First, a daycare worker in Manitoba followed a well-intentioned, if misapplied, policy to ensure that children are given a well-balanced meal and the internet broke. Ritz crackers as a grain?! How stupid is that!
At the same time, there is this New York Times article on rich Manhattanites hiring an exclusive nanny consulting service to teach their nannies how to cook healthier and more sophisticated dishes for little Imogen and Atticus. Mr. Leandro, one of the founders of the service, was quoted as saying, “Some of these nannies already do the cooking in the family, but they’re throwing chicken fingers in the oven, or worse, the microwave — they’re doing the bare minimum.” And feeding children the easy way is clearly not good enough for one mother featured in the article who “wanted her daughter to adopt a more refined and global palate, whether it’s a gluten-free kale salad or falafel made from organic chickpeas.”
So, pretty much: The poor people I pay to take care of my children are feeding them poor people foods!
There are schools right here in Toronto with an economically diverse student body. Many students truly benefit from school-run snack programs designed to help keep kids fed throughout the school day, but there are also upper middle-class parents who throw hissy fits because their children are offered such nutritionally dubious foods as grocery store-variety brown bread and yogurt tubes. In the words of one parent council member I know: “They are complaining because their children have too much food.”
You don’t need to look further than school lunch boxes to see income disparity at work. There are large macro-economic factors at play in the gulf between the rich and the poor. There are socio-economic explanations, too, for the way we eat that encompass education, access to fresh foods, cultural diversity and simply not having enough money. Many smart people have already spilled a lot of ink on these important considerations. So let me suggest there’s another, albeit lesser, factor to consider.
Why you gotta be so crazy?
When you tell me that pasta, couscous, rice and sliced brown bread are no longer healthy food options for my family and that I should be cooking quinoa, steel-cut oats and, I don’t even know, spelt or something instead, it makes we want to run out and gorge us all on Cheez Whiz and Wonder Bread.
When you tell me that the most important foods to buy organic are also the most expensive, it makes me want to drop my organic broccoli and apples and high tail it straight to McDonalds. Because if I can’t afford free-range, organic, locally farmed meat and dairy, then I might as well get it cheap and fast, right?
When you tell me that all processed foods are the devil, that feeding my children frozen pizzas and chicken fingers and supermarket meat pies is the same as loading them up with who-knows-what combination of chemicals, fats and salt, and that I should instead embrace the idea of slow food, it makes me want to feast on tv dinners. Because I don’t have time for slow food in my life.
When I hear the choruses calling for, “No gluten! No sugar! No preservatives! No sodium! No trans fats! No food colouring!” it’s makes me want to throw in the towel altogether. How are we supposed to monitor every piece of food our children eat?
When you tell me that if I really valued health and nutrition I would be growing my own vegetables every summer and campaigning for backyard chicken coops to farm my own bloody eggs, I feel like I might as well rip open a pack of powdered vegetable soup and a sleeve of Ritz crackers and call it a day.
I am lucky to have enough time and resources to not completely give up on nutrition. I do what I can. But the bar for healthy eating is set so high that ordinary, working people cannot realistically reach it, you’re doing everybody a disservice. When things like the Canada Food Guide are vilified for including too many refined grains and not enough vegetables, for not going far enough, then those people who only ever get a fraction of the recommended veggie intake tend to give up altogether. Most people want to be healthy. They want to eat well. They also want to know the little bit that they can do counts.
Guys, it’s just food. And we are damned lucky to have enough of it.
17 replies on “Can we talk about how crazy we’ve become about food?”
Couldn’t agree more! Just happily ate a wonderbread grilled.cheese sandwich with my daughter. WITH KETCHUP.
I mean, if you’re going to do …
I totally see what you’re saying. But when that food is making you sick, you have to stop and look closely at what you’re putting in your body. You do the best you can – my kids eat junk sometimes and that’s OK. It’s really all about moderation. But for me personally, I’ve been forced to make food choices because of my health.
Absolutely. I think we’re on the same page, Maria. I just think that there is too much pressure to always be optimizing our diets perfectly which can feel overwhelming for some people. Also, what’s healthy for a middle-aged diabetic women (for example) is not necessarily what’s best for an active child either.
Every little bit we do helps. YES!!!!!!!!!! Broccoli in the lunchbox, check. Goldfish and pretzels as its sidekick. YES!!!!!! Love this piece, Rebecca. It’s become a very judgey arena!
Judged by impossible standards for those of us who can’t afford chefs to train our nannies ;)
I do my best to avoid talking about food on the internet because it’s so judgey and extreme. The other day, as I was cutting up non-organic potatoes, I was thinking “Shit. I wonder how many chemicals this potato leeched from the soil.” But, for us, organic potatoes are just not an option. I can’t get a 10lb bag for the same price. If I could, I would. So, we’re at a point now where parents have an abundance of guilt, but few options.
Right? And really, if you are cooking vegetables in your kitchen, you are already eating better than 95% of people.
I try. Much of them are of the frozen variety because fresh just doesn’t last as long.
I love this.
I try my best with this whole mothering thing. I try to feed my kids more good-for-them foods than bad-for-them foods. We eat a lot of quinoa and freekeh and we have a garden where we grow our own vegetables and we eat lean organic meats etc.
But you know what else my kids eat?
BAGELS. MADE WITH WHITE FLOUR.
*gasp*
Because you know what? My husband and I might like to eat homemade bread made with Irish whole meal flour, but the kids? They aren’t touching it.
The internet is so full of articles telling me that I’m destroying my kids…with just about everything I do—with their carseats and screens and foods etc.
But I don’t know. They are happy, they are active, they are doing well in school.
And they love quinoa.
AND love white bread.
Right. Because perfection is a realistic expectation we set for our children anyway.
Preface: I’m fat, so anything I say online about food and eating puts me at risk for insult and mockery. (Not here, of course – I know the safe places to speak up.)
According to the varied and more militant corners of the internet, I’m an asshole no matter how I parent. So I try to be as small an asshole as possible. Probably not the best way to phrase it – it just means I pick my battles.
I do my best to provide lots of fruits and veggies in my daughter’s school lunches/snacks as the school prefers as few treats as possible. My grocery bill went up significantly to reflect that. When my daughter was in daycare, her lunches were provided so I just wasn’t buying as much fresh stuff as I wasn’t providing lunch to her five days a week. I’m lucky that I can make the choice to spend that money.
Some people would look in our cupboards and be horrified. Some would look and be impressed. We have enough reasonably healthy food – and treats – to eat and I am grateful for that.
I tend to have the same approach: I focus on making sure my kids get enough good food first and then I don’t worry so much about the rest. Inclusive vs exclusive, I think of it as.
“Why you gotta be so crazy” is right!
We have neighbors who mill their own flour for baking. There are zero processed or non-organic foods in their house. There are 3 generations living together and pitching in…both physically and financially. A little further down the street we have a single mom who relies more on processed foods. We are somewhere in between. Bottom line is that the kids in all three houses are fed and loved and we are all doing the best that we can. My kids are kids…sometimes they refuse to eat something simply because of the way it looks. I think that people who try and guilt the rest of us for not feeding our kids a wide variety of made from scratch organic foods have forgotten about all the years when they refused to eat their meals because their food was touching!
You know, if I milled my own flour and all that, I would have no time for other valuable parts of life. Is some sort of Platonic ideal of wholesome food really worth sacrificing time spent on other things? Apparently, some people think so.
In these conversations, I think it is important to be clear about where we are directing our judgment or our rage.
I don’t think it is right to judge or vilify parents who are doing their best to feed their family within a broken food system. I do think it is okay to tell the government to do better when it comes to regulating the food system, ensuring the sustainability of the food system, and protecting Canadians from harm. I do think it is okay to point the finger are harmful predatory practices of fast food and processed food companies. I do think we need to talk a lot more about food deserts, about the affordability and accessibility of healthier foods, about teaching nutrition in schools, and about getting our children to see advertising for what it is.
I think that people who see these conversations happening online need to be able to separate a criticism of McDonald’s (as a profit-greedy, child-luring corporation) from a criticism of a parent who sometimes takes their child to McDonald’s. They are not one and the same, but people often pretend they are.
I completely agree, Annie. I hope it’s clear to readers that I was making a point quite aside from all of the problems that exist in making good food readily available to everyone. I think that sometimes we tend to set the nutritional bar so high that we forget that we really do need to be focusing on making sure all families are able to meet much more basic nutritional needs.