Almost Overboard

by Diane Clark

I never thought of food as an Issue--not until I became a mom and self-appointed sheriff of the Food Police.

As new parents, most of us take on roles we never thought we would. I was a cautious kid, but I was never Hall Monitor in school (we had paid teachers' aides for that). I didn't snitch on other kids, and I didn't find myself overly concerned when a classmate stuck a pencil in his nose or even threateningly hoisted a chair over his head. I just wasn't much of a worrier, and anyway, I was too busy reading. But later on, when Mother-brain took over for Adolescent/Young Adult-brain after a particularly fierce coup, I suddenly felt the need to get serious about things, to become a worrier. And food was serious--food was an Issue.

o This worry with food--how long I should breastfeed, when should I introduce solids, what foods should I try first (bananas or sweet potatoes? Help!)--all this was new. I'd spent twenty-seven years as a Type-B eater, indulging myself complacently in whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it, without any apparent ill effects. And I loved it all, dearly.

But as a parent, I had the health and well-being of my young to consider, and as a reader, I had some work to do. My new Food Police role involved a certain amount of research and thought, and I did have some grounding as a child in this area. My parents, bless them, are both the kind of people who move into a house, despise the kitchen, say "Let's change it, right away!" and thirty years later have just finished the remodel. These are people who do not visit the mailbox without a plan and a snack. So I come naturally by a certain proclivity to careful consideration, and this consideration latched itself on, like my happily-nursing baby, to the selection and preparation of food.

When my daughter was a few months old, I began to encounter books about whole foods and then found a fabulous supermarket of the same name. I started meeting people who, along with their young children, were vegetarians. Growing up as I did in the Deep South, I could not recall ever knowing a real-live vegetarian, but now I was fascinated, and I wanted to join the club. A whole new world of culinary opportunities was waiting for me to read about and discover, alongside this whole new world of breastfeeding, cloth diapering, and herbal remedies. And Mother-brain was telling me that perhaps I'd been eating the wrong foods, the wrong way, for twenty-seven years, and goodness knows I didn't want the same thing to happen to my offspring!

I became--well, obsessed. Inundated by research and recipes, I prepared homemade applesauce. I worried if we went out of town and I didn't bring enough organic baby food. I was concerned that we were starting solids a month too soon and gravely considered the pros and cons of whole-grain rice cereal. I sniffed at mothers who fed their children Cheerios at nine months (no wheat until a year, hadn't these women read that?!). I became vegetarian and started to wonder how anyone could eat meat. Soon I found myself teetering, about to slip overboard, splash--into the I'm Weirder Than Any of You River, just outside the town of Holier Than Thou.

As my infant grew into a preschooler and I gave birth to a second child, I slipped in and out of vegetarianism and even turned vegan, or at least ate that way much of the time. I ground flaxseeds and gave them to my daughter, then worried that they might be mildly estrogenic. My husband complained about the lack of meat in his diet, but I held my ground after reading more about the meat-packing industry. I remember being taken aback--appalled, really--at a birthday party we attended where the children were served a "lunch" anchored by that beloved kid-staple, the hot dog. Not the veggie dogs we were accustomed to, but the kind made out of pig parts. I think I let my daughter have one, but I worried about it afterwards, afraid she might get sick.

Even while we were still at the party, I was looking forward to talking about the hot-dog-mothers with my whole-foods friends. I was glad I wasn't alone in my disdain of processed foods. Some of the moms in my circle were of the opinion that cakes were evil unless they contained pureed vegetables, whole wheat, and only the thinnest layer of dairy-free icing. That seemed normal to me, and though I loved sweets myself, I agreed with these moms, at least in principle.

But then one day I met a mother who nearly passed out when her son was given a cracker. A severe peanut or wheat allergy, you're thinking. But no--this mom was a Raw Foods person. She was not of the lower-case raw-foods variety. This was a woman who ate only raw; one of her favorite foods was raw chicken, and she was raising her son on a very strict regimen that was apparently ostracizing him from most of the world. When I, who had become tolerant of others' dietary idiosyncrasies and obviously had some of my own, asked her what her child ate for snacks, I was flabbergasted when she said, "Mostly suet." The stuff you put in bird feeders. That was weird, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps some of us were walking a very fine line. Had we taken food too far? Were we raising children who would end up on afternoon talk shows one day, complaining about eating disorders and blaming their caring-but-controlling mothers for not allowing them to eat birthday cake?

I ended up keeping myself from going overboard, just barely. I started to think about easing up on my family's dietary restrictions. I decided to turn in my badge as sheriff of the Food Police, and we started eating meat again. I stopped caring so much about what other moms were feeding their children and concentrated instead on giving my own children a varied diet of foods people have been eating for hundreds, or thousands, of years--with the occasional guilt-free indulgence of modern-day chicken nuggets, and plenty of ice cream. With the pressure off, food became less of an Issue and more of an Experience. It was almost--but not quite--like I was a kid again. Of course, I continued to read about nutrition, and I do so to this day, six or seven years after learning that humans could eat suet.

So when my kids were younger and I was finding my way as a new parent, was I crazy/controlling or merely interested--okay, very strongly--in their health and well-being? If forced to self-assess, I'd say both, because I've clearly had moments of near-insanity due to extreme protectiveness. But overall, I'm glad I took the time, when my children were babies, to imprint them with some very positive nutritional values. We talk now about portion control, about the foods that make their bodies feel good and grow strong, and about how it's okay to eat what you want, at least some of the time--even if what you want is cotton candy or beef and cheese nachos. That old saw about "everything in moderation" happens to make quite a bit of sense. But I doubt you'll find me munching on suet, in moderation or otherwise. Some things are just gross.

The Author

Diane Clark lives in a rented Japanese mini-castle with her husband and two children. When she's not homeschooling her kids, she's writing essays, planning a new Asian adventure, digging through her burgeoning bedside library, or attempting to become Super-Homemaker. She blogs about her varied interests at http://dianeclark.typepad.com/popcorn_and_sushi/.