Hungry (7 page)

Ned’s downtown Saturday rounds included an old-fashioned, frosted cookie-type bakery that made great wheat bread and hamburger buns, and the twenties-era Peninsula Creamery for milk in glass bottles. When we needed staples, we shopped at the Co-Op, a funky nonprofit from the sixties that did not survive the eighties. We joined a produce co-op as well as the cheese co-op.

“That’s the store we don’t like,” Jacob, age two, informed a visitor as we drove by the Safeway supermarket near our house. Apparently we had badmouthed Safeway in his presence. When we did shop there, we read labels to the kids, noted how it was usually crackers and soft drinks piled high at the ends of aisles, and counted the sugary candies and gum while waiting in the checkout line. “Yeah, I see the Kit Kat bars. We don’t need them, we didn’t come to buy them, but they’re placed right here so we’ll be tempted. Look at all that packaging. You’re paying for that. Does it help the apples to be wrapped in plastic?”

That was one side. The serious Marion Nestle side. Nestle, arguably the most prominent nutritionist in the land, advocates for consumer protection against marketing hype. We taught the kids to make informed food choices, and that new products and packaging are about making a profit, not our well-being. In
What to Eat
, Nestle follows the money: “What industry or group benefits from public confusion about nutrition and health? Here the list is long and includes the food, restaurant, fast-food, diet, health club, drug, and health-care industries, among many others.”

On the less serious side, our most-quoted food text when the kids were young was
Yummers!
Writer and illustrator James Marshall is better known for his George and Martha books, about hippopotamus best friends who learn when to tell the absolute truth and when to soften it.
Yummers!
is about being open to new experiences—foods in this case. That’s what we thought at the time. A less blessed-out interpretation would be that
Yummers!
is about the hazards of overindulging. It opens with Emily Pig, looking distraught on the bathroom scale: “She was gaining weight and she didn’t know why.” She resolves to live healthier. Her friend Eugene Turtle suggests getting some exercise by going for a walk, but walking makes Emily hungry. On the way she downs two sandwiches, corn on the cob, a platter of scones, and three Eskimo pies. Then Eugene buys a box of Girl Scout cookies, which need a milk chaser. They stop by a drugstore and Eugene sips skim milk while Emily plows through a vanilla malt, a banana split, and a dish of peach ice cream. When Eugene stops by the supermarket to buy a box of tea, Emily finds free pizza and speaks the line that was our mantra: “It’s so important to sample new products.”

Is Eugene an enabler? Emily is certainly a binge eater. We didn’t see it that way at the time, but rereading
Yummers!
and
Yummers Too: The Second Course
got me worried.
Yummers Too
continues the theme, with the addition of Emily’s favorite relative, Uncle Fatty Pig, and Emily eating her way through the inventory of Healthy Harriet’s food store. She has to tell Harriet, “I lost control.” Another interpretation: The Yummers books are about what happens when you panic about your weight.

 

lisa:
Emily is a pig! Is she binge eating or just being a pig? I think it would be different if the Emily character was a person, but she’s just being a hungry pig. A child wouldn’t read that much into it. I loved this book as a kid.

And there is a lesson at the end because Emily gets sick, so there are consequences to her actions. Maybe Eugene, her friend, should have stopped her. But whether or not
Yummers!
carries a positive message, it is charming.

 

sheila:
How do parents find the right books and messages? First, you reconvene the team of advisers from when you were pregnant, and add knowledgeable friends and relatives with slightly older children. As your children grow and their needs shift, you’ll naturally recruit new advisers, but the early ones may point the working parent to the right daycare center, which itself will be a great source of expertise and comfort. After my six-month maternity leaves, I went back to work and the kids went to the Learning Center, a highly recommended program with the corny acronym TLC. Nearly three decades later, TLC is going strong, with a long waiting list and an outstanding professional staff who get health benefits. The center closes at 5:30 p.m., early for working parents but powerful incentive to get home. Whenever Ned or I arrived, bedraggled from the office and the rush-hour freeway, TLC teachers were still fresh.

The food was fresh, too, and central to the program. It still is, as the center’s website states:

We became friends with several of the teachers, went to their weddings, and formed a sort of eating club to explore Asian and South American cuisines in restaurants and in our homes. It was a little like the gourmet group my parents had, dabbling mainly in the foods of Europe, except that then the mothers did all the work. I thought their gourmet group was even dumber than bridge, the card game in which the mothers seemed more often to be the “dummy.”

The TLC teachers had a remarkably natural way of talking to young children without patronizing them. It is a place for children with a “whole-child” philosophy, featuring tenets like this:

While Lisa and Jacob were developing their potential, we looked for an elementary school to keep up the good work. Palo Alto children have great choices in the public school system: excellent neighborhood schools and three alternative schools, at no extra expense.

We had heard about Ohlone and Hoover, the two alternative schools open when Jacob was ready for kindergarten: one named for the Native Americans of California’s Central Coast, the other for Hoover, as in Herbert. Hoover’s big contribution to education was to proclaim: “Children are our most valuable resource.” More famously, while campaigning for president in 1928, Hoover predicted, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” That was a few months before the stock market crash.

Hoover Elementary School is about solid academics, fabulous test scores, and “a quiet and orderly environment.” Ohlone is about creativity and “open education,” which jibed nicely with Jacob and Lisa’s training at TLC.

At Ohlone, adults and students go by their first names. Jacob was a popular name, so there might be a Jacob H. and a Jacob R., but by fourth grade Jacob H. had become Jake. In Lisa’s kindergarten class, the teacher was called Teacher Lisa to avoid confusion, but never Miss, Mrs., or Ms. At first the name thing struck us as odd. In the olden days, we didn’t know our elementary schoolteachers even had first names, and here the principal was just plain Michael. Ohlone gives no grades, only incredibly detailed and helpful written reports from the teachers. Nor is there, remarkably, any homework. Even in an age of test-score anxiety, children work mainly in groups, frequently with students at different grade levels. They learn to work with difficult people. As the manual describes:

Ohlone has a farm with animals as well as vegetables. Students pick corn, feed goats, and collect eggs. They learn that food comes from the earth, not Costco, Safeway, or even the farmers’ market. At the annual Harvest Festival, they churn butter, peel apples, and toss pumpkins.

At home, food was central from the get-go. Once Jacob and Lisa were unlikely to stick their fingers in the metal grinder, we unwrapped the Marcato pasta machine we had gotten as a wedding present. We kneaded dough, formed a ball, let it rest, cranked the dough through the machine into our chosen noodle shape. The kids could see how much faster this fresh dough cooked than packaged pasta, and how tender and tasty it was.

We observed the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night with the usual blessings and some innovations like clinking glasses after the wine blessing and then toasting our fortunate life with the pieces of bread we had just broken off. We had healthy children, a community of friends and family, and the resources to buy a house in Palo Alto, where influential residents from Stanford and Silicon Valley ensured highly regarded public schools. We even had jobs we liked, including flexible hours for me, and, for Ned, very little travel and most evenings at home.

Ned was rising into library management, leaving behind the reference work he loved. He put those skills to family use, especially in researching travel and food. He also wrote a restaurant column in the library employees’ newsletter, “Out to Lunch with Ned,” and started a menu collection. At Christmas, the kids helped him make fudge and cookies for his coworkers. For birthdays, he baked a checkerboard cake, a “How did you do that?” treat in chocolate and vanilla that his grandmother had made for him. He identified his grandmothers with food so much that he and his sister grew up calling them Grandma Soup and Grandma Pancake.

When Jacob was eight and Lisa five, we took a culinary tour of Eastern cities. Along with friends and family, the Liberty Bell, and the Statue of Liberty, each city had food highlights: french fry- topped hot dogs in Pittsburgh, cheesesteaks and the Melrose Diner in Philadelphia (“Everyone who knows goes to the Melrose”), astronaut ice cream in Washington, DC, and just about everything, including the “everything bagel,” in New York.

What we didn’t know was that Lisa soon would be hiding candy in her room, and feeling very anxious about the deception. It was a small room, and she had posted a sign on the door: “Welcome to Lisa’s Very Small Room,” but she could have hidden a chocolate factory in there and we may not have found it. Her room was a mess and she was Teflon to any organizational system. She would initially buy into it—this basket for hair things, that plastic tub for puzzles—but within days it was Ned or me or nobody maintaining order. Occasionally we helped her sweep piles from the floor into drawers so our cleaner could vacuum, but basically we admitted defeat and invaded Lisa’s space only when something smelled, guests were coming, or I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Looking back, I can see that letting this continue, cleaning up myself rather than getting Lisa to take responsibility, was a big mistake, perhaps the initial phase of our happy bubble bursting.

 

lisa:
I wasn’t fat as a child. I was average. My parents bought high-quality produce and groceries. This is not to say we never had treats in our house, especially with Dad’s cooking skills. I would help him make the holiday fudge just so I could lick the bowl. But my lunch was never one of envy. Too often it was a plain cheese sandwich. The coolest parents packed cookies and other processed foods we loved.

On Saturday morning when Dad would ask, “Who wants to go to the farmers’ market?” sometimes Jake chose cartoons on TV and Mom stayed home with him. To me there was no question. I enjoyed the atmosphere, the smell of local flowers mixed with the sweet tang of oranges, and looking back now, I can see that I was being educated in food appreciation. I watched Dad figure out which melon was ripe. If I behaved, we got fresh-made, unpasteurized apple juice.

When I was old enough to start getting an allowance I began to rebel against my healthy upbringing. On the weekends my friends and I would go to 7-Eleven and I’d stock up. Oh, it was wonderful. Snickers, Baby Ruth, Caramello, Laffy Taffy, Pop Tarts. Every bit of junk I could afford, I purchased with joy. When I got home, I stashed the candy in my top desk drawer, so my parents wouldn’t find it. I remember sitting in my chair, unwrapping candy bar after candy bar and stuffing them down my throat. It felt so sneaky.

Food would always be there when friends couldn’t be found. It wasn’t that I hid my emotions. I have always been vocal, often too vocal. But something was missing. I was never satisfied with myself. I felt ugly and fat, and food solved issues I couldn’t even explain. I stopped bringing my parents’ lunches. It was better to wait in line for the mass-produced school lunch and ice cream sandwiches.

I was jealous of my schoolmates’ pudding cups, soda cans, and Fruit Gushers. From fourth grade on, I was just a bit heavier than most girls my age, but I felt like a complete outcast. I also developed boobs in fourth grade. At this time girls walked around the room, grabbing the backs of other girls’ shirts to do “bra checks.” It was embarrassing to have a bra but there came a time when I couldn’t wear a shirt, especially a white shirt, without one. Mom and I went to the Mervyn’s kids department and bought two training bras. Really they were just thin cloth made into the shape of a bra. You could completely see through them, which felt like people were seeing through me. I was wearing double-digit adult sizes by sixth grade.

At first I thought getting bigger was good because it meant I was growing up. At age six I got excited when I went from a size 6X to an 8, and I could fit into my cousin’s hand-me-down shoes. At age eight I knew my exact weight to be sixty pounds. I can recall one sunny afternoon, lounging on the top of the high monkey bars with my friends and questioning them on their weight. They were all in the fifties. By nine years old I started calling myself fat. I was a bit round but by no means fat. It probably didn’t help that my brother was always a twig.

 

sheila:
We knew it was wrong to push food on Jacob and pull it away from Lisa, but it happened. When he was a toddler, a pediatrician had us counting bites of banana and whatever else our little prince would condescend to swallow, and reporting the meager results. Even as he grew, slowly, we kept an eye on those bites. At the dinner table, Jacob nibbled on a roasted chicken leg while Lisa downed a thigh and half a breast. He pushed roasted red potatoes around the plate, could be nudged to have a couple pieces, and ate a good amount of steamed broccoli. Lisa went for more of everything. In about fifteen years, we would be counting bites again, this time for Lisa.