Notes from the Underhill: Fossil Foods

The Friday before Thanksgiving was Movie Night at my son’s school. The Wellness Committee was hosting the snack table, as part of a new drive to boost overall wellness at the school.

I was helping serve food as my kids ran riot through the gym and lobby, and then my 6-year-old decided to pitch in by illustrating the big sign that read: “PS 9 Wellness Committee.”

He drew a stick figure eating a slice of pizza and put a big red circle with a cross through it. Because of the angle of the stick figure, it sort of looked as though the little person was keeling over dead at the first bite.

This raised a question for me: has all my emphasis, over the years, on good (often organic) eating taught my son that healthy food means no pizza?

I love food. I really love food. When I was at school, I was the only kid in my class (as I recall) who always wanted second, then third helpings of school lunch. (I went to an old-fashioned English school, where jam tart, apple crumble, and treacle pudding—a steamed lump of lard-based sponge cake drenched in syrup—were everyday events, and the treacle pudding was my favorite.)

As I grew up my love of eating well evolved: it’s still about quantity but also about quality, about eating the kind of food that nourishes your body and enhances your likelihood of sticking around to babysit your grandchildren.

To me, there’s no conflict between this idea and pleasure. I think growing up in Europe gave me the belief that food should be a source of enjoyment throughout life, not angst.

I believe in butter. I believe in full fat milk, yogurt, everything, in fact. As for pizza, I rank it alongside the Chrysler Building, the DUMBO ship playground, and people who help carry your stroller down the subway steps as one of the key reasons for living in New York.

But when I say “I love food,” I also mean it in the Michael Pollen sense, i.e., I love food that grows on a farm or is harvested from the sea, a forest, a garden, whatever—and I don’t want to eat things that are not.

Nowadays (as Pollen wrote so compellingly in The Omnivore’s Dilemma), so much of what ends up in our stomachs is NOT food. It originates in an oil refinery or a coal mine and nature never endowed us with the tools for digesting it.

Since becoming a mom, I’ve always aimed to feed my kids food.

That sentence sounds obvious to the point of banality. Yet in truth, over the years, I’ve often felt as though I’m going out on some extreme limb pursuing that goal. Because when you read labels (I do, always, despite what I said earlier about “angst”), you realize that most groceries sold in stores contain a host of ingredients that aren’t food.

As your kids grow older, the attempt to bar non-food items from their diet becomes an increasingly tricky enterprise. For example, my son came home from school recently with a little Ziploc pouch of purple monster breakfast cereal, containing (a quick internet search tells me) Red 40 (made from petroleum; banned in Britain), Blue 1 (banned in most of Europe), and Blue 2 (made from synthetic coal tar).

I wouldn't choose to have him eat coal tar. (Unfairly enough, kids in England who eat purple cereal are getting, instead of Red 40, real strawberries as colorants.)

But the question is: to what extent—past a certain age—can you hope to control what goes into your children's mouths? Too much harping on about healthy eating is likely to drive them straight into the arms of MacDonalds. In fact, it seems important to me to overcome my own resistance and buy them the occasional Happy Meal (very occasional, on road trips, when we’ve finished the last granola bar and the only alternative is a limp bowl of pasta at Sbarro), simply to prevent them, at some future point, going on a wild junk food spree prompted by feelings of childhood deprivation (“I never got the Snow Tubing Hello Kitty toy!”)

Day-to-day, though, both my kids are pretty good eaters and I truly believe that it's in the long term, when they’re adults, that the habits and tastes they absorbed growing up will resonate. 

Meanwhile, P.S. 9’s Wellness Committee is off to a great start. At Movie Night we sold 80 organic hot dogs in whole wheat buns (not perfect, I know, but a lot better than the chemical-nitrite-laden feedlot kind), raisins and carrot sticks in baggies—and to everyone’s surprise the big seller of the evening was seaweed.

There are some serious seaweed-snack lovers among the P.S. 9 kids, it turns out.