!  But don’t try to convince me that they are evil for everyone.  Thousands of years of eating them and digesting them without difficulty is enough proof for me that for most people grains are an awesome way to get nutrients and protein in their diet.

I do believe that eating a variety of them rather than only eating wheat and sticking mostly to wholegrains is the healthiest way to go.

Produce:

Fruit and vegetables.  I eat a lot of them.  Mostly vegetables.  Organic is always best.  I can’t always afford to buy all organic but if I could – I would never eat produce that has been sprayed with pesticides.  I pay attention to the “Dirty Dozen” list and use it as a guideline of priority when I have to make a choice.  I think eating mostly local produce is even more important than eating local grains.  I allow myself a small amount of imported produce like avocados but always try to maintain a mostly local buying policy.  This automatically means I eat mostly seasonally too.  No tomatoes in winter.  No zucchini or green beans or eggplants in winter either.  I’m not a zealot and if friends make me a meal in winter that uses all summer ingredients I’d never say a thing or think twice about eating it and appreciating their hospitality.

I like most vegetables except for peppers.  I can’t digest sweet peppers and even hot peppers can be tricky.  Cayenne doesn’t ever seem to be a problem.  There are other vegetables I’m not that fond of but I’ll eat them if you put them in front of me.  I find Jerusalem artichokes to be a bit dreary.  Broccoli rabe is okay but I don’t love it so I never buy it.  Same with kohrabi.  Turnips aren’t a favorite of mine and neither are radishes though I’ll eat both and I’m fine with it, but I never get all excited to cook with them.  Bitter greens… oh bitter greens and how everyone loves you but me.  I can take small amounts of bitter greens but I don’t enjoy a big plateful of them.

Fruit – I like most fruit except mangos and papayas.  I like dried figs a lot but don’t care for them fresh.  Fruit eaten only in season is a revelation.

Fats:

I don’t believe fat is evil any more than I think grains are evil.  I believe in baking with butter and cooking with olive oil.  Those are my staples.  I don’t bake a lot so I don’t personally consume a ton of butter.  I use it on toast sometimes but I use a modest amount.  I use safflower oil and am making an effort to only get vegetable oils that weren’t made from GMO crops.  My mom says I “grease up” my food but in reality I don’t use a crazy amount of oil when I’m sauteeing.  Usually a tablespoon for stir fries and two tablespoons for large batches of soup.  My big oil extravaganza is when I roast vegetables which I’m trying to reform now to use less.  I eat whole fat cheeses (low fat cheeses are rarely worth eating) but I do use low fat milk and low fat yogurt because I like them better.

I don’t eat much fried food.  Fried food makes me feel gross and sometimes even gives me the burps.  While I love french fries and apple fritters, I eat french fries seldom and doughnuts even less.  I love spring rolls but rarely eat those either.  It is lucky for me that fried food upsets my stomach enough to keep me from making a habit of it.  I am a girl naturally attracted to fats and starch and the two go brilliantly together when fried.  I don’t believe fried foods are part of a healthy diet except as a treat.

Legumes:

I eat a lot of legumes.  I love beans, lentils, peas, and tofu.  I am only buying organic tofu now because one of the biggest GMO crops in the world is soy.  Some people can’t digest legumes well and if I didn’t I probably wouldn’t eat them or at least not often.  However, I have never had difficulty digesting legumes.  I especially love lentils and feel really good eating them.

Nuts and Seeds:

I eat a modest amount of nuts and seeds.  Mostly nuts.  Mostly walnuts.  I love peanuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, pine nuts, and almonds but since where I live I’ve been managing to get walnuts for free I eat more of them than any of the others.  I hate hazelnuts.  I really do.  I like sunflower and sesame seeds but don’t eat too many of them.  I even like pumpkin seeds but I don’t buy them because it’s ridiculously easy to roast your own.  But I don’t like the hulls and it’s tedious to remove them…so I end up not eating them at all.

Sugar:

I don’t view sugar as my enemy either.  I don’t eat a ton of it.  I don’t even eat a lot of it.  My son has a sweet tooth but I don’t.  Eating too much sugar or eating even a single overly sweet dessert (lemon bars come to mind) can make my throat swell up or make me feel gross.  While I don’t crave sweets usually if they’re sitting around and I start eating them I have a hard time stopping.  In our house we use both refined and unrefined sugars.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

How I Got So Fat (telling the story for the last time)

Posted by on March 1, 2012 6 Comments

I’m very fat.  I gained 30 pounds when I broke my hip and was bedridden for three months and couldn’t do any real exercise for six.  During that time I might have done things differently – like do isolated strengthening exercises that didn’t involve my hip (after the first three months because before that if I moved my body in any way I was in excruciating pain) and I could have eaten much lighter food to make up for my complete lack of movement.  I certainly could have chosen not to eat so much food out of boredom and depression.  But that’s not what I did.  I started drinking beer more heavily (which eased my pain in more than one way – I should have opted for pain pills instead of beer – but I didn’t) and I ate lots of sweets which I normally don’t.

Following that first 30 pound weight gain we made a move to Oregon and commenced the most stressful years of our lives.  I take psychiatric drugs for major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety and OCD.  When we moved I couldn’t handle my anxiety so I upped my dose of Paxil which previously hadn’t caused any weight gain in me because I’d been on the lowest dose but when I upped my Paxil I gained 20 more pounds that year.  I didn’t know at the time that it was the Paxil.  I was still eating way too many sweets and cheese and having seconds on meals and drinking a ton of beer – so it was obvious to me that I needed to address my bad habits to stop the weight gain and start losing.  I started exercising more rigorously and frequently and I stopped eating all sweets, I cut down on my beer consumption, and took greater care with my meal portions and being much more moderate with my cheese and bread consumption.  At first I lost a little and I was really encouraged but because I was in a constant state of panic I upped my Paxil again.  I gained another 20 pounds even though for that whole year I was working hard to lose weight.  It worried me but I figured I just needed to give it more time.

The fourth year we were here I upped my Paxil one more time.  Yes, it really was helping to keep the anxiety from exploding my head.  That year I gained another 20 pounds.  I started wondering if I had a thyroid problem or some other health issue that might be causing me to gain weight no matter how much I exercised or watched my portions and avoided snacking and desserts.  I had my doctor test me and thyroid issues were ruled out.  So I let it go and tried just living with the fact that I was huge and nothing I did seemed to change it.  But the next year I started taking Kung Fu and after a lapse in the beer restraint I recommitted to drinking in moderation and still every time I got on a scale it was higher than before.

I had horrible visions of having to be removed from my house with a crane.

I was then at my highest ever: 268 pounds.  Finally I went to my doctor and we looked at my charts over the years and she made the connection between the Paxil and the weight gain.  She hadn’t caught it before because she wasn’t the one prescribing.  I got off of Paxil and started taking Celexa instead and immediately lost 11 pounds.  I worked hard and lost a few more.

Since then the stress of my life has only escalated and I have been for months now drinking too much alcohol and eating more food than I’m actually hungry for and not exercising as much as I need to.  I have been in a very dark place and it’s had a profound effect on my habits. I haven’t regained all my weight but some has crept back.  I am putting this whole story down here on my food blog because it’s important to me that others know that three quarters of my fat was not gained because of bad eating and drinking habits or lack of exercise.  The bulk of it is medication related.  However, I have fallen back into snacking late at night on cheese sandwiches and eating seconds of my dinner and eating more food than I’m hungry for and drinking too much.  As long as I am in this depressive cycle it’s going to be hell trying to reestablish healthier eating practices and regular exercise.

Yesterday I found out I am going to be going to Blogher Food in Seattle in June.  This has given me a very clear motivation to work harder to get back on track with my health and fitness goals.  I have been to two Blogher conferences now being super fat and completely ashamed of how I look.  I don’t want to do that a third time.  I don’t have time to lose all the weight I need to lose by June but I can at least aim for a goal that will make me look less like Alfred Hitchcock and more like a lady.

I don’t diet.  I gained lots of weight with my pregnancy and it took me two years but I lost all of it not by dieting but by exercising, relearning what a single portion of cheese really looks like, counting calories until I got more honest about my intake of foods, especially those foods I have a weakness for like cheese.  I still ate cheese, I still cooked with oils, I still buttered my toast, and I still ate plenty of pasta.  I lost 40 pounds this way and until I broke my hip I maintained my weight.  I felt great.  I wasn’t thin but I certainly wasn’t fat.  I had good self esteem and I ate what I consider the healthiest diet for me which is vegetarian, lots of vegetables, some fruits, grains (polenta and pasta being favorites with some rice), lots of legumes (lentils, black beans, kidney beans, split peas), eggs, nuts,  and dairy in moderation.

I want to get back to feeling good about my own body.  I’m tired of being ashamed and feeling uncomfortable.  So in another post I’m going to lay out for my own purposes (and yours if the subject interests you) what my ideal diet looks like in more detail.  What my best eating and exercising practices consist of.  This way I can revisit it to remind myself when I start slipping.

I am not sharing this to invite anyone to tell me what miracle way of eating will fix me, cure my mental illness, or make my fat melt right off.  The way we eat is not a panacea – no matter how good you feel the way you eat your health is more complex than just being a matter of diet and exercise.  I will never adopt another way of eating just because some scientist (or friend) swears it will cure all my skin problems and magically cure my mental illness and make me thin.  I know that people will continue to seek the ONE TRUTH, the ONE DIET, the ONE TRICK, and the ONE CURE because people can’t seem to help themselves.  When they think they find it, no matter how many times they think they’ve found it before, they become apostles of their chosen panacea.  I think it’s stupid.  If you have a way of eating that works wonders for you and makes you feel great – that’s awesome.  But don’t assume or insist that eating lots of meat is going to fix me or that not eating gluten will revolutionize my body and I’ll realize that I’ve been sick with an allergy my whole life and didn’t even know it.  It might be true for you – and I salute you for having found this out about yourself so that you can heal yourself and feel great.

We’re all individuals and our bodies are not the same.  You honor yours.  I’ll honor mine.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

GMO Foods: JUST LABEL IT

Posted by on December 3, 2011 6 Comments

If I put two heads of broccoli in front of you and I told you that one of them was from GMO seed and the other wasn’t, which would you choose?  Given a choice, would you actually pick the one that is a genetically modified organism with pesticides built into its dna that can’t be washed off?  This head of broccoli is NOT grown from genetically engineered seed.  How do I know?  Because my mom grew it herself in our garden using seeds from a company that has taken the Safe Seed Pledge.

Having a choice is the quintessential American way.  Having a choice in religion, politics, how you deal with your own body, what state you live in, what job you have, and who you marry.  I am aware that a couple of those issues are things we’re still grappling with as a country.  My point is that Americans, when they’re feeling most prideful, love to boast about how our country is so FREE.

So why is it so hard to convince the FDA that we should have a choice in whether or not we consume GMO foods?  All foods should be clearly labeled.  Labeling is how we already choose whether or not to consume foods that have been sprayed with the nasty pesticides that are currently killing off all the fertility in the land.  It’s how we decide whether or not we eat red dye #40, monosodium glutamate, high fructose corn syrup, or propylene glycol (used in both food and antifreeze).  It is vital that all produce and foods that contain GMOs be labeled too.

Here’s a petition to the FDA that you can sign in 15 seconds that demands that all foods containing GMOs be labeled so that Americans can make a choice to eat them or not.

LABEL MY FOOD

Please sign it today.

Thank you.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , ,

People Are What They Grow

Posted by on September 30, 2011 3 Comments

I’ve been living in McMinnville for five and a half years now and when I first arrived I marveled at the obvious love this town had for: lawns, tiny stands of shrubs and/or perennials dwarfed by expanse of lawn, Japanese maple trees (the mini kind with red leaves), and the sameness.  All the mind numbing sameness from house to house, yard to yard.  I had just moved up from a northern California neighborhood filled with a wonderful diversity of garden styles so the sameness here struck me as being stark, sterile, and depressing.

Naturally I’m painting a broad picture.  I’m telling what my impressions as a newcomer were.  It is to be understood that all this time there have been a sprinkling of gardens that have not fit this standard mold, that have stood out with their more interesting styles.  But I promise that those gardens were (and still are) in the minority.

I have come to understand that the garden style here represents the people here very well.  This is a conservative town that likes things to be neat and tidy, likes the diversity of flowers to be corraled in liver shaped segregated (easily maintained) beds.  This is how it deals with people as well.  People are superficially friendly here but any outsider will tell you that it goes air deep.  People aren’t actually that friendly here.  They are not eager to let new people into their inner circles.  There is a hierarchy that, while it exists in all places where humans gather to live, is more strictly observed than it ever was in the city I moved here from.  This orderliness, this silent segregation of people into groups and cliques, this tight containment of plants reflects the people who grow them.

My own garden “style” very much reflects me as well, both my good qualities and my bad.  I rarely weed.  I put my mess of fruit and vegetables where people can see them.  I let my roses run riot.  I let my trees reach out too far.  I eschew order and encourage my plants to live together in a chaos of tangles.  Every once in a while I trim some things, weed a little, pretend to make order.  My garden reflects my mind, which is not an orderly place at all but constantly full of thoughts, of ideas, of questions, of anxiety, and of reflections – all of it in an untidy mess.  What you see is what you get.

I’ve been noticing gardens changing slowly over the last few years.  I’ve seen some lawns ripped out and vegetable beds put in in their place.  I’ve seen more gardens leaning towards permaculture ideals, and more daring combinations of perennials, some of them even edible.  Blueberries as shrubs in the front yard!  I’ve been seeing more herbs, more flowers, more fruit trees being planted.  I’ve seen those liver shaped beds expand, shrinking the obsessively clipped lawns surrounding them.  I’ve seen more lawns go brown in the summer.

Best of all of this is that I’m seeing more and more vegetable gardens being put in front yards.  I am seeing sidewalk strips turn into corn patches.  I am seeing squash plants spilling out toward curbs.  I am seeing more and more food being grown right there in front where all the neighbors can see.  I suppose in some ways this is a sad reflection of our deep recession.  Food prices constantly going upwards is forcing people to see the merit of growing their own food.  Letting lawns go brown in summer is a reflection of thinner pocketbooks creaking under the weight of water bills.  I’m not sad about this.  I hate that people are getting more and more strapped, myself included.  I hate that so many of my friends are enduring hard times, scrabbling for enough money to pay mortgages, some going on food stamps.  I’m not happy for the stress that financial distress is bringing to people but if this is what it takes for people to understand the value of growing food instead of lawns, I can’t do anything but cheer for the transformation.

The apartment building in these pictures is around the corner from my house.  For years it has favored institutionally low maintenance landscaping.  The people who live in it are mostly middle aged to old, no kids, and truthfully they seem a dour motley crowd that rarely smiles back at me.  When I saw these squash plants pop up in early summer I was taken completely off my guard.  I was absolutely charmed.  It gave me a glimmer of hope for all of mankind to see them plant tomatoes against the chain link.  Many tomato plants in the place of azaleas and useless stinky Pieris.  I ride my bicycle past this little patch often and every single time it makes me happy.  It reflects change in a stolid community.

I wonder if eventually most lawns will disappear and give way to a diversity of garden styles and garden plants.  I wonder if McMinnville will ever lose its crazy love for utilitarian shrubs in favor of more daphne, herbs, flowering quince (or even fruiting!), and free range wild flowers?  I doubt it, but a girl can hope.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Food for the Poorest Bird

Posted by on August 15, 2011 1 Comment

My lace-cap hydrangea, lilacs, and Japanese Snowball have become tangled with over-eager brambles that reach for bare feet, crawl across our porch, and spread out into our lawn.  It became this Medusa mess through neglect.  While the pages of my novel grew, so did the strength and ambition of the brambles encircling my house that I didn’t have time to uproot or even cut back.  I will admit that the branch-thick canes are mean to step on and I do sometimes worry I might wake up one morning unable to leave my own house like some sucker in a fairy tale.

Then the canes clothe themselves in blossoms, the shower of petals in late spring is like a bridal explosion, and just when I remember that I’m supposed to be cutting them back or digging them up the sprays of green berries swell and hang heavily with clean pure food and I am reduced to a quiet humility.  After all, I invade and take over everywhere I go too but I don’t feed birds and insects and bears and people as I sprawl.  All the scratches and the encroachments are forgiven as I pick fat black berries and eat them warm and lazy.

When I came home from my trip the berries which were (I thought) still hard and green when I left had become luscious and sweet and there were so many of them ripened already that I could dream up a dozen possibilities of what to make with them all while I ate them by the cupful.  I decided to make some jam and my mother requested a dessert be made with some because she doesn’t love jam.  I started picking them yesterday and every year it’s almost the same meditation – the abundance all around us and the abundance we kill off with round up and mowers.  I know we all need some space not over-run with blackberry hedges and in no way blame people for wanting to tame them better than I do, but to name such a generous plant as a noxious weed seems like awfully rich behavior coming from such a poor nation.

I am not rich in money and I’m not, according to all the tarot readings I’ve ever gotten, likely to ever be rich with silver or gold or even the things that stand in for them.  I might lose my home soon.  Like so many people, we’re hanging on.  I was able to take my trip for which I’m deeply grateful.  But not more than I’m grateful to the blackberries choking my porch.  I’ve got six jars of jam, I’ve eaten at least a quart all on my own fresh, and tonight we had blackberry buckle.  All of this food was free to me.  I spent no money watering them or buying them or fertilizing them.  They ask for nothing and give me pounds of organic free fruit.  I know it’s not like having a heifer to butcher up.  I know it’s not like winning the grocery store sweepstakes.  I know it isn’t the same as having a field of wheat or rice.

I don’t care.  It’s my secret joy to see blackberries taking over factory yards, neglected fields, rising up on the banks of rivers, and edging so many miles of blacktop.  I feel connected to blackberries in a way I am connected with no other fruit or food.  They’re scrappy, surviving in a hard-scrabble world; thriving in nutrient starved hard ground producing from this barrenness a rich sweet juicy tempting fruit with the most delicate fragile perfume.

While I picked the fruit of my neglect I thought about hunger and starvation.  I thought about people ripping out brambles to plant more lawns.  I thought about the kind of values that are reflected in our tendency to loath the messiness of food in a landscape.  I thought about all those people in the J.C. neighborhood in Santa Rosa who complained about the horrible messes the walnuts made on the streets.  I collected them every year.  The whole time I lived there I never bought a single walnut in the store.  So many people in our neighborhood bought walnuts when they were literally dropping from the sky into our hands.  They weren’t just any walnuts- they were high quality large walnuts with a truly fine flavor.  Before foraging for those nuts I was ambivalent about walnuts.  I didn’t hate them but I didn’t especially love them either.  The squirrels, birds, Sharon, and I looked forward to gathering those nuts every year.  Food falling from the sky.  Free food showering the streets and all anyone can say is “They make a damn big mess.  I hate ‘em!”

I’ve never lived on the streets.  I’ve never gone long enough without food to be truly deeply desperately hungry but I’ve been hungry.  I’ve had nothing but butter in my fridge on more than one occasion.  I’ve lived on potatoes and butter at times.  I know what it is to not have an abundance of food.  I don’t think you have to half starve to death to appreciate having food but why do so many people not collect the walnuts and blackberries?  Why are they called a nuisance?  I know so many people who plant “ornamental” pears and apples.  I know they’re pretty but there’s so much hunger in the world, if you’re going to plant a tree that could potentially feed you or your community – why choose a sterile empty one?

Is food such a mess that we have come to reject it if it means we have to exert ourselves at all to collect it?  There is such malnutrition and hunger in the world and yet even poor people aren’t collecting blackberries from the miles of thriving fruiting fragrant bushes.  Even poor people don’t seem to value free food unless it’s picked for them and handed to them in a bag.

While I picked 9 cups of berries from my choked porch I felt lucky.  I felt rich.  I thought that even if I lost my home, even if I became literally homeless, in Oregon I would not starve to death in August because of this generous noxious impolite weed.  There is enough here for the insects, the birds, the small rodents, the big bears, and me.  In some way I felt myself break down a little.  It happens every year when I’m picking food and realize all over again how small I am on the big map of the universe.  I am nothing.  My insignificance is colossal.

When we spend so much of our time building ourselves up, trying to become more than we started out, striving so hard to achieve things we dreamt up on quiet buzzing summer afternoons when we were children looking at the world of possibilities like it was one enormous frosted cake and all we had to do was point at the slice we wanted and it would be so.  When we spend all this time reaching and growing it’s easy to forget how unimportant each of us is as an individual.  Our legacy as a collective is so much bigger than each of us separately.  It is good to be humbled.  To become small.  It isn’t at all the same as being humiliated or being made to be invisible or not count.  Being brought to a place of humility is about embracing everything outside yourself.  It’s about acknowledging that every bite of food we get is a grace in our life.  It’s about your body being nothing more than a corporeal bookmark of who you are in this world.  You can’t take your body with you.  It doesn’t matter if you believe in heaven and hell, reincarnation, or neither- your body is a reflection of who you are but it isn’t going to go with you when you’re gone.  So you have now.  You have this minute and when you’re in a state of humility you are no more important than the bees and the frogs but you matter just as much as they do.  Everything belongs.  Everyone belongs.

My spirit is a field of blackberries growing in bankrupt soil producing from nothing a rich harvest of food for the poorest bird.

 

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged: Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Extreme Picky Eating: The Max Diet

Posted by on February 28, 2011 9 Comments

tater tots.jpg

My kid may be an extreme picky eater but while the number of things he’ll eat is small, his food rules are complex.  Part of what makes feeding him so complicated is the fact that there are distinct cycles to his eating habits which change frequently and suddenly.  I am going to lay out (for your interest, not your criticism) all his food rules and the foods he eats to give others an idea of what it’s like to feed him and, more importantly, how hard it is for him to eat.  Other parents of picky eaters may find solace in reading this account.  Either you’ll realize your kid is way pickier and I’ve got it easier (but feel less alone) or you’ll realize your kid is easier to feed and maybe find things to appreciate about your own experience by comparison.

The Rules:

Only one food on a plate at a time.  Any condiments need to be in their own container in order to avoid touching the food before it’s time to eat it.

Plates, bowls, and glasses are frequently scrutinized for cleanliness.  Any suspicious speck will contaminate the food on the plate and it will be refused.

Hand washing.  Occasionally requests are made that we wash our hands before feeding the kid.  This always insults me and is met with a lecture about how my hands are always cleaner than his.  The truth is, he’s not worried about germs, he’s worried about unauthorized foods still being on my fingers such as the essence of cheese which may transfer to his food and make him lose his appetite.

Food needs to be as even and same sized as possible.  This is one of the reasons why he likes crackers and other predictably uniform foods.  Most foods are amorphous and irregular, this is repugnant to him.  Holes in toast, for example, used to be met with panic and then a flood of tears.  Now he is much more polite about refusing to eat toast that isn’t “perfect”.  There must be no rips, shreds, stringy bits, dark specks or anything ruining the appearance of his food.

Texture.  He mostly likes things to be crunchy and firm.  A limp carrot is an abomination.  A stale cracker is unacceptable.  mealy apples or crumbly anything is not okay.  Tater tots slightly underdone are an insult.  Texture is a very serious thing to Max and the wrong texture (such as a wet spot on a cracker) can be traumatic.   

With a few exceptions (which remains a mystery to me) sticky textures such as jam or soft peanut butter in a piece of bread aren’t tolerated because if he gets it on his hands he panics (and used to cry).  He will eat cornbread with honey on it (this is one of the exceptions) and will immediately run to the bathroom to clean his hands afterward – should there be an impediment to his getting to the bathroom he will freak out.

He does not eat at the table.  He eats while watching movies.  I fought him from the time he was a baby in the highchair until he was about two years old trying to get him to eat at the table.  He would constantly try to get out of the chair and no food would be eaten.  I would give up and give him a snack while he watched a movie and the movie would keep him still and calm and I found he’d put food in his mouth and not examine it as closely.  This is true to this day.  I don’t care what any other parent thinks of me, if it weren’t for DVDs my child would not have enough distraction to eat.  It’s like needing white noise to sleep (which he also needs).  I am at peace with this.

Flies or insects.  If a fly or insect is seen in the same room in which he is eating he will lose his appetite for at least an hour, sometimes several.  For some reason ants inside the house, especially in any room he’s eating in, are disturbing to him.  He doesn’t mind them outside but he has nightmares that they are crawling on him in his bed. 

Food odors.  He cannot tolerate the odors of most food he doesn’t himself eat.  He refuses to eat his food in the school cafeteria (a fact he didn’t tell me until I found out because he got into trouble trying to eat his protein bar in the hallway).  He finds most food visually disgusting with special disgust for all pasta dishes, beans, and pizza.  He is usually neutral about people eating salads near him.  He is still very rude in dealing with his strong food odor/visual aversions though we keep working on it.

Temperature of foods matters.  If something like toast is supposed to be warm he will not eat it if it isn’t the right temperature.  He doesn’t eat much food that’s meant to be hot except for tater tots.  I don’t really blame him for not liking his tater tots cold but he’s pretty dramatic about how disgusting it is.  He likes his cold beverages to be really cold, but not iced. 

“Old” water or old anything.  If it takes him too long to drink or eat something (say, longer than a half an hour) he will refuse to eat them because they’ve been sitting out for too long.  This drives me insane.  I do know that water grows stale but he is so sensitive to it that I have wanted to strangle his handsome little neck at constant requests for “fresh” water or new food.

Unopened bags.  He has started requesting that all Goldfish be brought to him in an unopened bag because he believes they don’t taste right when they are opened by us though it seems to be fine if other crackers are put in a bowl by us. 

One left on the plate.  One of whatever he’s eating that is considered his “real” food (as opposed to snacks) must always be left on the plate.  For years he would always (ALWAYS) leave one tater tot or one carrot stick or one piece of apple.  Even if he was hungry enough to ask for more, one must remain uneaten.  He has, very lately, eased up on this.  I’ve asked him many times over the years why he does this and he would just tell me he had to do it.

Food Cycles.  There is a distinct cycle to his eating that I haven’t scientifically mapped but I can tell you that at one end of the cycle he’ll have about fifteen different foods in rotation that he’ll eat and at the other end of the cycle he’ll have only two foods in rotation.  There are mini cycles within the bigger cycles.  He’ll eat a few things obsessively until he gets a (literally) bad apple and then he won’t be willing to try that food again for a month, sometimes more.  So what foods he’ll eat are constantly changing.  This makes my head spin and my patience thin.

Brand specific.  Don’t switch brands on this kid.  He always can tell.  Have him try three vanilla ice creams without seeing the packages and he can tell you which one is the one he usually eats, which one is vanilla bean (which he hated for the specks in it), and which is the off brand you bought because they were out of the usual one. 

The Actual List of Tolerated Foods in the Max Diet:

Sugar toast.  Whole wheat toast with butter and brown sugar.

Egg toast.  (this only makes the rotation rarely).  Whole wheat toast with a fried egg and ketchup.  (this is hard to make “perfect” so comes with a high chance of being rejected.

Wheat hot dog bun with ketchup.

Cornbread with honey.  When he loves it he LOVES it a
nd usually he will only eat  few slices before it’s out of rotation for a long time.

Tater tots.

Apples.  Texture is extremely important.  The slightest bit of browning and he will stop eating them.  We’ve used lemon juice sometimes to help this.

Carrots.  Only likes the “baby” carrots because they’re pretty uniform in shape and size.  Though he recently tried cut carrots again, unfortunately they didn’t taste that great.

Grapes.  Only red grapes when they’re in season.  Mostly just the red grapes we get from a friend of ours.  He’ll eat bowls of those.

Cucumbers.  But only in season.  When they’re good he LOVES them.

Watermelon.  Only the seedless kinds.

Strawberry “milkshakes” made with milk, frozen strawberries, and a little sugar.

Crackers.  An ever changing list of packaged crackers (organic saltines, Ritz style, Goldfish, Pop chips, and a few others that once in a while enter the rotation)

Energy/Protein bars.  This is his main source of protein.  We only buy Luna and Cliff because they don’t use corn syrup and are mostly organic.  Right now Cliff bars are NOT OKAY.  In each bar type he only likes two flavors and usually eats one flavor exclusively until he is sick of it.

Juice popsicles.  Concord grape only.

French fries.  When we go out to dinner we feed him at home and then let him order fries which are not good enough for him to eat 75% of the time.  When they’re good he really likes them.

Peanut butter cracker sandwiches.  I put peanut butter (very smooth) between two natural Ritz-style crackers.  He’s not eating them now but it was a great favorite for at least two months.

Peanut butter “breakfast” cookies.  I adapted my peanut butter cookie recipe to have less sugar and wheat flour so he would eat something with protein in the mornings. 

Home baked cookies.  A few select recipes I use are approved.

Gingerbread.  He loves gingerbread. 

Ice cream.  All kinds of ice cream (except not fruity). 

Hot cocoa.  I count this as food because I make it with milk which has actual protein in it.  He doesn’t like it often because he hates milk but sometimes it hits the spot.

Frozen yogurts.  But not the healthy natural ones.  He likes the tube yogurts made by Yoplait.  I hate Yoplait for having made them appealing to kids and then putting total crap in them.  Luckily, I guess, he seems almost to have permanently taken this off the acceptable foods list.

Pancakes.  Ten grain pancakes with a bucket of real maple syrup.

Popcorn.  Not a lot of nutritional value but at least it’s something.

Potato chips.  We don’t let him have these often but he loves them. 

That’s 25 items total that he will eat, including desserts. 

Remember that most of the time there are only 5 to 10 of those items in rotation. 

Right now there are three:  Peppermint Luna bars, tater tots, and grape juice popsicles.

Food is emotional for most people and necessary for everyone.  I was prepared to love my child if he was born without all his limbs, to find charm in him should he be born a dwarf, and forgiving should he grow up to be a jock… but I was not prepared for a picky eater because I believed, as most parents do, that as long as I always put healthy food in front of my kid he would eat what I gave him (barring the usual disdain for broccoli and kale that many kids have).  I believed that it’s parenting skill that makes good eaters, not something mental or physiological. 

Every time Max rejects the food I make for him he rejects a part of me.  He doesn’t see it that way.  For eight years I’ve experienced his rejection of my tireless efforts to nourish his body and mind with good food.  I have compromised, worked hard at coming up with clever ways around his issues, and I have also given up a thousand times.  There have been times when I was so desperate to get him to eat anything that I let him eat crap that I don’t eat myself.  No normal parent will let their kids starve.  Many parents of non-picky eaters love to say that no child will starve themselves so if you hold out and insist they eat what you want them to eat with the threat of no other options they’ll cave in and bend to your awesome parental will.

My child would rather die than eat soggy toast.  I know this to be true.  How can I know?  Because I would rather starve myself to death than eat any kind of meat.  Anyway, I don’t personally respect the kind of parenting that pits a parent’s will against its child’s with starvation as the threat.  I want a better relationship with my son than that.

Now that Max is much older he doesn’t cry over his food issues, we discuss them and we work on them together.  I can’t change the fact that he’s picky, and neither can he, but he is more willing to try new things than he used to be and since he was diagnosed with OCD two years ago we know that many of his food issues are directly related to his OCD and this makes it easier for me to not take his food rejection personally and it helps Max to understand that his many frustrations with food aren’t his fault. 

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Cooking Basics, Food Philosophy | Tagged:

Extreme Picky Eating: The Beginning

Posted by on February 23, 2011 7 Comments

Max thanksgiving 2.jpg

Max’s Thanksgiving Dinner

For most parents what picky eating means is that their kids don’t like broccoli or spinach or papaya.  For the privilege of being able to complain that my child won’t eat a few vegetables or exotic fruits I would happily amputate my foot.  You think I am being melodramatic but I assure you that missing my foot would be worth the pain in exchange for my kid eating most things besides a few vegetables or fruits that most children don’t like.  To me that is not picky eating.

For some parents picky eating means their kids won’t eat most vegetables or fruits and prefer a steady diet of pasta with butter, potatoes in any form, chicken, beef, cheese, milk, cereals, breads, rice, eggs, and sandwiches.  I definitely feel for parents with kids who won’t eat any produce but will eat grains and meat and dairy.  I still envy them enough that if I had a ransom to give in exchange for my kid eating such a wide variety of foods, I would happily be poor but able to feed my child.  Sadly, I’m already poor and my child won’t eat most of those foods.

Then there’s the few of us with kids who eat 10 or less food items at any given period of time.  Think about what that would mean to you.  What if your child didn’t like meat, hated nearly all dairy, choked on almost all fresh produce, disliked most cereals, bars, nuts, and grains?  What would you feed your kid?  How would your kid grow up to be healthy?  How would you deal with the fact that your child would prefer it if all food but dessert and a select few other items could simply be swallowed in gel-cap form?  How would you feel?  How capable of a parent would you consider yourself?  Would you blame your child?  Would you fight your child over food every single day?  Would you give up trying?

When my kid first started eating food as a baby he ate almost everything.  He ate pureed greens, carrots, squash, fruit, and cereals.  There were few things I put in front of him that he wasn’t willing to eat.  I mashed bananas until he could eat them himself, he ate almost a banana a day until he was two years old.  He liked peanut butter and jam sandwiches, baked beans with grilled cheese sandwiches, lentil and chard soup pureed and scooped up on crackers, feta cheese, avocado, melon, pears, peaches, and he would even eat potatoes.

The change happened so gradually I can’t possibly say exactly when we realized Max’s palate was changing.  It wasn’t overnight.  Slowly he started rejecting foods he previously liked and no power on earth could make him swallow a banana by the time he was two.  Other things were happening at the same time but the most dramatic was his powerful refusal to wear denim.  Later, when he could talk, he told me it was because it didn’t feel good.  It was rough.  Anyway, slowly his diet whittled down to mostly carbohydrates and we consulted our pediatrician.

The pediatrician said it was a fairly normal stage many children go through.  Her advice was to continue to offer healthy foods at every meal and he would probably grow out of it.  He did not grow out of it.  Another year and another pediatrician visit and more advice to always offer healthy food but not to freak out if Max only wanted to eat crackers.  We already noticed other troubling trends in our child and considering these the doctor told us that we had a choice to make food a daily battle (I was making it a daily battle and crying all the time over the fact that he wouldn’t eat much of what I offered) but warned that I could potentially create an eating disorder by fighting at every meal with my child. 

A child like Max.

She suggested we be careful about choosing our battles with him.  She told me that my job was to never give up offering him wholesome food.  If he chose only to eat crackers he probably wouldn’t die, would most likely grow out of it, and we could give him multivitamins. 

I have never given up trying to get him to eat wholesome food.  I am an excellent cook and the biggest crime I commit in my diet is too much fat.  We eat a lot of fresh produce, whole grains, not much packaged crap, not too much salt or sugar, and we eat a truly varied diet.  To have an extreme picky eater for a child has been an enormous emotional strain on us and on our budget.  Packaged crackers aren’t cheap.  Instead of growing out of the picky eating it has simply grown worse. 

I started writing about this issue on Dustpan Alley and have realized that it’s time I write about it here.  Not for people with kids who will eat some things they don’t like with some applied parental pressure or threats or promise of dessert, I want to write about it for those parents like us, who have struggled so hard over the basic job of feeding our child, who have shed a lot of tears, torn out a lot of hair, and thrown out a shameful quantity of rejected food. 

I get so angry listening to parents telling me how to get my kid over his picky eating.  There is a general assumption out there that if you just keep forcing your kid to try something (they say it takes twelve times) they will eventually like it.  Or that if you just refuse to feed them outside the meals you cook for yourself they will eventually just choose to eat what you put in front of them (“no child will ever choose to starve themselves”).  Or that if a child doesn’t like much food it’s because the parents don’t eat good wholesome food themselves.  Or that they aren’t good cooks. 

There are a lot of assumptions out there about picky eating and most of them are made by people who don’t have picky eaters for children.

I would like to address a lot of these assumptions and offer encouragement to other parents with extreme picky eaters because I need it myself and there’s precious little of it out there.  I can’t do it all in one post.  I will tackle it in several.  In the next post I will write out every single eating issue my kid has so that anyone who doesn’t know the full scope may learn what my kid goes through and consequently what I go through trying to feed him.

I would like to offer some general advice right now:

1.  Never stop offering healthy food for your child to eat no matter how exhausting it is and how frustrated you are.

2.  Give your kid a multivitamin that includes iron.*

3.  If your kid only likes packaged food (crackers and things like that) be careful to read labels and don’t allow any high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, food coloring, or other harmful ingredients into your cupboards. 

4.  Don’t let other parents make you feel like a failure.  I once had a neighbor suggest that the reason my kid didn’t eat healthily was because I wasn’t cooking good enough food.  I have rarely had such a terrible urge to slap another woman as I did at that moment.  Her kids would eat kale raw and she assumed it was her awesomeness as a mother that made her kids like everything.  Most people will view picking eating as a failing of the parents or of the child or both.  Don’t let them get under your skin.

5.  Be compassionate with your picky eater and with yourself. 

*Even finding  multi-vitamin my kid will take has been a miserable ever changing drag.  The flavors of
most multi-vitamins are repugnant to him.  He finally begged for a pill to swallow but the one I found was enormous and the serving size was three a day and he could taste them going down.  I have finally found a multi-vitamin in a gel-cap which goes down more easily and he can’t taste.

Filed Under: Food Philosophy | Tagged:
« Older Posts