Hungry (5 page)

Bad food happens, no matter how extensive the research, but the thrill of the hunt kept us traveling with the sole purpose of trying a new restaurant. Who knew people were allowed to have fun like this? First speaking to Katharine Hepburn, now driving for hours not to visit family or friends, not to see an historic site or a natural wonder, but just to eat.

Ned loved having an appreciative sidekick. He had once taken a thirty-mile detour, on a trip from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, to dine at a French-Asian restaurant famous for its escargots. Despite its being located in Hanford, remote from everything but cattle and cotton, the Imperial Dynasty had served European monarchs and Hollywood movie stars. Ned remembers walking in and thinking, “I really wanted to do this. But it’s sad to be here by myself.” He doesn’t even remember if he had the signature escargots.

At home, the San Francisco Bay Area was leading a white-bread nation into an expanded consciousness of good food, introducing the language we speak today: fresh, local, natural, organic, seasonal. At parties, people talked about restaurants and food rather than jobs and real estate. When our friend Susan’s parents were moving to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, friends and colleagues were full of advice: “Oh, the Bay Area. Let me tell you about the best place to get bread.” In Los Angeles, restaurant conversation was about real estate, and servers aspired to be movie stars. Up North, in restaurants we talked about other restaurants, and waiters dreamed of opening their own.

In Bay Area home kitchens and restaurants, food allegiances were shifting dramatically. There would be less bowing and scraping to the French on the high end, and much less dependence on canned and processed foods on the low end. We already had high-quality wine, fruit, vegetables, chocolate, Monterey Jack cheese, and sourdough bread. We were about to go artisan, partisan, and often organic in all those areas and more. The West Coast’s pioneer spirit and willingness to experiment jibed nicely with a population of adventurous residents who traveled widely and brought back food and recipes. In the seventies, waves of immigrants from South-east Asia, China, the Middle East, and Latin America opened restaurants and groceries. The mix got even tastier.

How could a person not take part in all of this? It would be like living in Hawaii and never going to the beach. Ned and I searched out Salvadoran
pupusas
and Szechuan peppercorns, hot dogs, and tempura. The night he met my parents, we ate at a French restaurant in San Francisco, La Bourgogne, which I picked because of Ned’s research. He was impressed that my dad knew how to talk to waiters. At the first spoonful of lobster bisque, we all looked up and giggled, and by the time we got to the Grand Marnier soufflé, life was so delightful that we all went dancing at the elegant St. Francis Hotel. How could I not marry this man?

Ned and I joined a cheese co-op, which required knife work and attendance at monthly meetings. We saved menus. Ned continued a collection of restaurant matchbooks. Are these foodie obsessions? Did they lead to grief later on?

Maybe as a recent convert to the joy of food, I lost perspective. Where I used to disdain conversations about food—thinking, How can these people keep talking for half an hour about bread? It’s just bread!—now I cared deeply. Maybe we put too much effort into procuring, preparing, and consuming food—all the activity, socializing, and sense of purpose that my three-day experiment in starvation had lacked. Of course bread mattered. In France, we took a train trip to Tours just to eat warm brioche at a little place near the train station, famous for selling only brioche. When visiting Los Angeles, we always stopped for corn rye bread at the Beverlywood Bakery, where I had gone as a child and remembered that no matter how many cakes and onion rolls and loaves of bread you bought, the counterwomen always asked, “And what else?” They still did that. What joy! There was no question that we would pass this joy on to our children.

In 1982, when our first child was born, Ned and I were in our early thirties, not exactly babes in the ’burbs. A librarian and a journalist, we both are trained to track down information, evaluate sources, and talk to experts in subjects that are way out of our realm. We know how to study. But as happens to most parents, in our children’s early years much of what we studied turned out not to be on the test.

We read up on pregnancy and took childbirth classes. Child-rearing? Not so much. I found the information hard to store—perhaps a hormonal case of pre-Mommy Brain. But having this unknown future person in our life seemed so hard to grasp. We knew babies are born different and change constantly, and that as soon as you learned what to expect, he or she would push the Restart button. (On our first well-baby visit, when the pediatrician referred to Jacob as “he,” after all those months of carrying “the baby,” I thought, “Who?”) If you think about the impending responsibility, the rational response is overwhelming fear. Ned and I decided we’d read about childcare on a just-in-time schedule. Still, we quizzed every young parent who came near, focusing on things we could control, like what to look for in a good day-care center and what we needed to buy before the baby was born. There was so much unfamiliar equipment to evaluate.

The scariest item looked like an airline-size bottle of dark rum. This was ipecac, used to make your child avoid death by throwing up the snail bait, drain cleaner, or other poison you’d insanely left within reach. Physicians later decided this procedure could do more harm than good. With the advent of eating disorders, bulimics bought ipecac to induce vomiting, so stores stopped stocking it. (Although ipecac lives on. A lightning-fast scan of Google turns up a number of YouTube videos featuring people swallowing ipecac and vomiting, and a record label called Ipecac Recordings whose slogan is “Making People Sick Since 1999.”) The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that ipecac syrup
not
be stocked at home. Luckily our ipecac never left the kitchen cupboard, but later, Lisa was to remember the creepy little brown bottle and skulk around a drugstore before finally asking if they carried ipecac. They didn’t.

For the less ominous items,
Consumer Reports
was a big help. Parents packed up their baby for a walk around the block as if crossing the frontier in a covered wagon. Strollers ranged from handy canvas to handsome buggies suitable for the Prince of Wales. Still, the items then available would have stocked only a mini-mart next to the Costco of products crying out to new parents today.

Besides spending money and interviewing parents, Ned and I practiced childcare on our dear friends’ toddlers. Taking care of young children appeared to be a lot like taking care of a dog. I’d always had a dog.

Each outing started pleasantly enough. Sarah played happily with us for a while, and Benjy took one look at us and quickly went to sleep. Then Sarah wanted something unfathomable and Benjy woke up. The dialogue between Ned and me eventually went:

“What should we do now?” (A plea that would bounce back and speak our hopeless anguish during Lisa’s anorexia.)

“I thought you knew! Your sister has children!”

“I thought you knew! You used to babysit!”

“Twenty years ago!”

Incompetence didn’t keep us from scoffing at others. When our neighbors’ adorable two-year-old daughter threw an operatic fit on their front porch, we sat in our childless living room and laughed. When spoiled children dropped food to a restaurant’s floor and got up and down, up and down, we clucked disapprovingly. Why couldn’t their parents get through the grocery store without a breakdown, holding up the checkout line at rush hour?

There seemed to be a lot of pandering to children’s tastes. An actual conversation, overheard in a grocery store, went like this:

“Chelsea, do you want a banana?”

“No!”

“Do you want an apple?”

“No!”

And so on, to everything else on offer that day, until the exasperated mother cried, “What
do
you want?”

“I don’t
want
what I want!”

We were to have our own versions of this conversation, but before having children we could float above the fray, like Spock on
Star Trek
, thinking if not saying about other people’s child-rearing: “This is highly illogical.” Any children of ours, we knew, would eat everything, and they wouldn’t have fits in restaurants.

 

 

 

Early on, Ned and I discovered that the best result in splitting household tasks was to focus on areas of competence, and Ned had the cooking competence. He also liked to shop for food. It gave him a sense of budgetary control and ensured we had on hand what he wanted to cook. We loved trying new foods, at home and in restaurants.

In my dreamscapes of maternity leave, I envisioned six months of sitting on a park bench, one hand holding a book, the other on the stroller where “the baby” slept. Our view of taking kids to restaurants was only slightly more realistic. If we trained them right, wouldn’t they just sit there and smile?

Baby boomers got the idea that we could control everything that happened to our children, an ego trip foolishly accepted by each successive wave of parents. Perhaps the economy will put a dent in this overconfidence, but we assumed we were the captains of our family ships, much more so than our own clueless parents had been. Certainly we were to be totally in charge of what our children ate. And if they didn’t eat well, it was our own fault. Dinner became a show of skill as well as love. Working women brought the discipline we’d honed on the job—control, cause and effect, retraining—to the job of feeding. Books and experts were consulted. During my sister’s pregnancy, her bedside table always had a foot-high pile of books on childcare.

Right off the bat, there were skills involved with breast-feeding. Don’t let the baby nurse too long on one side. Do consume brewer’s yeast, helpful for the letdown of milk. Breast-feed for at least six months—or risk frequent colds, allergies, and low achievement. Bring a breast pump to work, despite there being only a restroom stall to use it in, because the less formula the better.

And then came the complications of solid foods, grown or manufactured by strangers. Solid foods were “introduced” to your child, as if they were new friends. Or enemies. As guardian at the gate of allergies, the wise parent introduces one food at a time. That way, if the child breaks out in hives, you know the culprit. The high performers of parenthood jumped through blenders, grinders, and strainers to make their own baby food.

I focused my anxieties on giving birth to a healthy baby. That is, eating well, sleeping a lot, and taking a Lamaze class, which provided breathing techniques we actually used, but also new things to worry about. One mother-to-be had heard that if you didn’t push properly the baby could go back up the birth canal. The rest of us snickered silently at her naivete, but at least one of us was thinking, “I really don’t know what’s going to happen. My body has never turned inside-out before.”

It was the dawn of reality for many of us, that life wasn’t practice, with infinite opportunities for do-overs, and that having a baby wasn’t just another thing to try, like being a vegetarian. Childbirth classes drive home the awesome responsibility, for the first time since driver’s education, with tales of horror and gore. A mother from the previous class gave a stitch-by-stitch account of her emergency episiotomy. We toured the ICU. I hadn’t been a hospital patient since having my tonsils out at age four, and that was not a good memory. Even the ice cream at the end didn’t soothe the pain.

But when Jacob was born, I would have liked to have lingered in the hospital. He slept, I slept, he was carried in to me, food came to me with no cooking or cleaning, and I had my own room. Except for the crying, it was like a luxury spa.

Which all evaporated when we went home and he became colicky, forgot how to nurse, and slept only when we were awake. I got so groggy that I mistook apple juice for vegetable oil, and served a sweet, rock-hard quiche to guests. Jacob got an ear infection in his second month, and I nearly poured the liquefied antibiotic into his ear instead of his mouth because by the time we got home I couldn’t recall what the doctor had said to do with the pink bottle. Luckily the advice nurse was on duty.

Clearly I should have read up on lactation, but it had seemed so obvious. We called the Nursing Mothers Council, a volunteer group that sent over an angel of mercy to help me with technique. From then, feeding went pretty well until it was time for solid foods.

Now came the book buying. The classic
Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care
for a calm, genial, trust-your-instincts kind of approach and at the other end, books by Penelope Leach and T. Berry Brazelton. These two were steeped in the “attachment theory” that working mothers could not help reading as an attack. If you weren’t home all the time, bonding, you were separating, causing anxiety. There were plenty of people around who regarded daycare as bordering on a post-Ceauescu Romanian orphanage, where starving children were tied to their beds.

I was pretty sure if I stayed home all day, I’d become the Romanian dictator. I wasn’t going to worry too much about leaving my children in the hands of recommended professionals. Now that we had a healthy baby, keeping him that way was our purpose in life.
Feed Me, I’m Yours
promised “Baby Food Made Easy! Delicious, Nutritious, and Fun Things You Can Cook Up for Your Kids!” It introduced the “Plop” Method:

The author, Vicki Lansky, also gave the following key advice: