Food guilt

Laura from 11D is, I believe, the blogger I've been following for the longest time now.  Pretty much from the beginning, I think, back in 2003 or 2004.  We lived in Belgrade (or Bucharest?), and she lived in NYC in a tiny apartment some insane number of flights up (six? something like that?) with two little kids.

She's funny, smart, and beautiful.  I have somewhat of a girl crush on her.  Her blog has a sizeable group of commenters who are diverse and interesting enough to make the comments always worth reading -- not something you can say about just any blog.  Or most blogs.  Her readers add a certain something, they are not shy to criticize her but always in a respectful, almost lovingly-teasing way.  It's a fun group.  (And I love my readers, too.  If I still have any.)  

Laura posts very regularly (yes, I can hint at myself, you can stop now) and only the discussions about school vouchers are not that interesting to me, if only because as a European, I simply cannot wrap my head around those.  I don't always agree with her but I always find her worth reading.  For, gulp, nine years. Ten, maybe?  A long time in the blogosphere.

Anyway, one recent post on her blog was about food and about how she feeds her family.  I read it and I immediately felt guilty.  I mean, we're doing everything wrong!

1. We don't use garlic at all - I'm allergic to it. I go around reading cook books and watching cooking shows, always thinking to myself that probably, my food is crap because we never use garlic. But it makes me sick and it smells horrible to me.  So I use lots of onions and shallots.  I tell myself that my kids make up for the lack of garlic by not drinking sodas.

2. We use butter!  We use quite a bit of butter.  I bake, I fry omelettes in butter, I add a dab of butter to soups for my skinny 9-year-old who could need some few more pounds on his ribs.  My gurus are Ina Garten and Julia Child - everything is better with butter.  We also use sunflower oil (high quality), cold-pressed local rapeseed oil, and olive oil.   It's hard to get good olive oil here, and ever since I brought back some oil from a little Palestinian fair trade cooperative, I find I don't like the cheap stuff anymore.  Not that it was expensive.  It was just so good, and it is not available in Germany. Sigh.

3. We do eat meals where carbs are the main player.  We eat Spagetti Alfredo a lot - it fast and cheap.  I have a few 1-Dollar-meals that are dirty cheap but yummy.  I usually add some raw veggies like carrots (which we basically always offer at meals, together with red pepper slices and cucumber sticks).  But yes, it's not always a vegetable palooza. 

4. I do not make separate dishes for us and the kids.  Jenny Rosenstrach calls them "deconstructed dinners" and that's what I do.  I offer many things seperately.  

5. I don't always offer a salad.  

6. We almost never eat dessert.  More often than not, dessert is fruit.  Sunday lunches at my Mom's include dessert and that's always very special.  I like it that way.

7. We eat lots of bread.  Germany is the home of the bread.  We eat quite a variety, and hardly ever white bread.  I still haven't tried Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread but it's on my list.  Also, his pizza crust.

8. We do eat cheese.  Oh, cheese is so good.  I can't live without cheese.

So, is our diet really bad, I asked myself in a panic.  As a German, I do guilt very easily.  My poor kids! They will die of food-related disease because I'M A BAD MOM!

Time for a reality check.

1. We eats lots of fruit - mostly apples, mostly local, when in season homegrown - and lots of raw vegetables.  Those I try to buy organic but they aren't always available.   Vegetables inclucde carrots, cucumbers, red peppers, and kohlrabi - those are my kids' favorites.   When in season, we have lots of radishes growing in the garden, and fresh spinach.   Weirdly enough, my kids also love eating frozen corn and frozen peas.  Judge me not. That runs firmly on my husband's side.

2. I love vegetables and often cook an additional vegetable dish for Doug and myself, since the kids perfer their raw stuff most of the times.  Everybody has to try at least one bite during the meal, though.

3. We try to avoid snacking too much.  (A la "French Kids Eat Everything" - I adore that book.)  We introduced a "gouter" at 4 pm (when Leah comes home hungry and grumpy) and that may be a pastry, or crudités, or some special fruit, or a jogurt.  (And by jogurt I don't mean low-fat yucky industrial stuff but wholesome German jogurt.  High fat, some sugar but not too much, nothing artificial.  Aaaaah.) Special days deserve a Nutella croissant.

4. We always eat dinner together.  Always.  Sometimes, it's a traditional German dinner with bread, sausage, cheese, and pickles.  Sometimes, it's three courses. 

5. My meat dishes are more involved.  We eat roast chicken.  Meatballs. Schnitzel. Goulash.  

So is our diet inferior to Laura's?  Because of the garlic and the olive oil?  Not sure.  I am trying to take away from this that diets are varied.  Ethnic food exists for a reason and it would be sad if we all only ate Greek food, no? (Please say yes!)  We are making an effort to feed our kids home-made meals, no processed crap, we don't drink sodas.  My basement is full of jeweled jars with jams, pickles, juices.  We grow tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, chard, potatoes, carrots and lots of fruits and walnuts in our backyard.

My kids are picky.  Between the four of them, there are maybe five things they all like.  (Pasta, pasta, pasta, pasta, and pasta.  I'm only partially kidding.)  We are trying to introduce new foods, one by one. It's a tedious process.  It's also a leftover from years of living in countries with limited access to fresh vegetables, especially in the winter.  I love eating a wide variety of foods and sometimes, I get very frustrated with my picky eaters.

I found that renaming things helps, even though my kids are not stupid.  I got them to eat fish (many years ago) by calling it "shark". It's not fish, it's SHARK! Man-eating SHARK!  Eat that SHARK before it eats YOU! Lots of giggles, and we still eat shark today, even though the kids did catch on eventually. Red lentil patties are called Super Hero Patties.   It works, amazingly.   A visit to the beekeeper in Ostheim convinced them to use honey in their teas instead of sugar.  The list goes on.

I think we are doing okay.

Could it be better?  Sure.  Is it good enough? Nope.  But we're getting there.  I hope.

Comments

[laura]

You're doing JUST FINE. I love schnitzel and meatballs. I've never had goulash, but would love to try it.

Thanks for the very sweet comments about 11D and the gang of commenters. We try to have fun.

[New York City Math Teacher]

As Henry progressed further and further into toddler independence, he's been refusing a lot more food, and that screws with my head. We've been exposing him for the requisite ten to fifteen tries, but he's been refusing old favorites. I really don't want his repertoire of foods to be restricted (we had been getting him to eat foods like sauteed tofu with sansho, skirt steak with parsley sauce, codfish tacos with sour cream and lime, and broccoli with garlic and butter), but now it's more and more yoghurt, bananas, and bread. So, we suck, potentially. (We had a guest once who would eat nothing but fried chicken cutlets and grapes. I don't want Henry to go down that route!)

Advice?

[Christine Forber (@xinef5980)]

When my younger son, now 19, was MUCH younger, I once said "Man may not live in bread alone but T could!" As as an adult, he has broad taste in foods. So, my only suggestion is to be patient, serve a wide variety of foods and encourage tastes of each whenever they are served.

And Claudia, I love your blog entries and read every one. So you do have at least one reader left!!

[claudia]

Christine - thank you! I was a bit tired of the blogging. Also, being in Germany doesn't qualify for "expatria" and seems less interesting to me. And then, of course, real life. It keeps interfering.

David.

1. Don't panic. Think about it - toddlers are becoming more independent from you; they walk, they talk, they have their own minds. Yet his parents decide every little thing for him, right down to the socks he wears. The only thing he can really truly control is what goes into his mouth. That's his only power, to eat or not to eat. He would be a sorry excuse for a toddler if he didn't figure that out and then run with it. He behaves like a normal child of good intelligence.

2. Don't panic. Now that we know it's powerplay, relax. Don't engage in it. He wants to make decisions? Good - offer him a variety of foods and let him make decisions. It grows his self-confidence, his independence, his ability to actually make decisions. Deconstruct your own food (really, that works miracles) - put the cod fish, the taco, the sour cream, and the lime in four little corners on his plate. Let him eat what he wants to eat of this.

3. Continue offering him a great variety of foods, and let him choose - but let him see how much you enjoy your own food. Be smart - don't pressure him, lure him.

4. For bigger kids, I use little tiny bowls a lot, and restricted amounts. Everybody has to eat three beans. One blob of avocado. Two bites of lentil patty. That sort of thing.

5. I always offer raw veggies at dinner. If someone doesn't fill up on dinner, they can fill up on the veggies. It's healthy and the lack of a proper dinner once in a while won't actually kill them.

6. Be prepared for really odd quirks, like "no white foods", "no foods touching", "no tomatoes", "plain pasta" for weeks on end, "cucumbers give me a headache". Remember: powerplay. Give them the safety to be odd about their food choices. Mostly, MOSTLY, they will expand their food choices as they grow older. It takes a lot of patience and trust.

7. All people have some foods they dislike. I can't stand garlic. Doug doesn't like shellfish or gummy bears (really, how weird is that?). My friend doesn't like ginger (oh, the world that is lost to her!). It's okay.

8. Don't panic. I read that there is an evolutionary reason for rejecting foods. As toddlers get more mobile and can move out of the cave without supervision, they are in more danger of eating, say, that poisonous berry over there. Evolution makes the kid safe by making it reject new foods.
Mmmm, maybe. It doesn't explain why kids suddenly reject favorite foods. It comes like a lightning bolt out of the blue. "I don't like lentil soup anymore." Really? WHY? There is no reason, not really.

9. Don't let him mess with your head, or, at least don't let him see that he messes with your head. Your strategy needs to remain cool, offer him food, and let him be. It's hard, but it isn't. ;-)

Oh, and obviously it's good for him to make more decisions on the whole. Give him two pairs of socks and let him choose. Ditto with the pants, t-shirt, etc. Only two options because otherwise he gets overwhelmed. He will LOVE to get his word in. This playground or that one? This game or that one? This book or that one? It will make eating time easier, as well. Odd but true.

[Christine Forber (@xinef5980)]

Love your comments about decisions. If we don't let our kids make decisions while little, how do we expect them to make the bigger decisions as they get older?

Eg, I let my boys pick their hair cuts from the time they were able to express a preference. Buzz cut? Sure. Let it grow, sure. I told them that they needed to talk to me if they wanted to dye it or anything more expensive than a basic cut but I didn't interfere otherwise. Great way to learn to make a decision and have to live with the consequences.

[Greta]

You are doing more than fine. Your posts about all the fresh air and apple picking are evidence. It's impossible to eat perfectly (and I can find flaws in her list too). It's about being mostly healthy .. And raw veggies at every dinner is brilliant.