Juice isn't the Worst (and other ridiculous realizations of a semi-former food snob)
Last time I talked about how getting pregnant helped me inhabit my body in a way I hadn’t previously. Before that I tried to follow mainstream food prescriptions and couldn’t figure out why eating wasn’t as easy and straightforward as the leading women’s magazines made it look.
Sometimes you’re trying too hard and you don’t even realize it.
Over the years I learned to take the magazine advice with a grain of salt and began to read more about our food systems and our connection to food and where it comes from, books like Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; Diet for a Small Planet, by Francis Moore Lappe; Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver. I read about how French women eat (so easy!), how food is tied to spirituality, and how to eat intuitively. I slowly realized that by listening to outside forces (what I felt I was supposed to eat, what was recommended, what worked for others, etc.), I had allowed the act of eating—a seemingly simple event I had been practicing my whole life—to become a separate event between what my mind wanted and what my body wanted and the disconnect was creating an uncomfortable tension and frankly, made eating not something I looked forward to much of the time because it came with so much baggage.
Yes, sometimes eating intuitively gets messy. “Don’t yuck my yum.”
Becoming pregnant brought it around full circle and I finally was able to really listen to what my body and mind needed, together as a unit, but the biggest change in my thinking about food came after the kids came out. It was one thing to nurse and feed a baby from my own body (a topic that would require many TMI blog posts in itself!), as I felt happy to be able to do with both kids, but the six month mark came quick in a flurry of sleep-deprived, love-fueled nights and days, and suddenly I had to think about now teaching these children how to begin to learn how to feed themselves. A lifetime of someone else’s relationship with food begins now, and it’s all on us groggy new parents to parse an internet full of mixed messages and nutrition “studies” that even the experts can’t agree on! No pressure.
It helps to watch friends who make it look easy and are willing to share their methods.
I started out obsessed with the what and the how—which foods we would choose and the delivery method. We chose to avoid added sugar (sure, it snuck in sometimes in restaurant meals or jarred pasta sauce or the infamous “sugary peanut butter incident”) until they reached the age of two. I included plenty of sweet dried and fresh fruits into their meals so it isn’t like they weren’t tasting sweet things. And I will never know if it was the right call or not—one of my kids prefers sweets over almost everything else, and the other kid regularly would choose to eat a date before a bowl of ice cream and often seems perplexed and uninterested about things like a marshmallow—I don’t blame her! At the time, it seemed like the right choice according to everything I was reading so we went with it. But then when I found myself hovering like a psycho buzzard at parties or BBQs when juice was being proffered, I knew I needed to probably tone it back a bit. I realized I was imprinting some of my own ancient preferences about what was worthy food or not onto what I was choosing to feed them, and again defaulting to taking the advice of experts over trying to pay attention to what worked best for us as a family and each of us individually. Now, I do want to be clear that I am not some sort of conspiracy theorist who knows more than the experts and scientists do—I absolutely trust science and believe the doctors and experts. I also know that human bodies are incredibly complex, and that nutritional studies often just can’t account for all of the factors that go into what is healthy for everyone to eat, and that there is a ton that we just don’t know. Which is why for me, keeping the prevailing wisdom in mind while working out what feels best to each person in our family is a reasonable strategy.
When eating naturally comes very easy.
When I was trying to wean our second daughter from nursing (she was a notoriously poor sleeper), my mother-in-law mentioned that my husband didn’t sleep through the night until he was two, and she laughingly admitted that she had taken to sometimes giving him a bottle of apple juice because it helped keep him in the crib longer. Then, separately, a friend who had noticed how much our youngest loved grapes—and that we had jars of concord grape juice that another friend had lovingly made us from our fall grape surplus—heard my desperation about her unwillingness to wean and suggested that I give her some juice instead. My inner food snob recoiled at both of these juice suggestions (but every magazine article cautions against giving your kids juice!!!!) and then I came to my senses. It’s juice. It’s from our own apples that we had pressed into cider, and our own grapes. Good heavens, woman, I told myself, this is some of the best food you could have. I began giving our second a little bit of watered down juice in the mornings when she would have preferred breast milk, from the source, and the result was miraculous. Just a week before I was teary-eyed thinking of giving up nursing, how sweet and amazing it is and I could just keep going, and then within a week of introducing a little weak juice we had happily weaned, the magical nursing bubble had gently closed and we were giving each other that post-nursing-hormone look like, we used to do WHAT together? Also, I started to drink juice myself, sometimes mixed with sparkling water—I think it helped me wean too. I mean, the stuff is amazing, have you tried it lately? Same with jam, lemonade, tons of fruit all by itself (without any recommended “protein to balance it out!”), dried fruits (“watch out for dried fruits as the sugar can really add up!” I could hear ringing in my brain, as I scarfed raisins and felt great) and all sorts of other stuff that I had unwittingly dismissed because it wasn’t recommended.
Well, it turns out that sometimes we just want and need a piece of fruit, a glass of juice, or some dried apricots (hold the sulfur please). It sounds crazy to even write these things out, because now they seem totally normal, and before it seemed so taboo and wrong. Once I began to see my food biases in some areas, I started to notice them everywhere. I studied the dirty dozen and the clean thirteen, accepted that conventional produce is good food too, and though I still try to go organic when I can, I no longer judge myself when it doesn’t happen. After all, people all over the world eat all types of food all the time, and many of them are super healthy. People enjoy meals, look forward to them, and don’t talk about needing to “work off the burger” or “I’m going to eat this even though I don’t deserve dessert tonight.” These and other similar statements are so much a part of our vernacular around food that we don’t even about them as being damaging, when truly if we all felt like we deserved what we wanted and what made us feel good to eat—inside and out, during and after—then immediately all the weird societal stuff around food might just disappear. It seems that so much of the disconnect about how we eat and how we feel can be attributed to the tension and stress involved in feeling like we are not living up to the impossible standards, so we might as well give in. We rationalize, “Feed the inner child! They deserve it! They’ve had a hard day. Even though I will feel bad later, I can invent something else or look at my phone or throw myself into work in order to stay numb to that icky feeling that occurs when I’m not truly listening to my body and acting like someone else—the outside forces of the universe or today’s hot nutrition expert or whatever—should be in control.”
Deconstructing my relationship with food, including my food snobbery and food bias has improved the way I think about feeding my kids, and we are all still learning. The most important thing that I’ve learned is that it’s not always about what exactly I put in my body. The most important thing is to let go of preconceived notions and pay attention to what I truly need. What I think about how I eat, and how I actually eat and enjoy it, is more important. Stay tuned—I might even try a piece of American cheese.
The best stuff, waiting to be squeezed into the best stuff, hiding in plain sight.
