Category Archives: Around the Farmhouse

Food Philosophy: Eating Local

I have agreed to give a talk about doing the 100 mile diet at my local library. I did the 100 mile diet for 10 months a couple of years ago. It changed how I eat irrevocably. I didn’t stick to the 100 mile diet but I did stick with a strong dedication to eating mostly local produce and a determination to seek out as many pantry staples that are produced locally as I can. Before I write up my notes on how I ate during my 100 mile diet challenge, I want to chronicle, for clarity, how I eat now. What does eating local mean for me?

First of all, eating local is NOT a contest. It’s not a “trend” to follow and then abandon just because too many other people are doing it and it’s stopped being cool (that’s a particular species of personality I disrespect in general). Eating local is something all people need to re-learn to do for the sake of regional food supply security. Eating locally means eating seasonally which means that your food will taste better and be texturally more appealing (think of out of season mealy apples). Eating locally supports your local economy and naturally ends up supporting smaller local farms. Eating locally will connect you to your own community in new (and good) ways.

The best reason to eat local is because it brings greater pleasure to the table.

I am not a zealot about eating locally. I try not to be a jerk about it. There are people so serious and dedicated to eating locally that they would definitely not think I’m doing enough. That’s okay with me because to me this isn’t a contest to see who can eat the most locally. My rules for eating are not severe, not difficult, yet so many people I know think I’ve taken a vow of food chastity just because I won’t buy most produce out of season.

I am going to try to break it down into lists of how I eat NOW, this is NOT the 100 mile diet:

Imported foods I buy:

coffee, tea, oil, sugar, spices, limes, dry pasta, rice, some dried legumes, condiments, sometimes tofu, sometimes wine (I can’t afford local wines though we have lots of them), some nuts and seeds, food for Max, Parmesan cheese, avocados, fresh ginger, garlic (when the local farms don’t have any), flour, polenta, olives, some juices, chocolate (we consumer very little chocolate), canned tomatoes (when I run out of home canned), canned coconut milk.

I don’t consume a lot of rice, tofu, or wine. Even though I don’t buy lemons (only on very rare occasions) I do keep limes on my constantly exempt list because I use it for seasoning in cooking a lot and there’s no good alternative. I don’t buy any other citrus regularly. Max food is one big exemption I’m okay making so my kid won’t starve to death.* The list looks long and I assure you it was much shorter when I did the 100 mile diet.

Produce I never buy out of season (and buy strictly locally):

green beans, tomatoes, asparagus, all fruit (except apples for Max), eggplant, summer squash, winter squash, favas, tomatilloes, hot peppers (I don’t even eat sweet ones because they don’t agree with me), fennel, cabbage, celery, cauliflower, broccoli, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, lettuce**, corn, peas (fresh, though I will eat dried split peas).

Produce I will buy out of season but only from local sources (root vegetables can be eaten all year due to excellent storage quality):

beets, potatoes, carrots, onions, rutabagas.

After doing the 100 mile diet for 10 months I decided to lighten up a little on the rules so that they would be more livable for me. Every week I go shopping I allow myself a small portion of imported produce. On my list of exceptions I included avocados and limes. Here’s how it works: if I want to buy bananas, I can, but I can’ t buy bananas AND avocados. I basically have two spots available on my grocery list to buy something that doesn’t ever grow here. The following list is of produce I rarely buy and when I do I can’t also buy avocados and/or limes the same week. Truth is, I haven’t bought most of those items since doing my 100 mile diet challenge. I love avocados so much it takes a strong urge for tropical fruit or imported vegetables to oust them from my weekly indulgence list.

Produce I buy only very rarely:

pineapples, kiwis, bananas, tamarind, jicima, most melons, oranges, tangerines, dates, coconuts, pomegranates.

Things I ONLY buy locally:

honey, seasonal produce, walnuts, bread, milk, butter, eggs, most cheeses, fresh herbs (I grow most of my own) and dried herbs, beer, vodka, canned corn (there is a company within 100 miles that cans local corn, I rarely buy canned corn anyway but when I do I only buy from this company whose name I will get and record for those who want to know), fruit***.

I want to note here that I do quite a lot of food preserving so I don’t buy much commercially frozen or canned produce. I make an exception sometimes for canned tomatoes when I run out of home canned, but I really don’t do that often. Most years I just stop making anything tomato-y until the season starts again. I freeze a lot of eggplant and fruit. So it’s all local even though I’ll eat those out of season from my pantry- I never buy them out of season.

I think that sums of the bulk of my food buying habits. Enough for now. Next I want to do a post covering what those lists looked like while I was doing the 100 mile diet.

*He is an extreme picky eater largely because of tactile issues connected to his OCD and ADD, we don’t punish him for it. I concentrate on keeping his food free of HFCS and preservatives and making his diet as organic as I can.

**This year is the first one I’ve cheated and bought out of season non-local lettuce. I am determined to knock that off. It really is worth waiting for it to come back in season.

***My policy has always been to buy Max whatever produce he’s willing to eat whether it’s in season or not, local or not, because he eats so little produce and I’m desperate to get him to eat any at all. The funny thing is that he’s been learning (without my help) that the red grapes our friend Laurie grows and shares with us are a hundred times better than the ones I have bought him from the store which he now refuses to eat. He’s discovered that apples out of season aren’t so good either. This year he refused the out of season carrots, cucumbers, grapes, watermelon, and apples. That’s all the produce he ever eats. So this winter and spring he didn’t eat any produce. Just tater tots. So frozen potato products was the only “produce” he ate. On the one hand this is very stressful to me, on the other, it’s proof that once you’ve gotten used to eating truly ripe seasonal produce there’s no going back.

First Days of Summer

The Apothecary’s Rose is supposed to have a strong scent. For me it has never had more than a mild sweet scent. Even so, I am completely taken with it’s history as one of the earliest cultivated roses and its well known medicinal uses. When it comes to getting the best medicine from roses you want to get as close to wild roses as you can. The absolute best rose variety for use in medicine is the dog rose (Rosa Canina) (but good luck finding a nursery that carries this one and if you do, for god’s sake- tell me where you found it!) but this rose is the next best thing to species roses. I am not generally a fan of the single roses but this is one of the exceptions.

Borage is charming. It has uses. It’s edible. It’s medicinal. I confess I like it because it has starry spikey blue flowers that look like they were designed by a ten year old into science fiction. I haven’t had any in my garden for a long time. So many things blooming right now are old friends.

You are dying to ask me if my hands are freakishly small, aren’t you? (What would you say if I said YES?!) These strawberry leaves were normal sized when I planted them last year. My secret fear is that someone (poison-man from next door) dumped some toxic waste on my garden and now these plants have superpowers. Do other people have such enormous strawberry leaves lurking in your garden? Please share, cause I’m a little freaked out.

In contrast to the leaves, the berries are normal sized. There are lots of them! In a couple of days we’ll be able to pick our first bowlful. One of the things I love about living in Oregon are all the berries. I realize that California has them too. But they’re not as good. I kid you not. Especially if you like to grow them yourself. I could never get any strawberries to thrive in my California garden. I couldn’t keep the ground moist enough to get anything but tiny little berries. Here, all I have to do is plant them and wait. They ripen just as the summer sun comes out (there’s little spring sunshine here) and so I don’t even have to water them to get fruit. The blueberries here are phenomenal and prolific as well. So are the blackberries and the –

Speaking of berries coloring up- the red currents are turning too! I’ll have enough of them to make about a quarter cup of sauce. Maybe. I’m so excited about them, even if I just had one bunch to eat raw, I couldn’t be more pleased. I love tart food!

This is my most beautiful kitchen utensil. Mitch made it from black walnut wood. From a walnut tree that grew here in my county. I never knew a spoon could make me so happy.

Philip has submitted our HAMP loan papers, this time to actually be looked at by an underwriter with the bank. We should know in a month if we get to stay here. If we do, we’re going to be really broke again. I think it will be worth getting to stay right here. Looking down from my eyrie of an office on my monastery garden full of California poppies, lupines, calendula, columbines, nasturtiums, vegetables, and feverfew.

There is such a chaos of beautiful, edible, and healing things planted all around me here. I want to be here.

Beautiful June

June in my garden means all of my roses are either blooming or are just about to bloom. While I was working on the novel the other day my mom surprised me with this vase full of gorgeous “Cottage Rose” roses, a David Austin variety. I don’t know how this rose behaves in anyone else’s garden but in mine it is towering and reaching and wants to be a climber. The roses are prolific and gorgeous. The scent is light but definite. Roses in my garden either have to have a scent or they have to perform some other purpose (rose hips, for example).

Here’s “Cottage Rose” in its natural environment, the jungle of my yard.

This is my bean bed which is coming along nicely. I need to buy another bean packet to fill in some holes where beans didn’t pop up or where they were eaten to the ground. I planted all I had in this bed.

I’ve grown bush beans and they’re good but my favorite is always the pole bean. I am growing Scarlet podded, Helda, and Lazy Housewife.

I have some wild purple lupines from a wild seed packet but this one my mom bought at the nursery and I can see it from my eyrie of an office. I’ve been enjoying the almost coral color mixed with the orange calendula and California poppies it shares a bed with.

I have been wanting to grow red currants forever. I have made several failed attempts. For the first time I’m getting berries and they’re so pretty! Gooseberries are another ambition I have and now I’m encouraged to try for them next year.

This week we finally heard from the bank about our house. Through a gross miscommunication we have been applying for the HAMP loan for a year and the bank was ignoring us because our bankruptcy file never officially closed. You can read about it on my other blog if you like “If My Bank Was My Boyfriend”. The upshot is that they aren’t ignoring us anymore and we should find out whether or not we get to keep our home within the next month. Now I’m looking around feeling both dread and excitement at the same time. I find myself saying (constantly) “If we get to keep the house we’ll replace those dying diseased peach trees with more “Frost” peaches…” or “If we get to keep the house I’m going to plant a gooseberry…” or “If we get to keep the house we’ll get a tub we can actually soak in…”

The reality is that if we get to keep our house we’ll be so broke we’ll just have to sit tight and buckle down with budgets and make do with what we have and there will be no real improvements for the foreseeable future. I can live with that. For the chance to see my sour cherry tree mature and put out a full crop? For the chance to harvest our first Spitzenberg apple? Worth the poverty. Not having to move, not having to leave this house we love, not having to uproot ourselves to God knows where and in what hovel… completely worth being broke as dirt. All my fingers and toes are crossed. We think the numbers are in our favor and the bank says the only thing they care about is the numbers.

Whatever the outcome, I’m enjoying my roses and seeing my fruits and vegetables growing and maturing. June is a lovely month in Oregon.

The McMinnville Saturday Market

The Saturday Market in McMinnville runs all year long, unlike our week day farmer’s market that only runs from June through October. This has been fantastic for me because I try to eat mostly local and mostly organic food and the winter, before this market, was especially tough for me to stick to my preferred way of eating.

There are only two farms that kept up stalls all winter long. Denison Farms is a really huge farm in Corvallis that does several different farmer’s markets and this is the smallest one they do. This means that they will only keep coming if it is profitable enough. I promised myself to shop their stall every single weekend during the winter. I only missed a couple.

They have had a surprisingly good diversity of vegetables throughout the winter. They make use of greenhouses for certain, but this doesn’t bother me at all. If I had a big enough property I’d have a big greenhouse myself. They’re organic which is great. Their prices aren’t cheap, but it’s been a long time since I have made food choices based solely on price. We have made the choice to spend less money in other areas of our life so that we can buy good quality food.

We have eaten well all winter on the most lush dark greens and on their fennel, turnips, carrots (sometimes), leeks, potatoes (until they ran out of last year’s crop), and radishes.

I’m not a big fan of radishes but I’m learning to enjoy having them in salads. Just don’t ask me to eat them whole dipped in salt and butter. (Excuse me while I retch that thought out of my head.) In spite of not loving to eat radishes, I have to admit that I think they’re beautiful and I never get tired of seeing them stacked up.

Growing Wild Farm is also organic. It’s a small family owned farm here in McMinnville. They had some good offerings for most of the winter but when it got slim at last, they brought out the cutting boards they make from fallen oak trees on their property. They are also one of the few farms that offers fresh herbs. I find it curious that so few farms here do that. Basil is about the best you can find around here. Growing Wild offers lovage, sage, rosemary, mint, and sometimes dill.

I’m not a big fan of rapini. I want to be. Just like with the radishes. I don’t hate it. There are honestly few vegetables that I hate. But I never choose rapini if I can choose something else. Still, it’s popular and it’s pretty. See that cutting board? Next picture shows more of them. I bought two of them this year and I LOVE them!

I am notoriously hard on everything I use. I have never waxed a cutting board in my life until I bought these handmade ones. They’re gorgeous and sturdy and I’m trying to take good care of mine. Next time you need a cutting board you should come and check these out. Sometimes if you have a specific cutting board size you need and it’s not there Andre will make one to the size you need. Always be sure to ask.

Ruby Cakes is new this year. My friend Dominique started this business baking allergen free cupcakes and other baked goods. She now has a partner whose name I have shamefully forgotten. (I only met her once!) The business has been doing very well and even my picky son likes the cupcakes.

Every weekend it seems they have some new treat for everyone to try. I can’t keep up with everything these treats are free of but here’s what I know for sure: gluten free, dairy free, and soy free. They also offer some sugar free treats.

Red Fox Bakery is also at the Saturday Market. They have a counter inside where you can buy breads and pastries and the best macaroons in the entire world. Outside they make pizzas in a cob oven which are also very good.

This miniature horse is a new attraction at the Saturday Market for the kids. I’m a sucker for animals and can’t get over how small this horse is. Maybe it’s really a pony? I don’t know, but he’s cute.

Another recent addition to the Saturday Market is a stall full of handmade wooden spoons, bowls, and terrariums. The day I took these pictures there were no terrariums so feast your eyes on the spoons! This stall is run by Mitch and Ari (Mitch does the woodworking and Ari does the terrariums). I have been in need of wooden spoons recently. I lost the two I’ve been using for years.

I’m not sure a kitchen can have too many spoons. I bought two cheap ones from the kitchen store downtown but that was before I saw these ones. They aren’t cheap but they’re gorgeous and worth every penny. Wooden spoons can last forever. No lie. There is no comparison between the ones Mitch makes and the cheap factory made ones. Each spoon is different, he uses a variety of woods, so you have to test each one out to see how it feels in your hand, does the depth of the bowl please or do you want something shallower? Is the handle the right thickness, does it taper where you want a handle to taper? You don’t actually have to ask these questions like a dork. You just pick up different spoons until you’re holding one that makes you want to rush home and start a pot of soup. I bought a long handled spoon for soup but plan to buy a shorter handled one with a deeper bowl as soon as the budget allows.

These little walnut buttons completely charmed me. For my book I was wondering what my character Cricket would do if she couldn’t get hold of containers for lip balm and I thought of walnuts with little hinges on them, sanded out inside, filled with balm, and closed with some twine. When I saw these I was amazed to see that someone else had thought of something to do with walnut shells- I hadn’t considered that they could be used as buttons!

Other things you can get at the Saturday market: jewelry, soaps (sometimes), wild mushrooms, duck eggs, other baked goods, crafts, chocolates, knitted hats and scarves, and nursery plants and bulbs. Not all of these things are there all the time but if you haven’t visited the Saturday Market and you live in McMinnville, you must come and see it!

I think every community needs a market like this year round.

Illumination

Santa Rosa plum tree 2.jpg It is terribly easy to become depressed and hopeless in times of war or when tsunamis unleash death and nuclear instability on the world. Death trudges on its determined route and we sit stunned while counting our sorrows. What have we got to look to for hope in times of darkness?

gang of tulips 2.jpg Don’t ever dismiss the simple answer. Never assume that the small things don’t count or can’t weigh against the big things meaningfully. Maybe the bright coral of a tulip can’t bring back the loved ones you’ve lost. No one is going to argue that. But can you not see the joy that nature offers us, the color she splashes across our path to arrest thought, to provoke laughter? Can you not recognize a path there to light?

elephant heart blossoms 2.jpg What about the fruit tree that has hitherto never produced more than a meek smattering of blossoms and suddenly plasters itself with creamy flowers reaching sky high for the impossible spark of life? Can you be blind to the hopeful ignorance of war and death your plum tree claims? Listen.

volunteer violets 2.jpg Listen to the life around you. See the fractional evidences of love and hope the world gives even in the grimmest hour. There will always be grief. We will always be losing ourselves in graves and the calamities that bring us down to the surface of soil. We will always be mourning for something. Therefore we must always be looking for light to mitigate the dark.

elderberry buds 2.jpg The most life affirming gift I have ever received in my life were elderberry cuttings from a dear friend who is like a sister to me. This very elderberry you see, budding as though it was a large-hearted lion of the landscape is nothing more than a sproutling declaring its love, its scrappy will to live, to thrive across continents, between friends. This cluster of buds is promise, it’s new life, it’s a message of continuity and peace.

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Never relinquish your most private dreams because even if they never play out in your life they will inform your hope, your ability to move forward, and your belief that you deserve every scrap of love you have. Never stop believing in the power of the small voice, the sliver of light in the dark, or in the regenerative power of the earth beneath your feet.

I don’t care what your creed is, what your political views are, or what your country of origin is. There is a universal truth to recognize. It isn’t weakness to love. It isn’t weakness to want peace. It isn’t weakness to want to help your neighbor. It isn’t weakness to listen to the early spring white violets call out for pale sunshine. It isn’t weakness to stop to listen to them.

What’s important in life is elemental and not the least bit complicated. Don’t be afraid to love without sophistication. Just love. It isn’t all you need but it’s the best foundation on which to build a rich life.

Love.

And bury your hands in soil once in a while.

Urban Homesteading: you can’t own who we are

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I have been calling myself an urban homesteader for years. I knew
it was a movement a decade ago. In fact, it was a movement started in
the sixties with my mom’s generation of people “getting back to the
earth”.

Urban homesteading is a growing movement of people re-learning
homesteading skills on a city-scale. There is a fairly well known
website of a family who’s also been a part of this movement who believe
they are solely responsible for coining the name of this movement, so
much so that they have trademarked the term “Urban Homesteading”.

I have never personally liked the “Path to Freedom” website run by the
Dervaes family but I was happy enough to see another website
where people could get information about growing food on small
city lots. I have always thought that the more people talking about urban homesteading and sharing ideas the better.

Now I’m angry.

The Dervaes family is trying to enforce their dubious trademark on the term “Urban
Homesteading” (and “urban homestead” too, I believe). I don’t know all the
details but I don’t need to know much more than that it is a betrayal of
this movement to try to own its name and control its use.

The spirit
of the urban homesteading movement is a non-commercial, non-corporate
approach to self sufficiency on a small scale. What part of this
movement is about ownership of its name? What part of this movement is about owning what and who other people are? None of it. What I have loved about urban homesteaders across the board is their willingness to share information for free, their encouragement to others to come join the fun, to explore self sufficiency with the goal of becoming less dependent on corporate America.

Supposedly all of us who have been calling ourselves urban homesteaders for years must no longer use that term.

Trademarking the term urban homesteader and urban homesteading is no
different than trademarking these terms: housewife, animal husbandry,
homesteader, farmer, plant conservationist, home gardener, city dweller,
marathon runner, anarchist, American citizen, nurseryman, self
sufficiency, dairy farmer… and this list is infinite.

You can’t own me. You can’t own who I am. You can’t own the life I lead and my ability to succinctly describe it to others. You can’t own a grassroots movement. If a movement can be owned at all (which I don’t believe it can) the minute someone owns any part of it it is no longer a grassroots movement but a business. You can’t own what people call themselves. You can’t own the words that describe what a person does and what they believe in.

Trying to own the term “urban homestead” in any of its forms is like trying to own the term “Christian” and then forcing all Christians to come up with some other way to identify themselves and what person on earth is arrogant enough to try to own the faith of others?

Urban homesteading is my faith. It’s my spirit. Growing my own food and herbs, raising chickens, sewing my own clothes, recycling, composting, choosing open pollinated plants, building raised beds and coops, making my own medicines… this is who I am. It’s what I believe is more important than anything else. Even when I’m not able to work on all the projects I want, even when all I can do is dry some of my own thyme and cook great food for my family, I am still an urban homesteader and no one can take that away from me.

No one can own me.

No one can own you either.

Please read about this and if you can donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is helping to fight this issue, please do. If you have a blog or a website and can write about it- please do. Everyone who has ever considered themselves an urban homesteader should speak up and shout out.

Riding the Fences of the “Urban Homestead”: Trademark Complaints and Misinformation Lead to Improper Takedowns

Urban Homesteading

Take Back Urban Homesteading

Spring Approaching

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This is my latest baked bean batch. I’ve been working on developing a good vegetarian baked bean dish for ages. I’m closer now than I’ve ever been. Philip and my mother loved this version. It’s almost ready to share.

A lot has been going on around my farmhouse. We still don’t know if the bank will refinance and we’re at nine months of not knowing now. My campaign to unload a lot of junk was going well (did I already mention I got rid of 6 boxes of craft stuff from my office alone?) and then my mother moved in with us permanently.

Her moving in was a decision we reached mutually for a lot of different reasons. The number one reason is that she couldn’t afford to live in Portland any more. She loves it there but it’s just too expensive. Another reason is that if the bank refinances our loan she can contribute to our mortgage.

The less official reasons are that her health isn’t great and neither of us wanted her to be so far away that if anything happened I wouldn’t be able to help out. She’s had bronchitis for a month and has been experiencing vertigo and has been ordered by her doctor not to drive. So now she’s on a leave of absence from work.

The minute she moved in it’s been complete chaos. Not because of her. My mom is pretty easy to live with now, something I never thought I’d say ten years ago, and she has a magic way of arranging and organizing things that I was not blessed with. So she moves in and suddenly we have an amazing living room. No dead space. It’s wonderful! What’s chaotic is how we’ve all been getting sick for a month and the pet situation is complicated and extremely stressful.

We love pets. We are all animal people. By animal people I mean to say that we aren’t people who feel life is complete without animals being part of our family. My mom arrived with two cats and two huge dogs. My dog who has never chased her own kitties is suddenly responding to a cat-hunt vibe with the youngest of my mother’s two dogs (a big boy named Angus) and our cat Penny is really upset and is now peeing on things.

Angus is really the apex of all the trouble. He can reach anything at all and is constantly chewing on whatever he can get his maw around. Any boots or shoes left around are decimated in minutes. He’ll eat everything in the kitchen. I roasted a very expensive baking sheet of organic fennel and turned my back for less than three minutes and he had licked over it all and already eaten half of them.

On the plus side my mom got our dishwasher fixed. I don’t mind hand washing dishes but I confess that it gets overwhelming doing dishes here and never more so than with one more person living here. Not only did she get our dishwasher fixed (it’s been broken for over a year) she actually cleans the kitchen every couple of days!

Stitch and Boots is meant to be my homesteading blog but lately I realize it’s mostly been my cooking blog. I am not going to officially change the focus because I keep hoping to do some other household projects to share here. I’m using this place as my flame of hope, if you don’t mind me saying such a silly thing. I have not really done any garden planning for a year while writing my novel and working and trying very hard to hold everything together with thin threads.

I was reinspired the other day by a talk I had with my Kung Fu teacher and a couple of other students at our school about GMOs and though our talk was angry (not with each other- with the situation of not being able to keep GMOs from our own diet due to no labeling and contamination of non-GMO crops by a growing number of GMO crops) out of the anger I remembered something fundamental: growing your own food matters. Growing my own food matters.

Even though I might have to leave this house mid-season, it’s also true that I might be here (in limbo) for as long as another year and in that time I can grow at least two crops in my garden. I already have the beds, they just have to be cleared of quack grass (“just” is not doing justice to the problem- remember I broke a shovel on that stuff?!). So I talked to my mother who is largely responsible for having given me a passion for gardening in the first place and she’s going to help me. We’re going to do a small vegetable garden.

It will be an act of good faith that we’ll hopefully still be here a year from now. Two years from now. A decade from now.

She has requested one whole bed for her own experimentation with square foot gardening.

There is nothing more important than for all of us with yards and balconies to grow open pollinated food. With all my house and life turmoil I lost sight of that. I’m watching the spring bulbs surface and though I’m sad to see winter winding down I am feeling the excitement of spring and all the new growth it brings with it. I’m excited to clean out the dead growth from my strawberries and let the new leaves up into the light. Snow watch 2011 is over.

It’s time to plan the only part of my future I can be sure of which is that no matter where I live I will always grow food. It’s the best offering of hope I can make. It’s the grandest gesture of love I can share.

Extreme Picky Eating: The Max Diet

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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.

Extreme Picky Eating: The Beginning

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.

Fry Cook

There’s no denying that these were better than the baked version, but worth the stench and the danger?

Until last week I had never fried anything in my life. I don’t think my mom ever fried anything in my life either. We have always reserved our fried food eating for going out or for the occasional packaged potato or corn chip. I’m hardly a paragon of healthy eating, what with my cheese habit and my beer gut, but the truth is that fried food doesn’t make me feel good. Every six months or so I’ll eat an apple fritter and predictably I’ll feel icky afterwords. I can eat fries once a week, but I have been known to get fry burps afterwords, a real sign that fried food doesn’t agree with me.

I have one frying ambition though- spring rolls. I have made baked spring rolls but I think it makes the wrapping kind of tough. I finally broke down last week and decided to fry some home made spring rolls. Frying is easy, right? You just heat up a bucket-load of oil and throw food into it until it turns golden…

Apparently there’s a learning curve with frying. First of all, I can’t bear the thought of filling any of my pots and pans with inches of oil. What do you do with all that oil when you’re done frying? Do you dump it down the drain? That seems wasteful and also unhealthy for the drain. Do you filter it and save it? Do you make it into oil burning candles? I couldn’t do it. I put about a quarter of an inch of oil in a large frying pan.

I heated it up.

Till it was really hot.

I added some spring rolls which sizzled satisfyingly.

But soon the rolls were frying too quickly and burning a bit.

The kitchen was filling up with a slight smokiness.

The oil was looking a little suspect.

Turns out you should turn your oil down once you have heated it up. I came very close to catching my kitchen on fire. Apparently frying is much more of an art than I imagined. Even if I hadn’t almost made my oil catch fire, the kitchen was filled with fried-smell for hours afterwords. Usually my kitchen smells great after I’ve cooked. How can the smell of fried grease smell so good when you’re eating the food and then smell so very wrong when just the grease smell is left?

I’ve decided that I’m not going to cultivate this kitchen knowledge. I’m going to experiment with rice wraps next. Perhaps I’ll make thin pancakes to eat my spring roll filling with. I make a plum dipping sauce and I want to eat more of it but I need to find a way to eat this without baking or frying. Pancakes might be the ticket!

I think it’s nice to find some things I don’t need to master in the kitchen.