Squashers

James and Anna love squash. While they like eating squash, they love to sit on it more. I call them my Squash-sitters or Squashers. When I am cooking, they sit on their respective squashes and watch me.

This is Anna's favorite squash. It is just the right size for her. I have no idea what type it is, we bought it at a roadside farm stand.

It is a good seat for a snack as well.

James balances on a hubbard squash since we moved his pumpkin outside.

He really liked that pumpkin.

Now I don't know if I can cook their squashes. Where would my little Squashers sit and eat their snacks and watch me cook?

James-isms

James is talking so much now. He frequently is asking "Whats dis?" and then answering it himself. He is obsessed with pointing at and saying "Eyebrow!" I love the way he says some things that I just have to share his James-isms.

Jamesie- What he calls himself.

'Licious—(my personal favorite). James is very prudent in his use of this word. It is only for foods that he finds especially delicious. For example, the grape juice mixed with sprite he had at Anna's birthday party. He said 'licious after every sip.

Up-and-down— James could not remember which was up and which was down, so he combined the two words and it now means whatever condition he is not currently in. If he wants to be held, it means up. If he is being held, it means down.

Nummy bread—what he calls homemade bread. I usually awake in the morning to James' smiling face right next to mine saying "Piece of nummy bread?"And if I forgot to put it on top of the fridge, he is holding it.

Ap'in—what he calls his apron which he insists on wearing when I made "nummy bread."

Squish bread—his term for kneading "nummy" bread. He insists on helping.

Temp-o—Temple. Any building with a steeple or that he is things is sufficiently grand is called "temp-o" or castle.

Nana b'ake it—Anna broke it. He blames Anna for everything and only calls her Nana.

Oh No! Oh No! Oh No! its b'oken!—"B'oken" is his word for anything that he feels is not in right or that he cannot put right by himself.

Daddy scareme—Daddy Scary. James loves to be scared which basically consists of just growling at him. He thinks its hilarious. I think he is adorable.

Food for thought, part III: Kids

While marriage and my extensive reading on food helped changed the way I think about food, the way I cook and what I chose to eat, it is my children that motivate me the most. Even before marrying and having children, I was concerned by the raising rates of obesity that I read about frequently and saw around me but I found the obesity rates among children and teens concerning. One book that I read gave the statistic that children today are four times at risk of becoming overweight or obese than their parents were at the same age. Four times!! That is astounding. Yet when I look around at the prevalence of fast food restaurants and how busy they are, the amount of processed foods, snack foods, and candy that are readily available almost everywhere I go, not to mention all the advertizing that is directly aimed at children (in so many subtle and conniving ways) it is no wonder that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic.

As a mother, I have many responsibilities and obligations to my children as well as the many things I want to teach them and let them experience. One of my biggest responsibilities, I feel, is to help them grow up healthy, strong and active that will help them achieve a good self-esteem and body image. I also want them to enjoy eating healthy food, and more importantly, to understand the importance of choosing healthy food over junk and how to cook healthy food for themselves. I keep a fruit bowl near the table and it is not unusually to find the apples and pears in it with little bites taken out of them. James, the ever helpful big brother, usually gets a piece of fruit for Anna (since she is too short to reach the bowl) when he is helping himself to some. It is adorable to watch these two little people try to eat a whole apple! But I worry what the future will bring. Although we do not watch TV (we only watch DVDs) James is already being influenced by advertizing. He knows McDonalds although we have only taken him there once while traveling. He begs for "fishies" (goldfish crackers) when we go shopping and asks for candy (that's my fault, I have a sweet tooth or two).

I also worry about how to help Anna and any other daughters I may have, to have a good body image when girl's clothes, even some baby clothes, emphasize slenderness and can be very provocative. A few months ago, for example, I bought Anna a new pair of jeans from Old Navy. When I put them on her I could not button them; she was too chubby. Now Anna is not THAT chubby of a baby. In fact she usually weights between the 50th to 60th percentile for her age but these jeans were cut in such a way that makes me think they were designed for babies in the 30th percentile or lower. In other words, they were not designed for the average 6-12 month old like Anna, but for the "skinny" babies. Now that Anna is crawling and walking, she has slimmed out more in her tummy and the jeans fit but when I first put the jeans on I thought, "Great, I'm giving her body image problems at 6 months old!" I don't want Anna to ever have body image problems or if she does I hope they are minor and don't start until she is a teenager. However, the world seems more and more obsessed with body image: the too thin models and actresses in magazines and on TV, the raising rates of obesity and eating disorders, and the amount of money spent on diet products each year are all reasons for me to be concerned by how my children might perceive their bodies as they mature into adulthood.

I have read frequently that a mother's attitude towards food and her body imagine (positive or negative) affect how her children view food and their bodies. While I would never have called myself "skinny" as a child or a teenager, I did not feel that I was overweight or fat. I was healthy, I was active, I played outside with siblings and friends, rode my bike to school (if we lived close enough) and rode my bike or roller skated after school. In high school I started working out at a gym and in college I started running. I still run 3-4 times a week and if both kids take a nap, I work out to home videos. I have never "gone" on a diet. The first time I ever wanted or needed to lose weight was after having two kids. Despite my efforts not to gain too much weight while pregnant I gained 55 pounds with James and my body, especially my knees, ached from the excess weight. After that I determined to never let myself become overweight. After each pregnancy I watched the amount of sweets I ate, prepare healthy foods, exercised and soon I lost all the baby weight.

Sometimes I feel like I obsess about food but then I realized I am not obsessed about food, I am obsess about what to feed my family that will be healthy. I am obsessed with maintaining by husband's and my health and raising healthy, strong and happy children. I want all of us to be able to run and play without getting winded or having body image problems. I want all of us to find joy and wonder in our bodies and what they can do. I fully intend that when James and Anna leave our house to start college or serve a mission they will know how to plan menus and cook healthy food and to find pleasure in cooking good food. I think I will make that their exit examine: my children must first plan and cook healthy dinners for week before I will let them leave my home. Then if they fall victim to the obesity epidemic, I will know that it is their fault and not mine for not teaching them good nutrition knowledge or how to cook healthy foods.

Food for Thought, part II: Knowledge

When I started college there were three career paths I was interested in pursuing: business (my first business class put an end to that, it was soooo boring), English (understatement: I love to read), and nutrition. I had great hopes for nutrition; I loved to read magazine and news articles about food and nutrition and found it very interesting but confusing. I took Nutrition 101 my first semester of college. It was a night class taught by a very pregnant professor from Kenya who I had great difficulty understanding. This class killed my hopes of nutrition as a major. What I found confusing about nutrition was amplified in this class.

In 1996, when I started college, was the heyday of micro-nutritionism (i.e. all they taught and talked about was vitamins, minerals and other nutrients with heavy focus on the "super" nutrient of the moment without context to the actual foods in which they are found. That is what I found so confusing and which still confuses most people about good nutrition.) The whole food movement had started but it had not yet reached the news articles in popular magazines and college classrooms at that time. If I had attended a school where nutrition was taught from the whole foods perspective, I would have become a nutritionist instead I ended up majoring in elementary and special education for reasons I still don't understand myself.

In the years following that ill-fated nutrition class, I tried to learn more about nutrition and healthy eating but as mentioned above, it was confusing. Much of the information was confusing and contradictory. I ate as healthy as I could based upon my knowledge, resources and time available to devote to it. A few months after my wedding I met a woman at church who introduced me to Eating Well magazine. In this magazine I finally found what I had been looking for in terms of whole food nutrition information and delicious healthy recipes. After sampling several recipes from its website (all recipes from the magazine are available free on the website) I subscribed to the magazine and have for the last three years. Over 75% of the meals I cook come from recipes in this magazine. With one or two exceptions I have liked every recipe I have tried and the exceptions had more to do with personal taste than anything wrong with the recipe.

Eating Well also opened up a whole new realm of literature on food and nutrition for me. It was in that magazine that I first heard about The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meal
by Michael Pollan. I read this book about a year and half ago. Four months ago I read another book by Pollan In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.
Pollan is an investigative journalist, not a nutritionist or someone else professionally involved with food or nutrition, and because of that I found his books to be articulate and understandable to the average reader unlike many books I had read by nutrition professionals. Since reading Pollan's books I now feel that I can read a food label with some degree of competence (before I read them because I felt I ought to even though I did not understand them). I avoid, as much as possible, buying processed foods and if I do buy any I buy ones with a short ingredient list, with ingredients that I can actually pronounce and recognize, and hopefully without high fructose corn syrup.

A week after I finishing In Defense of Food I read The End of Overeating by David Kessler, M.D, a former FDA commissioner. Reading these two books close together will prompt almost anyone to never buy processed or fast food again, and instill a strong desire to plant a garden or start a small hobby farm. While The End of Overeating is not as accessible to average reader as Pollan's book, in some respects the way it is written does drive home some important facts more forcefully than Pollan's books. The first part of the book is devoted to research on what food combinations in terms of fat, sugar, salt cause people to overeat and which can be addictive. The second part of the book then details how the food industry takes these studies and applies them to make their food more "palatable," in other words, they design processed food to be overeaten so the consumer will buy more. Even commercial diet foods use this research to make their foods more palatable.

Next I read The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making us Sick and What We Can Do About It
by Robyn O'Brien. This also was an eye opening look at food especially into food preservatives, food colors, genetically engineered food, and growth hormones used in dairy cows. O'Brien is, like me, a housewife whose daughter violent allergic reaction to eggs prompted her to do in depth research into allergies and then into the food industry. Most of the book is about the research and studies she uncovered, especially in from European sources. In Europe most studies are funded by the government not the food industry like the US. In Europe, as well, many food additives and colors, so prevalent in US foods, are outlawed. Genetically engineered food in Europe also must be labeled as such whereas in the US in it voluntary. I would recommend this book to anyone with children or just wants to be more informed with one caveat: I found her frequent references to herself as "Mama Bear" rather tiresome.

Yes, the way I ate changed after my marriage but added to knowledge I gained from these books has prompted me even more. One thing that has changed the most is how I look at processed foods: now I call them food-like substances that have a little natural food in them but they are mostly chemicals. With a few exceptions I make most of what we eat from scratch. We eat meat 2-3 times a week, and vegetarian the other nights. If I was a working mom pressed for time, I probably would not have changed to making everything from scratch. But as a stay at home mom, I have the time and, really, after I got used to it, it does not add that much time on to my day as long as I plan ahead. There was also the added benefit that our food expenditures have gone down.

 

Part III: Kids, coming soon

*Currently reading What to Eat
by Marion Nestle. I would call it a supermarket survival guide.