thought for food, part ii
It’s not considered proper to begin a meal with dessert, but I’m gonna begin this post with dessert.
Dessert: I’m for it. My first memory of being in the kitchen was helping to decorate Christmas cookies when I was three years old. I’ve mentioned (frequently to random passing strangers) that I like to cook, but baking is my first and greatest love.
Desserts tend to be mostly comprised of fat and sugar, which is why we love them and why health nuts reject them with scorn (and possibly the occasional envy). Even when based on dairy products, a good dessert has almost no redeeming nutritional value to mention. I’ve heard that you can lose the fat in homemade cookies by making them with applesauce instead of butter or shortening, but it’s still gonna be a cookie, and “less unhealthy” is still a far cry from “healthy”.
Two things I believe help reduce the general unhealthiness of regular dessert, and those are controlling the amount, and avoiding prepared desserts.
In my family, we eat dessert after lunch and dinner. Lunch dessert tends to be only a token bit of sweet after the meal, while you get more after dinner. I don’t make the girls finish everything on their plates as a requirement for the privilege of dessert, but I do make sure that they’ve eaten something, at least enough of their dinner that they aren’t likely to pass out from starvation. Dessert after dinner might be two cookies (three if small), or a piece of cake, or a small bowl of pudding or ice cream, or something equivalent to a like amount. Lunch dessert is a bit smaller yet, a single cookie or a single piece of candy. Once more, the smaller amounts aren’t necessarily because I have an anti-dessert philosophy, but because it lasts longer that way. Sure, I could easily eat a gallon of ice cream in one setting, single-handedly, but I can get two desserts for a family of four if I give everyone a double scoop in a small dessert bowl. Occasionally we will have seconds on dessert, when it’s a holiday or a very special dessert, but usually not.
I do keep some prepared food sweets on hand, but not much, and we don’t eat them often. I’ll have the odd package of Oreos now and again, but this is more to fill in the gaps when I haven’t had time to make a homemade dessert; and usually it’s just the girls who eat them, as I don’t much care for “bought” cookies when homemade ones are so much yummier. Are homemade sweets better for you? I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s still all fat and processed sugar, but with far fewer chemicals and less if any corn syrup. Again, not “healthy” by any stretch, but less unhealthy.
We rarely keep candy about-scratch that. We almost always have some candy in the house, but not because we’ve bought it. It’s usually left over from Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or Easter, occasions on which people give the children entirely too much of the stuff. I stick it in a big bowl, and the girls can pick one piece for lunch, or up to two for dinner depending on the size of the piece. After a short while, however, they get tired of boring old candy and want to get into whatever the grownups are devouring, like cupcakes, and the candy sits there ignored until the next major holiday, when I toss it in the dumpster and we start over. Dessert might therefore be a half candy bar, two Hershey’s kisses, or a package of Skittles. In other words, my children, unlike most American kids, do not have unlimited supplies of, or unlimited access to, candy. (Actually, my kids don’t have unlimited access to anything besides oxygen, and hugs.)
I’ll pan out from here to include snacking in general. I said in the previous post that I don’t tend to snack between meals. The exception to this is that my girls may have some plain Saltine crackers and water after school. They don’t tend to like the cafeteria lunches at school, so they’ll come home from school rather hungry, and I let them nosh a bit before and during homework, hence the crackers.
But I did say that I love junk food. Chips are a major food group, right? How do I balance my love of junk with my not eating between meals? By making chips and salty snacks the end of lunch. I don’t encourage eating chips with your sandwich, because you fill up on chips and don’t eat the sandwich. But once they’ve finished their sandwich or yogurt, the girls get a handful of salty snack. This is not dessert, but often they find they don’t want much of a dessert after all, when they’ve just downed a chip or six.
It doesn’t have to be chips, though, and these days usually isn’t. Flavored crackers are every bit as yummy and salty as chips, and while absolutely not health food, are certainly less unhealthy than Fritos. A handful of Goldfish is the perfect end to a family lunch. (Get the house brand rather than the expensive stuff; it tastes just as good, and often better. Unless the name brand is on sale.)
There are actually people out there who say that a celery stick, with or without peanut butter, is tastier for a snack or dessert than chips or chocolate ice cream. Believe them not; they do but lie. Or else their taste buds were manufactured on another planet. Raw veggies with the slime of your choice are absolutely a wonderful light lunch, but dessert they’re not. I could eat broccoli with ranch dressing until I burst, but it’s not a snack, it’s a salad. “Dessert” means fat and sugar; it’s a word with an immutable meaning. If you want your carrot sticks to sound as good as they taste, come up with a cool new term for them, but don’t co-opt “dessert”. You won’t convince anyone, and you could turn off someone who otherwise might enjoy vegetables in their proper place, at the beginning rather than the end of the meal.
So I’ve said that my daughters eat nothing but cereal, peanut butter, and the occasional dairy product. How does that work? Surprisingly easily. I don’t usually buy sugar-based breakfast cereals. I know that Wheaties and Grape Nuts do have sugar in them, but they’re better for us than Froot Loops. So we keep two boxes of whole-grain type cereal open at all times, and the girls will have some for breakfast, either dry (in a bowl, with a glass of milk on the side) or with milk and a spoon. Because it’s pretty healthy stuff, and not prohibitively expensive, I generally let them eat seconds and occasionally thirds if asked for. (On those rare occurrences when we do in fact have something sugary on hand, they only get one bowlful.) Here is where I admit that the girls’ favorite morning meal includes a rice bowl full of dry Cheerios and a single chopstick.
Lunch is usually a sandwich and/or a bowl of yogurt.
As they are picky eaters, they often don’t want to eat whatever I’ve made for dinner. Where I draw the line is that I refuse to make two different dinners to accommodate personal eating habits. (It would be different if we had allergies or something to deal with, but we don’t.) So if the girls won’t eat what I’ve cooked, their only other option is a sandwich or the equivalent.
A sandwich-equivalent might be the traditional P.B. & J., jelly or honey on toast, peanut butter or cheese on crackers, or even bread and butter. Why I’ve chosen these as alternate dinners for the kids is twofold: first, it’s relatively healthy stuff for kids who shun all plant material, and second, it’s all stuff I can throw together easily while still preparing haut cuisine for the adults, or they can make entirely themselves with no help from me at all (depending on the age of the kid at the time). Their refusal to eat what I’m cooking cannot and will not impact my schedule. Picky eaters they unfortunately are; spoiled brats they will not be.
And whenever I hit upon something healthy that they actually like, by gosh, I keep in on hand and give it to them whenever possible. We keep carrot sticks in the fridge and they can get into them, especially at meals, because it’s the one vegetable they both like. We have yogurt in the flavors they prefer, also available for lunches. And we do give them a multivitamin, and make sure to buy the kid vites that they like (in their case, the gummy kind) rather than ones they don’t care for. Mostly they don’t like fruit, but when we can get something they will eat, we do; grapes are often a big hit, as are raw strawberries.
So how much does our diet do to keep us healthy? I really can’t say. I know that we’re not eating like the health experts recommend. But I think our avoidance of prepared foods and our restriction of the amounts of seriously bad stuff is probably keeping us in better shape than a lot of people.
Next time, I'll discuss those "lifestyle" details that I think may be the real secret to my good physical health.