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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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. 

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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.

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Eating Seasonally: summer 2010

Posted by on August 20, 2010 4 Comments

stuffed round zuchs 2.jpgThis is a recipe in the works.  The ricotta stuffing was excellent but the squash skin was kind of tough which was disappointing.  Hopefully I’ll be able to present this in the next week or so. 

We’ve been committed to eating mostly local produce for the last three years.  What “mostly” really means is that I buy almost all local produce all year but each week I allow myself to buy one or two produce items that aren’t grown locally.  Avocados are one of them.  I don’t believe I can live without avocados and I’m okay with that.  Because of buying avocados frequently I don’t buy oranges or tangerines (this winter I got three boxes full of them grown by a family friend which was an incredible treat) or bananas or pineapples or most other things that never grow in my climate.  If I decide I want any of those things then I make sure that I don’t buy avocados that week or I give up buying lemons or limes which I buy periodically for cooking.  It’s all about maintaining a high proportion of locally grown produce all year round. 

Nearly always if you’re eating locally you’re eating seasonally.  Eating seasonally has changed the way I think about produce for the better.  When you eat tomatoes all year long you not only support an unsustainable system of shipping produce worldwide but you commit to eating sub-standard quality food.  Wait, but that wasn’t what I was going to say- the best thing about not eating tomatoes until they’re in season is that they become infinitely more treasured.  I cheated this early summer and bought some locally grown organic tomatoes grown in a greenhouse, which, it turns out, weren’t that great anyway.  What can I say?  After ten months of buying NO “fresh”* tomatoes I was dying for my first taste and was disappointed.

This week the tomatoes are truly in season!  Here in my area they are beginning to show up at the farmer’s markets and they have flavor and I’m making a ridiculously poor sentence just because I’m so excited about it I can’t decide what to make with them first and I’m buying as many as I can at each market.  (That’s a lot of excitement.)

Right now the summer produce is at its peak and I’m finding that there are so many things I can only cook during the summer because this is the only time I can get the real deal: the ripe local flavorful food that epitomizes warm weather and prevents me from relocating to the North Pole during the heat.  Seasonal eating makes me savor food so much more than I did before.  I’m experiencing a little bit of sensory overload right now.

Here are some of the things I want to make with what’s available right now: 

Tomatoes: fresh salsa, pico de gallo, tomatoes on salad, stuffed tomatoes, slow oven roasted tomatoes, tomatoes in eggs, tomatoes in sandwiches, tomato gratin, pasta with tomatoes, a strange but unbelievably delicious casserole my mom makes with tofu feta and fresh tomatoes and cauliflower, tomato soup, Mexican rice, enchilada sauce, and Caprese salad.

Corn: corn chowder, corn on the cob, black bean chili with fresh corn, fresh in salad, corn in enchiladas, corn relish, creamed corn, and corn fritters.

Summer squash: squash gratin, stuffed squash, grilled on sandwiches, sauteed with fresh herbs and garlic, squash in summer soup, grilled as a side, zucchini bread, ratatouille, and in zucchini and feta fritters.

Eggplant:  grilled for sandwiches, grilled and cubed on pasta, baked, stuffed and baked, ratatouille, made into sauce for pasta with tomatoes and basil, baked with garlic and put on sandwiches, eggplant lasagna, and pickled!

Cucumbers: added to an assembled salad, sliced and dressed in mustard vinaigrette, in a raita sauce, tzatziki sauce to go over falafel, eaten plain, and dipped into ranch dressing.

 Those are just the main players.  Now I’m seeing beets- I love a salad with beets dressed in lemon and olive oil with kalamata olives and feta over a bed of lettuce.  Or roasted beets in couscous.  Or just roasted and eaten.  I love them pickled too.  Soon I’ll be seeing a little celery which is exciting because I gave it up for most of the year when I went seasonal.  I used to put it in almost everything I cooked.  I sometimes blanch and freeze it but if I don’t get around to it then I don’t eat celery for 11 months out of the year. 

What to make?  How to make everything I want to in such a short time?  The hardest part is that a lot of the time I’m truly happy just eating a cheese sandwich with fresh tomato, mayonnaise, spicy mustard, on wheat bread.  Just like that.  So simple.  It’s what I had for lunch today and it’s so good!  I’m one of those people who doesn’t think a sandwich is complete without tomato on it so I don’t eat sandwiches during most of the year either.  Except for grilled cheese with home made dill pickles. 

I stand in my kitchen the moment I have time to cook something and am paralyzed with choice.  Winter and spring cooking is about finding 100 great ways to use celery root and chard and carrots but summer cooking is about becoming drunk with the limitless possibilities for meals. 

Before I ate seasonally I didn’t appreciate what I was eating half so much or was nearly so conscious of the changes in my diet or of the seasons themselves in a broader sense; how when the air is hot and redolent of ripe blackberries it is also a time when I am most profoundly physically uncomfortable, my hens coo happily every late afternoon when the sun sinks and the heat eases and I toss them such succulent scraps as watermelon rinds or whole pieces of watermelon that Max has rejected, young squash trimmings, corn cobs full of corn scraps, and the low hanging blackberries in the garden.

Then there’s the way the air feels just as we turn the corner from the first two weeks of ripe tomatoes, when the nights start biting ever so slightly and underneath the lingering heat of summer is that queer smell we all recognize that tells us fall is coming; it’s time to preserve food madly, pick apples, clean up the summer garden if you’re normal and not lazy like me, and when the local giant cauliflowers start showing up downtown it means it’s time to pickle and it means that the last of the eggplants has drifted into the farm compost pile. 

Seasons still drive humans on a truly primal level but so many of us have allowed ourselves to operate outside them, to ignore the natural drives that tell us when to eat every rich vitamin-laden piece of produce we can get our hands on against the coming bleaker months, when to store things away for the co
ld months, when to pull out the blankets, hibernate, go inward, and when to come back outside to watch the first green fronds ignite the icy cold with bright hope…and it matters.  I feel more connected to myself and the earth when I eat seasonally. 

This makes sense since eating is such a basic need we are constantly trying to fulfill and without it, like light, we will die. 

So while I find it overwhelming to have so much lush produce at my disposal at a time when I am most inclined to eat salads and simple sandwiches, I also love this feeling of possibilities.  I just ate a salad with all organic locally grown (affordable) produce: lettuce, tomatoes (ripe!), raw corn, and cucmber, and it was soul satisfying. 

Tomorrow I hope to experiment with corn chowder.  I’m chasing a memory of a bowl of corn chowder I ate in San Francisco in a cafe that has been gone for over 15 years and who’s name I can’t even remember: a bowl of corn chowder that was so sublime I completely forgot who I was sitting with while I ate it and ever since then there has been no corn chowder to match it.  I keep trying.

Perhaps I’ll get it right this week and if I do I’ll share it with you.

Happy summer eating!!  

 

*I do buy canned tomato sauce and canned diced tomatoes and when I can I try to can my own.  The year before last I canned enough tomatoes myself that I didn’t even buy canned tomatoes for a year!  They tasted better and were actually cheaper than the factory canned tins.  If you don’t believe me you must read my article on the cost analysis between home canned and store bought canned tomatoes:

Is it cost effective to can your own tomatoes?

Filed Under: Cooking Basics, Food Philosophy | Tagged:

Mid-Winter: What To Eat

Posted by on January 9, 2010 8 Comments

It is exciting to me that so many more people are making their way back to seasonal eating.  For those people dedicated to eating as locally as possible this isn’t something they have to think about because eating locally forces you to also eat seasonally.  Learning to eat seasonally isn’t easy when nearly all grocery stores are always stocked with tomatoes and summer squash in winter.  How do you know what’s in season?  Different regions are going to be a little (or a lot) different.  In Florida right now it’s strawberry season but by the time it’s strawberry season where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, it will be much too hot for strawberries in Florida.  So I can’t tell everyone what’s in season for their area specifically.  I can only give some general guidelines to help you find out what’s in season where you live.

Here are some tips to discover what’s in season where you live and following that I will list what’s in season specifically for my area.

Shop your local farmer’s market: this is the number one way to discover what’s in season.  Though many farmer’s markets close during winter, be sure to do some research including nearby towns or cities that may have year-long markets that you can visit.  A winter farmer’s market will have only the produce that could be grown in your region and stored (such a root vegetables) in winter.  At the one farmer’s market in Portland that’s open all year many vendors have produced their own jams and pickles and sauces from the produce they grew in summer so you may not be able to buy tomatoes from them but you can buy salsa produced locally.  Even if you don’t make a habit of regularly shopping at a winter farmer’s market, go to one to educate yourself.

Ask what produce is local at your regular supermarket: many large supermarkets will carry a few local items even if they aren’t labeled as such.  Be sure to talk with the produce manager to find out if they carry anything local.

Read garden books about your region: here in the Pacific Northwest we have a fantastic garden guide (but only for regions west of the Cascades) put out by the Seattle Tilth that is a month by month guide to what to plant and when.  Even if you don’t garden you can easily see what grows during different seasons in your specific climate.  Look for climate specific guides.
I would love to see some Southerners and Southwesterners compile a region specific list of what’s in season for them in winter.  The list I give below should roughly apply to most of the top 2/3 of the United States but will not apply at all to people in the South and Southwest for which I apologize! If any of you out there have been working on this topic and studying your region for seasonal eating and can provide a detailed list, I would love to publish it here.

What to eat in mid-winter:

Fresh eating: (either pulled from your own garden or bought from the store, these items should be available picked fresh)
Chard

Kale

collards

leeks

citrus (though it comes from the southern states if you buy them, winter is their season)

watercress

chervil

mache (corn salad)

parsley

sorrel

Asian greens (tatsoi, mustards, bok choi…etc.)

endive

radicchio

persimmons (depending on region, may be done by early winter)

mushrooms (if you have a local cultivated source)

From the root cellar: (even if bought from local farmers, most likely these things were harvested in fall and stored)

potatoes

carrots

onions

cabbage

winter squash

celery root

parsnips

rutabagas

sunchokes

turnips

beets

shallots

apples

pears

kiwis (usually harvested in late fall and ripen in storage in winter)

garlic

From the pantry:

fruits

pickles

jams

sauces

dried things

We have become very accustomed, us modern people, to eating tomatoes in winter and apples in summer but it isn’t natural and except for the root vegetables that store well nearly all year, no produce is at it’s best when it’s no longer in season.  Winter is a harsh season, especially for people living in the extreme north.  Our diets should become more limited in the winter.  When you spend all winter eating mostly greens and root vegetables punctuated by things you preserved for the pantry, you will look forward a great deal more to the change in diet the spring brings with asparagus and radishes and lettuce.  It may sound bleak if you’re used to eating lettuce salads all winter but unless you’re eating lettuce from your own green house, it isn’t natural to eat lettuce in midwinter.  It’s a time for soups and root vegetable roasts.  While it may seem counter intuitive to some people, eating preserved food (particularly made by you) is healthier than eating out of season vegetables.  It takes a big shift in habit but I think you’ll find that when you eat seasonally you become more connected to your own region, the earth’s natural cycles, and your food will taste better and provide more optimal nutrition for you.

While I eat mostly seasonally and still stick mainly to locally produced food, I do have exceptions.  What I learned from going mostly local for ten months (a couple of years ago) was that there are a few things in my diet that I don’t want to live without.  Avocados and citrus do not grow in my region so buying them means I’m always getting them from hundreds of miles away.  Though sweet potatoes can grow here, this isn’t their ideal region and very few people grow them.  Tropical fruits such as bananas don’t grow here ever.  Pomegranates are another thing that I used to enjoy but which don’t grow where I live.  While I was being more strictly local I bought none of these things.  What I learned was that I can live life without bananas.  I can live life only buying sweet potatoes at the same time my organic CSA has them (we don’t get a lot of them, I bought some extras), and I can live without eating citrus often.  But I cannot live without eating avocados.  I cannot live without imported coffee and olives.  While I was doing my local challenge I had a small list of imported foods that I allowed myself to have such as coffee, tea, oil, sugar, and some other essential items.

I consider imported items as a flexible list but a list that must remain roughly the same size at all times.  So while I’m buying avocados, I don’t buy other non-regional produce such as other tropical fruits.  If I really want to buy bananas for a special occasion (I bought them for the first time in two years a couple of weeks ago) I don’t buy some other non-regional item.  I am happy with the balance I’ve reached for now.  I am constantly looking for closer sources for things like oil and while cost is obviously a factor since I have very little padding in my budget, I can’t always afford to buy things made closer to home.  However, I found an olive oil that’s produced in California (organic!) that costs only slightly more than the cheap imported olive oil I can buy at my discount grocery store*.  California is a lot closer to me than Spain or Italy so buying from California not only reduces the number of miles my food had to travel to get to me, it also supports the economy of my own country.

Seasonal eating has given me a greater appreciation for the food I cook and the flavors I associate with each month of the year.  I would like to end this article with a little list of the foods that you shouldn’t be putting in your grocery cart unless you live in one of the southern regions in which these things might be showing up at your local farmer’s markets:

Not in season in winter:

tomatoes

fresh basil

eggplant

summer squash

green beans

lettuce

strawberries

berries of any kind

peppers (unless preserved)

cucumbers

Happy seasonal eating!

*I should note here that even at my discount grocery store the olive oil is surprisingly expensive.  If a Trader Joe’s was closer to me I’d probably buy theirs because it’s such a great price.  But I heard from a friend that even Trader Joe’s has some California oils available.

Filed Under: Cooking Basics, Food Philosophy | Tagged: