Maybe they’re just not hungry

Today, the First Lady, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and celebrity chef Rachael Ray teamed up to announce the new regulations for healthy school food.  They talked about all the hot-button issues so many of us are intimately — and perhaps too vehemently — acquainted with, like reducing the fried foods, sodium, processed offerings, and sugar.  They said many of the right things, the things we want to hear about the food that’s being served to our kids: more vegetables, more fruits, healthier grains.  Some people are calling it a win, some people (like myself) are a bit ambivalent, and some, predictably, are crying foul on the new guidelines.

Among the naysayers, one of the most popular battle cries is “But they won’t EAT it!”  There seems to be a prevailing “wisdom” among those who decry the government’s intervention into its own school lunch program — a “wisdom” that tells us that American children will starve before eating something they don’t like (or, more accurately, THINK they don’t like).  And of course, in practice, there seems to be some unfortunate accuracy to the claim that lunchtime waste goes up exponentially along with the health quotient of the meal being served.  Even the LAUSD, after Jamie Oliver’s much-publicized intervention there, appears to have experienced quite a downturn in student enthusiasm for healthy lunches after the departure of the famous chef.

And yet.  YET.  You’ll never convince me that the observance of more apples in the trash, more quinoa salad untouched, more beans and rice thrown over for black-market Cheetos, actually mean that American children will not eat healthy food.  That’s the simple answer, sure, but it’s not the RIGHT answer.  There are dozens, literally dozens, of factors that go into the battle being fought with our kids over nutrition, not just in the school lunchrooms but in homes across the country.  But without examining all of those factors in detail, I’ll just boil it down to one key point:

Maybe they’re just not hungry.  Or, more accurately, maybe they’re not hungry ENOUGH.

I wonder several times a week, as I read Karen le Billon’s accounts of school lunches in France, just how it is that we as a culture miss the simple and obvious truth that if kids in other countries can eat well, our kids can also eat well.  Children in France are not made of different stuff than American children.  To put it quite simply, a lion eats meat, whether he is an African lion strolling the savannah, or a lion in a zoo somewhere halfway around the world who has never seen the wild beyond his man-made habitat.  Children are children, and are born omnivores, no matter where they are raised.

So what’s the difference?  Well, CULTURE, of course, I’m sure many of you are saying with rolled eyes.  But what does that mean, really?  Culture = traditions = habits = foodways = a relationship with food, shaped by family influence, peer influence, locale (in that herring might be more common than avocado, say, in Sweden), and expectations — to simplify sociological and anthropological fact, with all apologies to those of you more learned than I in these matters.  In other words, a child’s relationship to food is shaped by the way others around them eat and expect them to eat.  And we knew that.  But.

BUT.  I think we sometimes overlook the little things, the subtle nuances of food cultures that probably make a much bigger difference than we care to recognize.  For example, when those French children are being served their lovely four-course meals at lunchtime, they’ve probably not just eaten a sugary, starch-heavy, or artificially large snack just two hours prior.  In fact, I may miss my guess here, but they possibly haven’t eaten a snack of any kind at all.

It’s not that children in other cultures eat better than American children simply because the traditional foods of those cultures are healthier, or because their parents have more time to cook, or because there are greater expectations placed upon them to eat what they’re served — though all of those things may or may not be true, to varying degrees.  It’s that in many other parts of the world, meals are meals, and they’re not mucked up by constant eating.

Our kids eat too much.  They eat too often, rather, and with too much anxiety applied by well-meaning adults (parents, school administrators, activity providers, etc) to their possible HUNGER.  And let’s face it: in the absence of true hunger, aren’t YOU more likely to eat only what you think will taste the best, and skip the things that are less appealing to you?

L. came home today with a lunchbox that was mainly empty, but his vegetables had only barely been touched.  Now, L. is a child who LIKES vegetables, and had asked for the lunch he was given; and he’s also a child who understands that it’s important for him to eat the vegetables Mommy and Daddy serve to him.  But he didn’t eat them, despite the fact that his lunch wasn’t overly large or filling.  I was surprised…until I thought through his morning and realized he’d had a good breakfast at 7:45 a.m., followed by a “snack” of cereal and milk at school (around 9 a.m.), and sat down to lunch sometime between 11:30 and noon.

In the interim, he played with Legos, sang songs and listened to stories at circle time, did some art projects, and had show and tell.  He’d had neither the time nor the activity to get truly HUNGRY.  Peckish, yes.  A bit empty, certainly.  But gnawingly, startlingly HUNGRY?  I doubt it.

When was the last time you heard your child’s stomach growl?  If you can remember it, you’re probably farther ahead of the game than most Americans.  We’re so concerned that our kids will go hungry that we don’t let them get acquainted with what hunger actually feels like.  And then, when they fuss about eating things that are less appealing to them, we assume that the problem lies in the food, or in the children themselves (“Oh, she’s just so picky”).

It doesn’t.  The problem lies in us, and in our culture of nutrition anxiety.

So I say to you, Ms. Obama, and you, Secretary Vilsack: I sincerely appreciate what you are attempting here, and I applaud your motives.  I am pleased with the thought that has gone into trying to improve school food, and while I don’t think the new regulations have real teeth or will make substantive changes to the day-to-day realities in our schools, I don’t believe it’s appropriate to tear down small victories on the road to real progress.  But sadly, your new regulations exist within a larger cultural vortex that, if not exactly damning to progress of this kind, will certainly offer up at least a measurable and frustrating amount of resistance.  Your added vegetables may be destined for the trash, no matter how appetizing you make them, simply because you’re feeding them to children who don’t need, at that precise moment, to be fed.  Or don’t need to be fed quite so MUCH.  Or in such an option-rich environment.

See, if you know your next snack is just a few hours away, the peas just don’t seem necessary.  If you know your after-school activity will be serving graham crackers and chocolate milk, bok choy can be tossed with impunity.  And if you’ve got 400 calories’ worth of meat and starch on your plate, you’d have to be pretty hungry to delve into the creamed spinach, don’t you think?

I don’t mean to imply that we don’t have a serious — urgent, in fact — childhood hunger issue in this country.  Lest anyone take issue with this post, I’m not really talking about kids who get only one or two square meals a day.  I daresay that if you go to, say, a soup kitchen, more of the 5-year-olds in that room will be eating their vegetables than in the average kindergarten cafeteria.  What I’m talking about is more the kids who wake up to a bowl of cereal with juice, head off to school and eat their snack of cheese and crackers two hours later, and after another two hours, march into the cafeteria and stand in line to be served their 600 calories of hot food.  And then know they’ll eat again 2-3 hours later, and again 2-3 hours after that.

If you look at it that way…it seems so simple.  We’re not growing eaters because we’re not growing kids who are hungry enough to eat.  In our quest to make sure they’re nourished, we’re overfeeding them to the point that they feel no regret in leaving behind the MOST nourishing items on their plates, because food is nothing to them — it’s something that appears, disappears, and reappears before they can give it a second thought. Twelve months from now, give or take — maybe sooner, maybe later — someone will write an article discussing the deleterious effects of the new school food guidelines, and how many fruits and vegetables are being wasted because the children “won’t” eat them.  And nowhere in the whole heated debate over what kids should and shouldn’t be eating, and when, will the truth be mentioned.

They may just not be hungry.

Food Waste, Week Two: Pleasantly Surprised

Well.  Knock me over with a feather.

It’s week two of cataloging publicly the entirety of the food waste situation in our home, and I was certain that we were going to end up with far more waste than we had in week one — after all, we’re just getting the hang of this, and I haven’t even started being super-proactive about it yet; I’m still in the “observation” phase, I think.  (Or maybe that’s just how I justify to myself the fact that I’m not constantly thinking about scaling back the waste quotient.)  But surprisingly, we didn’t incur that kind of waste.  Maybe I shopped smarter or cooked smarter, or maybe the kids liked their lunches better this week (or were hungrier).  Maybe I was subconsciously shifting to more waste-conscious methods of cooking and packing, or maybe we just haven’t done a good enough job cleaning out the fridge this week (totally possible).  Whatever the reasons, the list is pretty acceptable — something I may still not enjoy looking at, but something I can at least breathe through.

Last week’s waste report got very kind and supportive comments from all of you, which I truly appreciate.  Some of you encouraged me to give myself more of a break as far as the kids’ wasted lunch leftovers go — opinions, and forgive me for paraphrasing, seemed to run towards the “kids are fickle eaters and the storage issue of uneaten food in warm cubbies is beyond your control.”  While those things are completely true, and having kids is, in and of itself, something of a recipe for food waste right at the outset, I don’t want to take the “easy out” and allow myself ot overlook whatever comes home in their lunchboxes at the end of the day.  When you get right down to it, the whole point of this project was to identify, own, and embrace the positives and negatives of our household’s food usage, and the kids’ contributions to the waste pile need to be accounted for, even if I can’t theoretically do a whole lot to change those figures.

Anyway, here’s the list for this week:

2 cups of tortilla soup.  Yeeeeahhhhh…we didn’t eat it.  I mean, we ATE it, when we had it for dinner…and for a few lunches after that…and then I forgot to freeze it and it got shoved behind something and, well, you can all see where this is going.

1 serving chicken and dumplings.  We did pretty well at polishing off the chicken and dumplings, but I have to say, we did NOT do well with picking out all the bones before we packaged up the leftovers.  When I tried to eat my way through the last bit, there were little bones and shards of bone all dispersed throughout the gravy and vegetables, and I’m sorry — that’s beyond what I will consider edible/worth my time to correct.  So the whole thing went in the trash.

1/4 of a sunbutter and jelly sandwich on whole-wheat.  P.’s latest breakfast kick is a pb&j, or in this case, sb&j on wheat.  He didn’t finish it one day.  I thought he had.  I found it on the couch that night when we came home from work.  On.  The.  Couch.

1 banana (roughly) and 1 tblsp. organic chocolate chips.  I packed sliced bananas sprinkled with chocolate chips for the boys’ Friday lunches, as a special treat.  Neither of them finished the serving they were given, so this is my estimate of what came back, combined.

1/4 cup frozen mango.  P. had mango and raspberries in his lunch the other day.  He ate all the raspberries and most of the mango.  The rest came home looking sad and….wet.

4 pieces dried papaya, 1 dried plum.  P.  AGAIN.  Lunch leftovers, vaguely chewed, perhaps?  I couldn’t tell, so I thought it wise to err on the conservative side on this one.

1/4 couscous mixed with sauteed vegetables.  Came home as lunchbox miscellany.

1/2 cup yogurt.  Total of the leftover carnage from lunches.

1 apple.  Found it in the crisper drawer.  I thought it was a pear, which would have been a recent purchase.  Nope.  Then I thought it was still edible.  I gave it a shot.  Also nope.

1 pound cremini mushrooms.  SOOO angry with myself about these.  I bought them and accidentally — do NOT ask me how — shoved them in the freezer.  They got frozen.  When I thawed them, they were slimy and smelled a little funny, even by fungus standards.   Word of advice: Don’t try to freeze unprotected mushrooms.

Anyway, that’s it — the sum total for the whole week.  As I look at it, I feel pretty good, because so much of it was the lunches — and it’s true that, if the boys were eating at home under my supervision, there’d be a bit more I could do to help mitigate the waste.  But just knowing at the moment that the odd bites from their lunches are a big contributor to our waste tally helps me tremendously.

I’m also feeling proud because we did a few things last week, and I’m in the process of doing a few more things this week, that were consciously designed to cut down on our food waste — as well as help keep me set up for easy cooking and lunch-packing.  Last week, when we made our breaded flounder for supper, I immediately separated out several portions and froze them for future meals.  The only leftovers that went into the refrigerator were a few pieces each for me and J., which we made sure to eat the next day.  I also made sure to reheat the leftovers of the couscous with mixed vegetables that we’d originally eaten with lamb meatballs, and serve it (refreshed with a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil) alongside a quick portion of pan-seared salmon for Friday fend night, meaning that every scrap was utilized.  And at some point during the week, when I made our salad, I added a hefty dose of chopped fresh herbs that looked as though they were about to turn on me, then popped the stems into my stock bag.

This week, I’m working diligently on the buy-less-cook-more philosophy to (hopefully) rein in our waste even further.  When I made the mashed potatoes for last night’s spoon roast supper, I made double; the leftovers will be used to bind tonight’s salmon cakes.  The extras of the spoon roast are waiting in the fridge to be chopped up and quickly reheated in a stir-fry later this week, while some stray beets and sweet potatoes from last week are already slated to become veggie chips for tomorrow’s sloppy joe supper.  They’re small things, really, and not hard to do — but I feel good knowing that I’m at least thinking proactively and setting up a system that may help us to eradicate as much waste in our kitchen as possible.

Fridge to Fork: Old-Fashioned Fish Supper

This is the second installment in my new “Fridge to Fork” series, in which I attempt to show how easily — and with how few ingredients — an appealing and relatively unprocessed family dinner can come together.  This meal is my answer to fish sticks (or, I suppose, fish and chips) and is a huge favorite with not only the kids in this house, but with J. and me as well.  You can use practically any fish; this time, we chose flounder because it was 60% off at Whole Foods, which meant I could buy double the necessary amount and freeze a whole second batch of ready-to-eat breaded fish.

Simple Breaded Fish, Crispy Roasted Potatoes, Baked Acorn Squash, and Greens

4:50 p.m.: Ingredient Assembly

Fish.  Greens.  Squash.  Potatoes.  Flour.  Panko.  Eggs.  Seasonings.  Oil.  And someone’s forgotten cup in the background.

4:55 p.m.: What's easier than roasted potatoes?

 Chunked up four Yukon Gold potatoes.  All they need is a drizzle of olive oil, some salt and pepper, and a hot oven.  Patience doesn’t hurt, either.  400 degrees for about 45 minutes, depending on your potatoes and your oven, turning once.  If they won’t loosen and flip easily when you try to turn them, they need more time.  Trust me — when they come out super crispy and delicious, you’ll be happy you were patient.

5:00 p.m.: Squash guts

Cut the squash in half, scrape the seeds out with a spoon…

Acorn squash, ready for the oven

…And then it’s just like the potatoes — olive oil, salt, pepper, and into the oven.  Forget about it for somewhere around 30 minutes, until it’s nice and tender.

5:05 p.m.: Breading station

Dish 1: Flour, seasoned with a pinch each of salt, pepper, and paprika.
Dish 2: Beaten eggs.  3 or 4 should do it.
Dish 3: Panko breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.  3-4 cups of breadcrumbs will coat 2 pounds of fish, give or take.

5:10 p.m.: Fish into flour...

Floured fish into egg...

Eggy fish into panko...

5:25 p.m.: The fish awaits its fate.

From here, it’s a short trip into hot oil — about 1/2 inch of whatever cooking oil you feel good about using (neutral-flavored is best, and something that can take the heat — canola, vegetable, and peanut oils are the traditional choices) is fine.  You want the oil hot enough that a few crumbs of panko dropped into the skillet produce a good sizzle and rapid, tiny bubbles, but not so hot that it smokes or immediately browns anything.  For thin fish like this, 3 minutes a side was plenty to cook it through and get it crispy and brown.

5:45 p.m.: Dinner.

Long story short: I tossed the greens with some lemon and olive oil and threw everything else into serving vessels.  Crispy, crunchy, slightly salty, savory…I’m glad we’ve got extras in the freezer.

Gulp. Food Waste Report, Week One

It was just over a week ago that I (and many of you, my readers) got all fired up about the Food Network’s “Big Waste” special.  I live-chatted with a number of you during the show, I wrote a follow-up post, and I vowed — both to myself and publicly — to do something, even in small measure, to combat food waste in my own little corner of the world.  That “something,” to wit, happened to be a moment of madness in which I said I’d keep track of all the food wasted in our house each week between now and March 21, and chronicle that waste here for the world to see.

Gulp.  It’s time for the first report.

First, the caveats: I am NOT good at keeping track of stuff yet, so I may, quite honestly, have missed one or two things along the way.  I’m trying to get better, I promise, but it’s hard to develop a habit of keeping track of what you previously considered to be trash.  Secondly, after some consideration, I decided that I’d measure the waste by general portion/measurements (most of which are educated estimates), rather than by a more scientific and exact method like weight.  Frankly, that’s somewhat motivated by laziness, because if I had to haul out my kitchen scale and weigh every scrap before disposing of it, this project would fall apart in a hurry.  However, I’ll also point out that since I rarely think of my food in terms of POUNDS, but rather in terms of portions, cups, tablespoons, etc., the whole exercise is probably more meaningful to me anyway if I look at our household food waste in terms that have a functional translation to my brain.

So here goes…food waste, week one, in no particular order:
1 small bunch beets.  I found them in a bag in the waaaaay back of the fridge.  They were NOT edible any longer.  Trust me.
1 1/2 small bunches cilantro.  This burns me a little.  I had a bunch of cilantro in the crisper, which I somehow overlooked.  I bought another and only used half of it.  By the time I’d found the first one, it was too late…and before I could make myself do something to preserve the other half-bunch, time had become my enemy.  Purely, purely my fault.
1 cup greens.  This is an assortment, a round-up if you will, of little odds and ends from various packages of salad greens and cooking greens.  We usually use things like this completely, but there was a little kale here…a little mesclun there…and a few leaves of baby spinach that just never got eaten.
1 cup assorted vegetables — tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, peppers.  This is the sum of all the vegetables that were either included in lunchboxes or on dinner plates that ended up neglected.  The lunchbox ones couldn’t be salvaged by the time they got home; the dinner ones just didn’t get saved, because I’m not good at managing our food waste yet.  This much I’ve learned.
1/4 cup fruit salad with yogurt topping.  Leftover from P.’s lunch one day.  Sat in a warm cubby all afternoon.  ‘Nuff said.
1 whole carrot.  This one slipped out of my fingers as I peeled it, fell into a dish of soapy water in the sink, and as I tried to retrieve it, I dropped it down the drain.  I’m motivated to manage our food waste, but not that motivated.
1 dozen small (51-count) shrimp.  I’m SO angry with myself about this one.  Shrimp are EXPENSIVE, damn it, and not something I am prone to wasting in any case.  Unfortunately, I’d made shrimp to bring to a party, and these dozen didn’t fit into the dish; so I popped them in our refrigerator with the solemn vow to myself that I’d cook them up for J. and me the next day.  You can see the result of that vow.
2 chicken drumsticks.  We cleaned out the fridge; they were in a mysterious foil package.  Yup.
1 piece broccoli quiche.  Forgive me for this one.  I must confess, it’s a simple matter of nobody really wanted to eat it.
1 banana-sunbutter slider on mini-English muffin.  P. took two of these sliders in his lunch one day; one was eaten, the other appeared to have been…licked.
1 pepperoni-spinach calzone.  Another lunch casualty, another afternoon in a hot cubby.
1/2 cup oatmeal (prepared with milk and maple syrup).  I made too much the first day, saved it, reheated and ate it again the second day, and frankly couldn’t see how it would continue to be edible after another reheating.
2 falafels.  Well, most of 2 falafels.  The kids nibbled, gnawed, smashed, and otherwise mangled them in the course of dinner.
1 cup cooked whole-wheat pasta with garlic butter.  I was so good!  I saved a whole bunch of this pasta.  I ate it again.  And reinvented it and ate it again.  And the last bit just didn’t quite make it.
1 slice whole-wheat bread.  J. thought it seemed a little stale, so he tossed it.
1 ounce (give or take) grass-fed beef.  P. didn’t finish the second slider he asked for at dinner one night.  We did save the scraps, dutifully, but when he asked for them again at lunch he still didn’t eat them.  I’ll only go so far on this one.
1/2 cup organic yogurt.  P., again.  He wanted it for breakfast, ate only a little, left the table, and we were in such a rush leaving the house that we FORGOT IT WAS THERE.  Ew.  Don’t come home to old yogurt on your dining table.  Just…don’t.

And that, my friends, is it.  The first week’s accounting of wasted food, laid out in black and white, in horrible detail.  We could have probably fed another PERSON, quite seriously, given what was cavalierly thrown away after our family was properly fed.  And now it’s your turn — give it to me straight.  Did I do better or worse than you expected?  How do you think this amount of waste stacks up against your household’s food waste in a given week?  And have any of you been keeping track for yourselves?

Did We Really Need an App for That?

I’m not a super-techie person.  (I know, I know – shocking given the pristine condition of my blog and my stunning photography.  Groan.)  I don’t even own a smartphone.  Scratch that – I don’t even own a CAMERAPHONE.  My 10-year-old nephew’s phone takes pictures, but nope, mine doesn’t.  It’s probably about 7 years old, making it the triceratops of cell phones, which is okay considering that I don’t actually use it.  Pretty much, well, ever.  I don’t text, I don’t talk on the thing, and it’s rarely even on.  Sometimes I remember to charge the battery.  Sometimes.

So…I’m not a super-techie person.  The new world, in which there is an “app” for apparently EVERYTHING, is passing me by, and I don’t really care.  It does not bother me that I don’t have apps to help me do things, because most of the things I do every day are things I have figured out how to do without the help of technology.  I’m actually somewhat dreading the day when I inevitably obtain better technology, become addicted to some particular app, and realize that I can’t comprehend how I ever lived without it.  I know it’s coming.  But I’m going to try to live in the 20^th century for as long as I can, damn it, and I’m not relinquishing my VHS tapes, CD player, or any other cherished relics of the bygone era anytime soon.

I do, however, enjoy playing around on the interwebs from time to time, and when I found this post from It’s Not About Nutrition, I had to check out the new fun internet excitement called the “Healthy Lunch Maker.”  It was my mistake, truly.  I should have known better.  But I took the bait and went to the Parents’ magazine site anyway, cursing the evil lure of computer playtime that I could pawn off as blogger research.

I’m…predictably underwhelmed by the HLM.  Almost to the point of malaise, actually.  And all I could think, at first, was: Did we really need an app for this?

Yes, I know it’s not technically an “app” (although I didn’t look closely – can you GET an app for the HLM?  Maybe?).  But my question stands.  Who among us – be honest – really NEEDS an online calculator tool that tells us how many calories, grams of protein, etc. are in our kids’ lunches?

It might be one thing, I suppose, if the tool were well-built – i.e., if it were at all useful.  Frankly, it’s not, at least not in my humble opinion.  I saw in some of the comments on the It’s Not About Nutrition post that a few people appear to have found some value in the thing, as it at least illuminates the fact that contrary to much popular belief, our young kids don’t need to eat an entire steer every day to meet the relatively modest guidelines for protein intake.  (That’s a relief.  I was getting tired of stewing up a venison haunch every time the kids got peckish.)  But seriously, a few useful tidbits of information here and there do not a truly helpful application make…and there are so many flaws with this HLM calculator business that I’m not sure I’ll be able to enumerate them all.

The short list of issues, as I see it:
1) The options are woefully limited.  A sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a drink?  That’s all I can ever pack in my kids’ “healthy” lunches?

2) The options are even more limited than they appear.  Bread options are almost nonexistent, and even though you can choose “whole wheat bread,” you can’t choose “whole wheat pita.”  Automatically, the calculations are going to be wrong if you’re packing something that varies at all from whatever standard brand they’re using.

3) If you make most of your food homemade, it doesn’t matter to the calculator.  The calculator doesn’t know.  So your homemade wheat sandwich bread will be whacked with the same sodium and sugar contents as the commercial stuff, which is almost assuredly a completely off-base comparison.

4) If you use pastured meats or nitrate-free lunch meats, or use fewer slices than they’re calculating, or use more cheese than they would, or any other possible variation…the calculator will be wrong.  You can’t set values, so who knows how your ham and cheese stacks up against their ham and cheese?

5) If you feed your child half a sandwich (as I do) rather than a whole sandwich, the calculator doesn’t know, because it doesn’t ask.  And sure, you could figure that out, theoretically…but why should you have to take extra steps when you’re using a tool that’s supposed to somehow “simplify” your life?

There are a lot more issues, some of them glaring (like the total lack of vegetable options)…but I’m stopping right here.  I’ve reached the real point, as I think about it, looking at the word “simplify.”

How in the world have we gotten so mixed up and so unsure of ourselves as parents that we feel any desire, any need, to seek validation of our lunch-making skills from some pre-programmed computer gizmo that doesn’t really tell us anything?  Is it simplifying our lives to plug lunch after lunch into this calculator and receive its critique of our food choices for our kids…or is it just another way to distance ourselves from the whole process of eating?

I could plug in a ham-and-cheese on pita, a banana, and some milk, and I could get some result that tells me how I’m doing “nutritionally” for my kids, relative to some guidelines, and based on a statistical average of nutrient values and caloric quantities that may or may not even apply to the food I’ve bought and prepared.  Or I could bake some whole-wheat pita bread with L. and P., and watch them get really excited about handling the dough and using the rolling pin, and see how L. hangs around next to the stove while it’s baking so he can beg for the first piece as it comes out of the oven.  I could think carefully and critically about the way our meat is sourced and handled and bring home a nitrate-free, uncured, pastured ham, cook it, slice it, and enjoy it with my family, knowing that there will be plenty of tasty leftovers for our sandwiches.  I could talk to my kids about whether they’d even want the banana today, or whether they’d prefer apples, oranges, pomegranates, dried dates, or any other fruit under the sun.  I could even (gasp) taste some vegetables with them, and pack up some green beans and carrots in that lunchbox, WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THE CALCULATOR THINKS OF THOSE ITEMS, and see my boys’ healthy, smiling faces at the end of the day as they help me unpack their lunchboxes and show me that they ate their vegetables, with pride and enthusiasm.

I could even, heaven forbid, skip the sandwiches altogether and pack SOUP.  Or meatballs.  Or pasta.  I could pack anything my boys like, whatever they want me to pack for them, because a “healthy lunch” means SO many different things.  And if I, as a parent, engage with my kids around food and experience it with them, how much easier and more rewarding the lunch-packing process becomes!

So, Healthy Lunch Maker, I’m sorry.  I know you want me to use you to make the lunch-packing process “simpler.”  But truth be told, it’s already as simple as I want it to be.  I actually have to think about what goes into my children’s lunchboxes, and that’s a good thing.  Even better is the fact that without you, I don’t have to think TOO MUCH.  It’s too much information for me to have to wonder about calories and sodium and the recommended daily value for protein in a 3-year-old’s diet.  I hate to break it to you, HLM, but it’s actually much simpler to look at the colors, the variety, and the freshness of that 3-year-old’s food options, and let my gut tell me whether or not the lunch is healthy enough for him.

Food is not a “thing.”  It is an activity, a lifestyle, a daily ritual.  And for that, no, I don’t think we need an app.

This is Either Really Brave, or Really Stupid

Last night, several blog readers joined me over at the RRG Facebook page for a live chat during the Food Network’s presentation of a new special, “The Big Waste.”  It was, as you’d expect, a show about the appalling amount of edible food that is just wasted in America every day — the billions of pounds, annually, of perfectly good produce, meat, dairy, and other foodstuffs that are thrown in the trash and forgotten about entirely.  The show was great, but the conversation on the RRG page was even better.  This is a topic that seems to arouse a lot of passions in everyone, and having watched the show, I can tell you that it’s inspired more than a momentary reaction in me — it’s gotten me itching for something I can DO about it.

I won’t be a spoiler, and I won’t rehash the whole show here, because I KNOW you’ll want to watch it if you didn’t catch last night’s airing, and it’s going to be rerun on Food Network at 4 p.m. on January 14.  So you’ve still got time.  But I will say this: There is a level of shock and dismay that I expected to feel upon watching a show devoted to uncovering wasteful food-handling in America…and then there’s a whole other level of distress, one that borders on nausea, and THAT is the level of distress I felt while watching this show.  Still feel, as a matter of fact.  When we live in a so-called privileged nation, and 1 in 4 of our children still doesn’t get enough to eat, sobering statistics like “Americans waste about 200 pounds of edible food per person each year” are nothing short of sickening.

The worst part, I think, is that I wanted to believe that all that food waste was happening on one of two fronts: either the sort of household crisper-drawer malaise we’re all guilty of from time to time, or somehow, as a byproduct of the great Food Industrial Complex – probably because, hey, I admit that I’d really like to be able to blame Big Food and Big Ag for just about everything.  Childhood obesity?  Big Food’s fault. High taxes?  Big Food’s fault.  Broken water heater?  Big Food’s fault.  Stubbed toe?  Totally gonna blame that on Big Food.   Unfortunately, it appears that I can NOT blame this ridiculously egregious amount of wasted food on the nefarious food industry.  Darn it.

No, it’s not entirely the fault of corporate greed or HFCS-peddling men in double-breasted suits, drumming their fingers together with anticipation behind the doors of board rooms while workers pump artificial colors into something that was formerly food.  It’s actually — at least according to the Food Network’s special — the fault, largely, of the American consumer.  That’s right, guys.  It’s US.  We are the problem.

You know how sometimes, when you go grocery shopping, you’ll see a tiny little imperfection on the outside of a pea pod and you’ll reject it outright, only choosing and purchasing the very most beautiful of all the pea pods in the land?  Yeah, me neither.  But apparently, there are many, many shoppers out there who do, in fact, insist upon having spotless, shiny, impossibly perfect produce…and meat…and seafood…and when those barely-spotted pea pods get chucked time and again to the bottom of the bin, the produce managers get wise and remove them.  Not because there’s anything wrong with them.  Because they just won’t sell.

Now, maybe it’s just me — I’ve always been the girl who, watching “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” each Christmas, wonders what in the heck is wrong with a spotted elephant, and wants to take that cute little pachyderm home for a cuddle — but I don’t mind a little imperfection on my food.  No, I don’t want anything that smells bad, or looks like it may have been used as a chew toy at the pound before hitting the butcher case, but I’m not a stickler for appearances.  I’ll buy the brussels sprouts with the aphid damage, the pea pods that are scratched and dented, the slightly splotchy bananas.  I may not seek those items out, don’t get me wrong; but I don’t mind if they find their way into my shopping bag.  If the bananas turn before we eat them, they’ll make great banana bread; I’m only after the peas INSIDE the pea pods anyway; and you can always cut around the aphid spots if they bother you so much.  It’s not a huge deal.  (I’m aware, by the way, that almost a decade of avid farmer’s market shopping has probably cultivated  this laissez-faire attitude in me — local, pesticide-free produce does not tend to look like it came from a showroom.)

But back to the Big Waste.  Apparently I am in a serious minority as far as my threshold for attractiveness in vegetables goes; the program showed several farmers, grocers, and distributors who were throwing away literally dozens of pounds (or more) of food every single day because it was “irregular.”  From scratched-up pea pods to eggs that were too small or too large, from cabbage that looked a little mangy on the outside layers to a whole FIELD of tomatoes that had fallen from the plants and were therefore deemed unsalable, there were just.  Mountains.  Of.  Good.  Wholesome.  Food.  Rotting.

I’m dismayed and angry and troubled about the whole thing, especially the meat — oh, God, the meat.  I’m a meat-eater myself, though I try to be moderate about it, and I don’t try to sugarcoat the reality of where that meat comes from — not to myself or to my family.  But if an animal’s life is sacrificed for us to eat, then I want that animal to be USED, not discarded.  Whole chickens, wasted because a single wing bone broke during the plucking process or a piece of skin was torn?  It’s horrifying to think that we’re wasting life at an alarming rate.  But even worse than the chickens is knowing that we’re allowing all of this wastefulness to go on with serious, deleterious consequences to HUMAN life as well.

It’s been a long-standing lament, not just of mine but of pretty much every conscious food writer/advocate in the world, that people who are living in poverty and food insecurity seem much more able to afford — and to access — utterly crapulous food.  I’m not going to do a whole review of the issues with food deserts and SNAP benefits and shelf stability and lack of proper cooking facilities, but it’s a basic fact that most food-insecure families in America are much more likely to have Kraft Mac n Cheese on their tables than they are to have brussels sprouts.  And I think if I had seen this special and found that the wasted food was mainly sweets and crackers and processed items that were past their shelf lives, I’d have been bothered, but not highly distressed.  However, knowing that it’s FOOD — honest, real, good, wholesome, healthy FOOD that’s being purposely tossed in the garbage bins and compost heaps without being offered to those hungry families first — really gets me.

No, I don’t know what the right answers are; I can’t tell you right now how to get those “irregular” eggs and tomatoes and cabbages and the broken-winged chickens and the barely bruised fresh filets of halibut from their farms and markets to, say, little Billy and Tommy at their inner-city apartment where their mom gives them a few bucks to buy dinner at the bodega because there’s not a whole lot of choice where they live.  (I have thoughts, though.  I always have thoughts.)  But I can tell you that we’re shamefully overfeeding our population, especially our low-income population, on junk that makes us all fat…and in the meantime, there’s healthy food nobody wants laying in a field somewhere, or being thrown into a dumpster, and there has GOT to be a way to reverse those trends so that the less-than-perfect fresh food gets into the hands and mouths of people who need it, and the Lucky Charms are the thing that consistently end up in the trash.  Then maybe we’d actually have a shot at reversing a whole bunch of terrible trends that are destroying the health of our nation — industrialized shelf-stable food products, childhood obesity, and the coexistence of both overweight and malnutrition in our citizens, just to name a few.

I can’t, at the moment, wrap my brain around just what li’l ol’ me can do to make a substantive difference in so large and complex a problem.  But I CAN at least hold myself accountable, and I can invite the rest of you to join me in this endeavor.  Today on the Facebook page I broached the subject of possibly — just possibly — doing a weekly accounting of the food waste in my household, so I can be aware of it (and you can wag your disapproving fingers at me, collectively).  One of my readers offered to join in, and I hope some others will as well.  So here’s what we’re going to do:

Each week from now until March 21 (my birthday!), I’ll post a list of the sheer food waste that I’ve observed in our house.  To qualify as “waste,” it has to be — as a reader so astutely phrased it — “something you’ve just let get away from you.”  In other words, an inedible trimming from meat or produce doesn’t count, nor does the remnant of beaten egg from a recipe; but that shriveled-up beet that has been hanging out in the crisper drawer is absolute waste.  I don’t care if you compost it — composting is better than the trash, certainly, but it’s still a beet that didn’t  go into the mouth of sometone who may have needed it.

As I post, I’ll invite each of you to comment with your own food waste tallies.  Over time, the hope is that our average amount of waste will decline; and as we learn to do better, each of us can share our tips and ideas until we’ve compiled a good resource guide to eating only what we need, and needing only what we eat.  I have no illusions that this is going to be easy, folks, but if just not wasting food were easy, the Food Network wouldn’t have had to air a special about it in the first place.  Sometimes big changes and big ideas come from small places.  Let’s see if we can’t be one of those places, shall we?

Fridge to Fork: Croque Monsieur

This week, I’ve seen a number of bloggers and websites talking about a new cookbook in which the author basically does exactly the opposite of what you’d think a cookbook author would do: she tells people to forget about recipes.  The first few times I saw the book mentioned, I didn’t pay much attention; but by the time it was a topic of conversation over at my blogger buddy Bettina’s site, The Lunch Tray, I knew that I’d definitely want to chime in.

My thoughts, after reading a little about this radical new cookbook idea?  I think it’s GREAT.  I actually don’t tend to use recipes myself, as most of you know by now, and when I do it’s really just as a sort of rough guideline.  I’ve written quite a bit before about the death of home cooking in America, but it occurred to me as I pondered the idea of an anti-recipe book that part of the issue is probably our collective need to know that we’re doing something right in the kitchen.  People who aren’t comfortable with cooking are often so afraid of doing things wrong that they won’t deviate from recipes at all — leading to those slightly absurd, if totally understandable, situations in which all intentions of making a family meal go by the wayside as the would-be cook discovers the lack of a single ingredient called for by the venerable recipe book.  No onion?  Panic sets in.  Can’t cook tonight.  Might as well heat up a microwave meal or call for takeout.

No, reliance on recipes certainly doesn’t breed confidence in the kitchen, and it’s no help in creating a nation of people who make their own food, based on what they’ve got on hand and what’s available, fresh, and affordable.  So I’ve decided to start a new little project here at RRG…something aimed at showing how simple, unglamorous, and flexible a homecooked meal can be.  No fancy ingredients, no complicated directions, and nothing that can’t be changed, substituted, or omitted at your whim.  I’m calling this photo diary of a dinner “Fridge to Fork,” and I’m hoping that when people see just how, well, unpretty the whole thing is, it may encourage a few tentative home cooks out there to take some baby steps towards becoming more free in their own kitchens.  Yes, you too can make an unglamorous mess of your stove while pulling together a simple supper for the family.  This high life isn’t just for food bloggers like me.

Croque Monsieur, Kale Salad, and Broiled Grapefruit

5:25 p.m.

Ingredient assembly

 

Bread.  Ham.  Cheese.  Milk.  Flour.  Butter.  Fruits and vegetables. 
You can use any bread you like.  You don’t have to use ham, though it’s traditional — turkey or chicken or even roast beef would be fine.  You can use whatever cheeses you like, because I’ll never know.  And I don’t care what you serve with it.  We just happened to have kale and grapefruit on hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:27 p.m.

Making bechamel

 

 
This is the hardest part of the whole meal, which is so NOT hard that it’s barely cooking.  3 tablespoons or so of butter, whisked with an equal amount of flour, cooked for 2 minutes…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:32 p.m.

Sauce.

…and 2 cups of milk/half-and-half added.  (I use about a cup and a half of milk and a half-cup of half-and-half, for richness.  You can use either, both, whatever ratio you’d like.)  Salt.  Pepper.  Bubble it away until it coats the back of a spoon, then put a cup of shredded cheese in there and let it melt.  Take it off the heat.  It’s done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:37 p.m.

Grapefruit: A still life.

 

 

Peeling grapefruit.  Again, you could use whatever fruit you wanted.  And you don’t have to cook it.  But I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:40 p.m.

Adding honey and cinnamon

 

 

Grapefruit can be a little sour, even slightly bitter, so I tried to make it more enticing for the kids by tossing the segments with honey and cinnamon and broiling it.  J. and I were favorably impressed.  The boys were not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:42 p.m.

Sandwich assembly

 

 

The only secret here is that I toasted the bread first so it wouldn’t be soggy.  There’s a little dijon mustard spread on the bread for the adults’ sandwiches, but the kids aren’t keen on mustard so I left it off theirs.   You could, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready for the oven

 

 

Bread…mustard…cheese…ham…bechamel sauce…bread…more bechamel sauce. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:45 p.m.

 

Kale salad

 

 

While the sandwiches were under the broiler, what else could I do but get busy tossing some baby kale leaves with salt, pepper, garlic powder, vinegar, and olive oil?  You could use different greens or different dressing.  Me, I like kale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:50 p.m.

The spread, ready for serving

 

I had to tell L. three times to keep his mitts off the hot food.  I finally handed him a bunch of utensils to carry to the table for me, just so I’d have a chance to dish up the food without him trying to sneak a taste.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5:52 p.m.

Not a bad-looking plate

 

So it’s just sandwiches, after all.  But FANCY FRENCH SANDWICHES.  We taught the boys a little smattering of Franglais and made a big deal about how THESE sandwiches had to be eaten with a knife and fork.  And darned if all the “Merci” and “S’il vous plait” business didn’t seem to make some bread, ham, and cheese taste extra special, even to me and J.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Year, Same Old Meal Plan

I like New Year’s.  I don’t like it because of the parties — truthfully, J. and I usually do very little to celebrate, and this year we did even less than we ordinarily might.  I don’t like it because of the champagne, which I generally don’t even drink.  I don’t like it for any reason other than the fact that it’s a fresh start and a chance to regroup in the middle of winter, when almost nothing really feels fresh here in the Northeast.

I like the New Year because I can take a moment to think about things, and to change my perspective, if need be; and because it seems to poke me (sometimes sharply) each year into some sort of action, if only by virtue of its newness.  I often find myself with a yen to clean and organize on January 1, or thinking quite seriously and clearly about something I want to do that I haven’t gotten around to tackling yet.  There’s been some of that yesterday and today, for sure — I finally framed and hung a few pictures and whatnot that had been cluttering up my space for a while, threw away mountains of disorganized paperwork and miscellany, and spent a little while musing here and there on what exactly I’d like my life to look like on January 1 of 2013, and how I might be able to get there in the next 12 months.  But honestly, the theme for me these days — and for 2012, perhaps? — appears to be simplicity.

You’ve noticed, probably, that I haven’t been around much on the blog.  (Those of you who follow me on Facebook, however, have had the privilege of being bothered by me on a routine basis.)  It’s not that I don’t love this blog and that I don’t want to be writing every day.  It’s just that I have been going through a process for the past few months of figuring out how to grab onto and enjoy more of my life, and part of that has involved needing to give myself a break.  A physical break.  RRG may be my favorite piece of brain candy, and goodness knows I enjoy it more than many things in my life, but I tend to work on this blog after putting in my long days of working and parenting and singing and taking care of Life Stuff.  So when my body gives out and I end up just being tired and sick — a lot — I have to regretfully step away from the computer screen and spend some time doing a whole lot of Nothing with my late evenings.

All of this is by way of saying that I’ve been away, and I’ve been thinking about stuff, and I’m in a good place (Happy New Year, everyone, by the way!), and I’m feeling less sick and less tired and ready to come back with some new energy.  AND that because of the New Year and the bloggy hiatus, of sorts, I’m looking to be easy with myself and conduct the family-work-blog-life balancing act with as much purposeful simplicity as I can.  Which leads me, delightfully, back to the same old chestnut that has saved my sanity on an almost daily basis for years now.  The meal plan.

This month’s plan is based on a few principles: first, that it will lead into the month with the use of some last holiday leftovers and some double-duty cooking; secondly, that it will continue my quest to use less meat in a number of our meals (though not quite fifty percent this month, I’m afraid); thirdly, that it will satisfy the kind of cold-weather hibernation food cravings that tend to set in during a January in New England; and fourthly, that it might help me to whittle down on the food budget a bit each week, because after some unexpected household expenses and so forth, I can easily foresee wanting a little extra in our pockets throughout the beginning of the New Year.

Sunday, 1/1: We started our month with that good old culinary reset button, Sunday Roast Chicken.  I served it with cous cous, roasted broccoli, and honey-glazed carrots.
Monday, 1/2: There’s a bit of Christmas ham left to be used (it was frozen after cooking, don’t worry).  We’re making Croque Monsieur with it and serving a big kale salad alongside.
Tuesday, 1/3: Slow cooker — Butternut squash soup, crackers, cheese, and fruit and veggie platter
Wednesday, 1/4: Linguine with chicken ragout (using leftover roast chicken), salad
Thursday, 1/5: Tacos with homemade wheat tortillas, beans, and grass-fed beef
Friday, 1/6: Fend night
Saturday, 1/7: Broccoli-cheese quiche, roasted vegetables
Sunday, 1/8: Dinner with family
Monday, 1/9: Chicken crusted with honey and pistachios, garlicky pasta, vegetables
Tuesday, 1/10: Slow cooker — tortilla soup
Wednesday, 1/11: Pepperoni and spinach calzones, fruit
Thursday, 1/12: Burgers, sweet potato fries, salad
Friday, 1/13: Fend night
Saturday, 1/14: Falafel, hummus, homemade pita
Sunday, 1/15: Baked penne with tomato cream sauce, salad
Monday, 1/16: Fish fingers (depending on what kind of fish looks good), roasted potato wedges, vegetables
Tuesday, 1/17: Slow cooker — chicken and dumplings
Wednesday, 1/18: Egg noodles with roasted winter squash, bacon, and balsamic dressing
Thursday, 1/19: Couscous and roasted vegetable toss with lamb mini-meatballs
Friday, 1/20: Fend night
Saturday, 1/21: Homemade pizzas
Sunday, 1/22: Spoon roast, mashed potatoes, vegetables
Monday, 1/23: Salmon cakes, sauteed greens, fruit
Tuesday, 1/24: Slow cooker — turkey sloppy joes, veggie chips
Wednesday, 1/25: Stir fry and brown rice (I’ll decide about meat, seafood, or entirely vegetarian when I get to the store that week)
Thursday, 1/26: Vegetable-rice soup, breadsticks
Friday, 1/27: Fend night
Saturday, 1/28: French onion soup, salads with poached eggs
Sunday, 1/29: Roast pork dinner with sweet potatoes and vegetables
Monday, 1/30: Tamale pot pie
Tuesday, 1/31: Slow cooker — West Indies chicken, rice, fruit

Happy 2012, everyone!  As always, feel free to comment and ask questions, request recipes, etc.

Repetition

L. and P.

L. has a quirky habit — okay, he has lots of quirky habits, but I’m only planning to address one in particular tonight.  We’ll leave the fact that he bites his toenails for another day.

He is the master of repetition, in a way that is alternately charming and crazy-making, and which has led J. and me to occasionally refer to him privately as “rainman” because he sometimes does it in a manner that just screams “These are not my K-Mart pants.”  He’ll ask us the same question four times in a row, or repeat the same piece of information — “Did you know Joey’s dad is BALD?” a dozen times in a single day.  He’s particularly repetitive when it comes to information he’s trying to get straight in his head; new concepts, answers to complicated questions, new schedules and routines.  And lately, I’ve had to repeat the same answers to him over and over again, regarding the following questions:

“Mom, SOME cookies are good for you…right?”
“Are crackers a healthy snack?”
“Animal crackers are cookies, but they’re healthy cookies, huh, Mom?”

Answers: “No, L., cookies are cookies.  And they’re not good for you, but that’s okay.  They’re treats.”  “What kind of crackers?  No, they’re not really healthy — not like fruits and veggies are healthy.”  “Yes, animal crackers are really more like cookies, but no, sweetheart, they’re not healthy.  Because they’re cookies.”  And, as you can imagine, we swing round again to Question #1.

WHY am I repeating myself so much?  Besides the fact that this is just sometimes how life with L. rolls, I’m having these conversations again and again because my child is receiving mixed messages and cannot seem to work out in his very clever little mind why Mommy and Daddy say one thing and Every Other Tall Person In His Life says another.

L. is accustomed to snacks, provided at his school, at church, at parties, at playdates, and even at — God help me — his martial arts class, which are mainly based around crackers and cookies.  Or, in the case of the animal crackers, cookies masquerading as crackers, which is like the ultimate confusion for little minds.  It’s not that I think this situation is unique; sadly, I’m fully aware that it’s anything BUT unique to find children in America who are firmly entrenched in the Nilla-Wafer-as-sustenance doctrine.  But lately, as I think about the way we grow eaters in this country, I have started to realize that we are up against a very serious enemy, one which most of us have thought of as our parenting friend and ally. 

We’re being thwarted by consistency.

Yes, that’s right.  The very hallmark of good parenting, the one thing many old-school mothers and fathers would immediately tell us is the MOST important component of raising children successfully, is the thing that’s causing the greatest kid-and-food issues in America right now.  As hard as we may try to instill good eating habits and food values within our children by offering consistency in our own homes, the outside world is ALSO being consistent, and its message is carried farther and wider than ours.

As we’re offering leafy greens and quinoa the requisite dozen or more times, firmly reminding ourselves that “it may take up to twenty tries for a child to stop rejecting a new food,” the schools, daycare programs, and activity providers are offering a dozen or more tastes of sweet, salt, fat, and starch to our kids’ eager palates.  As we’re lovingly and consistently explaining that cookies are a Sometimes Treat — and even receiving backup from the Cookie Monster himself! — the other people and institutions in our kids’ lives are offering up desserts and calling them snacks.  For every time that I tell my kids they’ve got to eat a vegetable before they can carry on with their carb loading fantasies, there are probably two or three times they’ll encounter some crazy exterior message like tomato-paste-on-pizza-is-close-enough.

Children respond to consistency, and they love repetition, and just as they’d rather read “Green Eggs and Ham” for the millionth time today (despite your desperate pleas to at LEAST convert their allegiance to “One Fish, Two Fish”), they’ll happily stick to the same old pizza-french fries-chicken nuggets-crackers-cookies regime if they’re allowed.  And unfortunately, while many of them may NOT be allowed to follow that regime at home, it doesn’t make them immune to the messaging that DOES encourage such behavior — with consistency, and repetition — outside the home.

How many times has L. seen animal crackers on the snack table in his five years?  I couldn’t even begin to say; but I can at least point out that it has taken him this long to start struggling with the recognition, however dim, that there may be something amiss about that.  I’ve never in his life served him animal crackers at snacktime, but only now does he begin to realize that there’s a sort of cognitive dissonance going on between Mommy’s version of snacktime and the standard institutional snacktime he encounters pretty much everywhere else he goes.  And that’s MY kid, who probably hears more about healthy eating blah blah blah than many, many other children his age.

Tonight, whether by coincidence or not, L. and P. both ate only semi-well at dinner; they were allowed a very small slice each of Swedish cardamom bread after they’d proclaimed themselves done; and then BOTH of them started whining for “something else.”  Something else?!?  I was baffled…until P. went to the pantry and started rummaging for SNACKS.  Somehow, despite a nightly routine that has NEVER wavered, despite a dinner rule that has held for longer than L. has been alive, my two children were under the impression that a cursory pass at their meals would entitle them to find something SNACKISH in the pantry and fill up that way. 

Of course, there are no animal crackers, or actually crackers of any type, in my pantry; but that’s beside the point.  I’ve worked hard to instill good habits in these boys, through consistency and repetition and example, and suddenly I’m reminded quite clearly that just because I’ve been consistent thus far, doesn’t mean I can stop anytime soon.  Or ever.

The more consistent the rest of the world is with presenting its junk-food agenda, the more consistent and vigilant we conscious-eater parents must become about instilling what we think are the RIGHT values and choices in our kids.  (A theory, by the way, which applies quite handily across the board, not just as it relates to food.  There are plenty of consistently bad messages I see kids getting these days that have nothing to do with nutrition.)  I don’t mean we’ve got to disallow all sweets and treats, or that we’ve got to make only THE HEALTHIEST of choices all the time, never slipping up or compromising; I just mean we’ve got to know what we believe, say what we believe, model what we believe, and stick to it.  It sounds simple, but at times — especially right now, with the holiday parties and festivities taking over all the white space on our calendars — just understanding, quite clearly, what’s important to us about food and eating, and being guided by that understanding, can be frustrating and draining. 

Consistency.  Mom and Dad never said it’d be easy.  But who knew it might end up becoming both friend and foe?

Missing My Market

I could also have titled this post, “Damn, the holidays are expensive…” but I think the problem is deeper than that. 

I’m missing my farmer’s market.  I’m missing it for obvious reasons – the camaraderie, the beautiful produce, the experience of walking around in the fresh air with an array of healthful options and smiling faces before me.  And I’m missing it for not-so-obvious reasons, one of which is my currently ailing budget.

I don’t think we’re eating more.  But the big bag of grapes that looked so ridiculously oversized in the produce section on Saturday is already nearly gone.  It didn’t last us as long as two totes of apples, which is what I could have gotten for the same price at the market. 

We’re not eating more.  But the container of organic salad mix is gone in three days, whereas the kale and mixed greens I could have gotten at the market – for the same amount of money – would have stretched out for the whole week.

I’m sure we’re not eating more.  But the $40 or $50 I would have spent at the Farmer’s Market for most of our weekly produce is not buying us the same volume of food at the store, and I’m frankly surprised.

It’s not like I’m buying strictly organic produce, though I do try to shop by the Dirty Dozen and make as many reasonable organic choices as I can.  It’s not like I’m not double-checking to see if there’s a tote bag of oranges or lemons or avocadoes that’s selling for less per unit than the loose varieties.  And it’s not like I’m filling our cart exclusively with high-end luxury produce, either.  Heck, last week we got mainly carrots, turnips, celery, onions, bananas…a humble lot, to be sure.  Not a pomegranate or white asparagus or even a fresh herb bundle in sight.  It just.  Costs.  More. 

What used to be reasonable splurges that fit handily into our budget – like the sale price on smoked salmon – are now things I have to think twice about, I guess.  And you know what else isn’t helping?  THE BAKING.  Ugh.  The baking.  I love to bake, but right now the extra ingredients for our favorite holiday treats are adding easily $10 or more every week to my bill.  I can’t just stop making dinner so we have the money for the baked goods; and I can’t make myself think about foregoing the baked goods to have the money for dinner. 

So what am I doing?  Mainly, swallowing it.  And looking ahead to try to stem the flow of cash that keeps swimming downstream of my wallet.

I wish I could say that I had come up with some brilliant, money-saving plan, or that I was going to do a whole MONTH’s worth of $1 and $2 dinners to make up for the cash flow issue.  But the truth is, sometimes, I just want to eat the way I want to eat, and I want to cook the way I want to cook.  It probably makes me sound like a spoiled brat; but if I’m totally honest with myself, and with all of you, going a little over budget is not going to ACTUALLY take anything away from us in any measurable degree.  If it happens long-term, it’ll be a larger issue.  But right now, it’s something that I merely have to take notice of and observe as part of a possible off-season trend. 

I don’t remember things being this way before.  I used to find that my grocery bills went down slightly after market season, or at least, that’s the way I recall things.  Possibly, however, that was because we were still eating more substantial amounts of meat; and the produce we bought at the farmer’s market, while it went to good use, was often at least partially frivolous, supplemental goods, not strictly necessary for every meal we ate.  As time has gone on and we’ve continued to decrease our dependence on meat, as we’ve increased our consumption of fresh vegetables, as we’ve re-structured our whole eating style around better, healthier, fresher food…we’ve unwittingly begun to rely on a food system that only truly exists for half the year. 

I should mention that there’s a winter farmer’s market in Rhode Island – two, in fact – and that I can certainly make some time to get to one of them every once in a while.  But winter markets in the Northeast tend to be heavy on things like meat, dairy, and specialty items; less heavy on produce. New England farmland isn’t exactly known for its high yields of fresh vegetables underneath all the frost.  What produce there is at the winter markets tends to be either cellared, or coming from indoor growing spaces; and while those are wonderful solutions to the dearth of plant-based food available around here in the colder months, they’re still not necessarily plentiful, abundant, and affordable.

All of this is by way of saying that I’m running into both a small (but solvable) budget crunch, and a (necessary) slap in the face to my utopian reality of eating really well on said budget.  What it really amounts to is a reminder that above all other problems in the world of food politics, accessibility is the greatest factor we must overcome.  

I’m usually the education girl; I’m usually the one who’s talking passionately and vehemently about how we need to figure out ways to give people all the information that’s required to get them making positive food choices that work for their lives.  I’m not ever going to stop being that girl, but I’m setting that issue gently and lovingly aside for the immediate present so I can stare head-on at this enormous problem of access. 

If I, as an informed, educated, cooking-savvy human being, cannot adhere to my own self-imposed and relatively lavish food budget at this time of year, how in God’s name can we expect anyone with fewer resources and skills to make it? 

I know what some of you are going to say:

1) YES, BUT…You, RRG mom, you are making your own problem by not being more mindful of the little extras you’re buying right now to make Christmas cookies for your kids.  (Or smoked-salmon sandwiches for yourself.)
2) YES, BUT…You’ve told us time and again that it’s possible to do this on a budget, and you even did a whole budget challenge with dinners that came in for under $5 per person.  Why are you punking out now?
3) YES, BUT…You’re not distinguishing between wants and needs.
4) YES, BUT…You’re also still insisting on buying organics and whole grains and responsibly sourced meats; you’d instantly see savings if you bought the bargain packs of feedlot meat and conventional produce.

All true, really.  And yet, all the kinds of arguments I think we, as a society, set up in the face of the very frightening reality of food insecurity.

”Yes, but…your family is adding to its own problems by purchasing fast-food dinners instead of dried beans and rice.”
”Yes, but…people have done great things with almost nothing.  If you’d just plant a garden and grow your own food, you’d be halfway there.”
”Yes, but…food stamps are only supposed to be a supplement to what you contribute towards food from your own pocket.  Where are you spending your other money?”
”Yes, but…your kids don’t need Christmas cookies if you can’t afford apples.”
”Yes, but…you’re shopping at the wrong stores/choosing the wrong foods/prioritizing things you and your family like to eat instead of focusing on getting the most food for the least money.” 

Sound familiar?

None of the above statements are any less technically true, in the cold light of day, than the first set of statements; but when you think of their meaning, their REAL meaning, they begin to ring hollow, and callous.  At least, they do for me.

Where have we gone so far wrong that we are currently the richest country in the world, and yet so many of our people are reduced to HAVING to choose between what is healthy and what is cheap?  In what just society should we be able to divide the children of the haves and the children of the have-nots by whose parents could afford to bake cookies with them at the holiday season, rather than forego sweets to have money for milk?  And since when is it humane, is it ethical, is it even FATHOMABLE that we should look down our noses to any degree at those who are struggling to feed themselves, passing judgment on them for the simple act of choosing a food item they’d like to eat, even if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious, most ideal choice they could make?

And yet we DO those things.  We know there are good, nutritious, cheap foods out there, and we want so desperately to solve this problem that we make ourselves believe that the answer lies simply in rice and beans and home-grown produce.  We want to believe that everyone in this country who cannot comfortably afford high-quality food for his or her family could become food-secure if only they would shop more wisely, become more industrious, use their food dollars for nothing but the “right” choices — whatever we deem those “right” choices to be.  Would those things help?  Immensely, I’m certain; but in so wishing, we overlook some very important facts about food-insecure human beings.

Mainly, that they are human.

And that human beings live flawed, human lives, in which they may have no space nor patience for that vegetable garden, no supermarket from which to select cheap and nutritious raw ingredients, no knowledge of how to cook those ingredients.  No time, between jobs, to learn.  No transportation.  Not enough food assistance for all the people in their household.  Maybe no kitchen, no real “household,” at all. 

And it’s easier to talk about budgeting and shoring up food assistance programs than it is to face the idea that it’s hard to buy rice and beans at a mini-mart, and even harder to cook them in an old beat-up microwave, or in the back of a car, or on a hot plate with no pans.  It’s easier to compare the price of Easy Mac or Chef Boyardee to the price of whole-wheat pasta than it is to admit to ourselves that there are people in our own cities who have only a can opener and a limited source of heat.  In our eagerness to offer the solutions we do understand, it’s easy for good people with well-meaning hearts to gloss over the problems that we don’t — and can’t, and hopefully will never have to — understand.

I miss my market.  In the light of a summer morning, with people from all backgrounds strolling from stall to stall, it’s hard to tell who’s there using food stamps and who’s not; we’re all just there to choose our food.  And that makes it even easier to forget that only some of our neighbors are so lucky as to be shopping at that market at all.  But now that even so small a shift as the loss of the summer markets has begun to show its impact to me, one of the fortunate ones…. Now it’s hard to forget that with winter, and the onset of heating bills, and more difficult transportation, and more illness and more medical bills and more sick days and lost wages, with all of these new challenges every action in life, including figuring out just how to get everybody fed, becomes that much harder.

The next time you purchase something at the grocery store — some piece of organic produce, some order of grass-fed meat, some item that you’re buying simply because you want to purchase it — remember this post.  And then go and buy one more item.  Just one.  Bring it to your local food pantry.  Then go home and cook your food, and remember how blessed are we all who can shop, and cook, and eat without fear; how blessed we are to have the luxury of making ourselves believe that the problem of food insecurity can be solved so simply.