"Why are people sick, eating the food they’re eating? The soil’s not loved, the animals aren’t loved, the way its shipped isn’t loving, the way its stored isn’t loving, the way its prepared isn’t loving, the way its eaten isn’t loving. No wonder. And we’re still surviving. Barely. People aren’t living longer, but they’re dying longer."He is so right about the love. He's saying what I am thinking.
And then, I hear the fear implanted in this way of thinking, along with the superiority of it (“We raw foodists are among the top 1%,” he told a self-congratulatory group during a juicing workshop) and...I wish it didn't have to go there. Saying over and over: “We’re dying from this. It’s a tragedy. Milk has pus in it. It’s astounding anyone can survive how we eat. It’s killing us.”
This rhetoric is not about the love. It is spreading the fear. People are eating fear. And other people are thinking they are superior for eating the healthiest food ever, but they are soaking in fear and separation-thinking, too.
Sure, I’m conflicted.
I've been on a backslide lately. I've been attracted again to lowly sugar-based crud for the first time in ages. Only lard-filled, chocolate-flavored pseudo cakes would do, eaten compulsively. Ho-Hos. Hostess cupcakes
covered with the icing you can lift off like one unbroken carpet of frosting, the white squiggles clearly drawn on by a machine.Time for a visit to the dig site for a bit of nutritional/emotional archeology. Upon excavation, I have found a pattern.
It was the mid 70’s and I was a little kid. My parents were on a “health kick.” They were collecting ‘Back to the Land’ books. They were also into our heritage, so the Norwegian portions of us were forced to swallow a tablespoon of cod liver oil every evening. We had health foods in the house, but no real will to prepare them.
Raw foods had only been barely invented by a bunch of crazies in some California commune. Juicing was done by recluses who used to be insurance agents in places like Big Sur to prepare the body for the rigors of interplanetary travel. There was no soy, little understanding of organic produce, Goji berries were still hiding out in the Himalayas, and every health food store was simply lined with plastic bottles of vitamins. With fruit leather planted next to the cash register.
My personal idea of health food would have been granola-ice cream bars with about 890 calories a piece. Which were considered healthy because they used brown sugar instead of white sugar to make them. But we didn’t buy those.
I packed my own lunch for school. It was usually a piece of fruit and some warmed-up Campbell’s soup in a thermos. Eating this was like eating a moderately portioned serving of self-hatred and low self-worth every day. All the other kids could just smell the neglected freak in me.
Other kids had cute metal lunch boxes with a white bread samwich, little crunchy bag of potato chips, an apple or banana, a thermos of orange juice, and a plastic wrapped Hostess cupcake. Their jewel-like perfection looked delicious to me. So that’s how it tasted, when your mom was there to pack your lunch every morning. So that’s what it was like when she even considerately put
a cute paper napkin along with. The dream childhood. A very Brady Christmas.Now. To a nutritional "extremist," the typical packed American kid’s lunch sounds like it should be included in a study of Unconscious Societal Infanticide. That kind of lunch and living has led to my fellow students now struggling with hanging white bread guts and cola-poked teeth, diverticulosis, ovarian cysts, early heart attacks. Did my parents do me a favor, not buying that?
My family had an OCD approach to weekends. We struggled through the week with the health food plans, but on the weekend we could taste the freedom. We shared popcorn or chips with Friday night TV. We ate a box of Keebler cookies or a Sara Lee Bavarian Cream pie after weekend dinners. Because we couldn’t have anything sweet during the week, we tore into these, a bunch of slavering wolves. Even so, the food was carefully controlled so that we didn’t get more than we needed. And there wasn’t enough to go around. Everyone got a medium-sized piece, my mom asked for ‘just a sliver,’ and my always-athletically slim dad sneakily and thoroughly gobbled down the rest when our backs were turned.
If food is really love, according to MFK Fisher, there was not a surfeit of love in the house. My folks were in survival mode -- survival in the suburbs. They were both strangely dissatisfied, trying to make things better and more healthy and more family, but unaware that what was missing w
as more heart, more love, more presence. Those sweets to me represented power and freedom. The freedom of the weekend, to let the straitjacket of rules and high intentions drop. The power to eat whatever satisfies you. And what satisfied me, or rather what glimmered at me, was cheap chocolate snack foods, the more shallowly made and brightly packaged and conspicuously useless, the better. They represented rightness to me. No controversy, no dissatisfaction. The right kind of kid, the right kind of family, with harmony and plenty for all.
They say kids copy the eating habits of the dominant parent. I soaked up the effect of my dad’s power over the food. He always got more treats to eat than anyone else, and he always ate them alone. I do the same thing to this day, when my Hyde is laughing in my Jekyll’s face.
In some ways, it wouldn’t have mattered if I my mom had packed me a healthy lunch rather than a twinkified lunch. It was the care and nurturing I was after. I wanted to know her, by feeling her care of me. I know she was doing her best, and in the 70's, she was in the minority as a working mother, yet still alone responsible for feeding everyone even though she worked as hard as my dad did.
But I craved the experience of not having to constantly comfort myself; rather the safety of knowing someone cared about what I ate, and that I ate at all, and that I didn’t go hungry. The act of packing food for a child with love is an important one.
It’s packing a juicer with the love that is a major element of the success of the David Wolfes (and I only know him from Youtube) of the world. But the superiority act leaves a burnt taste in my mouth. Tell me more about the love and the nurturing, Dude. That’s what we’re really after.
