Darn You, Michael Pollan! What Am I Supposed to Feed My Child Now?

I just finished reading my first Michael Pollan book, In Defense of Food.  Which is somewhat strange, because I have been a big Michael Pollan fan for some time now.

Mostly, I have depended on Mike to give me the information I need to tell people I’m a big Michael Pollan fan.  He does the heavy lifting — actually reading the books — and I decide I like what I hear and don’t really need to read any of it myself:  eat organic (or natural), eat local, don’t eat too much meat (or any, in my case, and all non-meat-eaters like to be patted on the back every so often).  After discussing why we’re going to make weekly visits to the farmer’s market or why Mike has gone to the trouble of assembling that huge compost heap in the yard, I smugly eye The Omnivore’s Dilemma, whisper, “I’ll be reading you next,” and then abandon it to gather dust on the stacked bookcases containing the other treasures Mike brought with him to the marriage that always seem so much more appealing when I’m not actually in need of something to read.

But a few months ago, I put In Defense of Food on my bedside stand in the stack of waiting-to-be-read books I love to make my way through.  And a week ago, I actually picked it up and started reading.

Almost immediately, I began worrying about what I’m feeding my son.

This is a problem. Because, as Mike will gladly confirm, I am the very last person who needs more reasons to worry about food.

What You Eat Is Yoga Too

Very slowly, over nearly two-thirds of my life, I’ve discovered just how directly what I eat affects how I feel.  It started with eliminating red meat because I was sixteen years old and thought it was cool.  I still recall that first fundraising dinner at the L.A. Zoo when I declared smugly to my fellow Student Volunteers, “Oh, I don’t eat red meat.”  The surprise was that I eventually realized I actually felt better not eating it.  And so I progressed through caffeine, poultry, wheat, high fructose corn syrup, and, for a time, even chocolate and cow’s milk. (“You mean,” someone once said after inquiring about my dietary restrictions, “you don’t eat dessert.”) By the time one of my teachers spoke directly to yoga and eating twenty years later, I gladly jumped on board.

So by the time I read Pollan’s book, I was pretty well primed for sensory overload.

“I think we’re feeding Jake too many processed foods,” I said worriedly to Mike one night as we lay in bed with our open books.

I was particularly chagrined by this realization because in the past month or so that he has been at the Big Kids’ preschool, putting together his lunch has become significantly easier.  No more assembling a collection of reused baby food jars with various homemade treats in a range of food groups for the teachers to put together on a plate in a state-approved healthy meal; now I just put lunch (three food groups) in a Rubbermaid lunch container and throw it in a bag with a bunch of snacks.  The teachers put the array in front of Jake and he decides what to eat.

What this arrangement encourages, of course, is packaged food. Not necessarily (and never in the house where Crazy Mom buys the food) packages of goldfish in colors that most closely resemble the dyes we used for making our tie-dyed tee-shirts in summer camp in the 70’s.  Only organic, fortified, all natural packaged food, of course.

Which, I discovered with an untoward degree of shock, can still violate Pollan’s rules (don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients; don’t buy anything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce).  Which, in turn, can raise my blood pressure (thankfully, low to begin with, something I’d love to attribute to a healthy diet but, quite honestly, is nothing more than the result of plain old heredity).

“I don’t think Michael Pollan is writing for people like you,” Mike said wearily before returning to his book.

The next night, I looked up from the page I was reading with a furrowed brow.  “We’re supposed to eat a lot of vegetables,” I said.  “Jake won’t eat vegetables at all.”

This is not hyperbole.  If it is green, Jake won’t eat it.  If it is orange or yellow or white and has no characteristics that distinguish it from, say, pasta or cheese crackers or some other wheat-based product on which he would happily subsist, Jake won’t eat it.  Is it the smell?  Some visual clue beyond my ability to sense?  Whatever the reason, even sweet potato fries will fool him only for a day or two.  He just knows.

“We’ll just make him more whole wheat pasta,” Mike said, not quite answering my concern but shutting me up with his tone just the same.  Because, of course, the pasta we feed him generally is whole wheat (or, worse, made of brown rice though I swear he prefers this version, as long as it’s still hot). And because we are both in agreement that forcing your child to eat something he doesn’t want to eat is the quickest way to ensure he will never, ever eat it again.

The following night, I finished my book and closed it with sigh of defeat.  “I eat too much,” I declared.

Mike took a moment to respond to this one — probably because there were simply too many things to say.  Like:  You’re pregnant; there’s no such thing as eating too much.  (I disagree when the bulk of what you’re eating is Ben & Jerry’s, the only benefit of which is that it makes Mike cheer when I gain more than a pound a week.  His cheers, by the way, are not worth it when I am crying for the same reason.)  Or, like, You eat less than most people.  (Pollan would point out that, if by “most people” Mike means Americans, he is correct, but that doesn’t mean much.)  Or, what he finally said:

“You are the last person who needs more reasons to restrict what you eat.”

Which, I admit, is true.  But where my child is concerned, it’s hard not to be concerned.  Isn’t this the time when good eating habits are formed?  Isn’t this my chance to stave off the hidden carcinogens that build up in our systems over time while I hope that our scientific community catches up and organic farming catches on?  Aren’t I — and I alone — responsible for my child’s long-term health and well-being?

I know what the correct answer is, but I don’t much care.

Living in this World

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine included a short essay by Peggy Orenstein pondering just how much we overly health-conscious parents can do to keep our children healthy.  (The Toxic Paradox). All the organic food in the world, she suggested (not in so many words because now I am reading my own issues into it), can not do a thing about the fact that our children will be exposed to toxins somewhere else.  And, the author went on to posit, isn’t it more of our own illness to try to protect our children from everything?  Isn’t it merely an outgrowth of our current over-protective culture?

I bristle even writing about it now.  What we eat is SO IMPORTANT! I want to howl.  PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE OUR CULTURE MAKES IT SO HARD TO!

And then I turn around and rail against over-vaccinating and over-use of antibacterial lotions (let them eat dirt!) and over-child-proofing (we use the gate at the top of our stairs to keep the dogs out when we’re getting Jake to bed, not to keep him from falling down them).

In a way, it reminds me of an anthropological study I once read about that found people in the U.S. are inordinately afraid of snakes, although they seldom encounter them, while people living in parts of Africa with high concentrations of poisonous snakes and low concentrations of cars are inordinately afraid of — you guessed it — cars.  Because, the study hypothesized, it is more manageable to be afraid of something you can manage.

(A confession here:  I can’t recall where I read about this study, but I have an uneasy suspicion it was in an SRA reading comprehension exercise in elementary school.  Still, it has always made sense to me.)

There’s a bit of yoga wisdom in there as well.  Something along the lines of:  You do what you can.  You make choices that you feel are right and responsible and healthy.  And you don’t beat yourself up if you find out later there might have been a preferable choice or if you don’t have the means to make the one your best friend is trying to guilt you into.

The key, I would say — and I picture the Michael Pollan book safely tucked back on its shelf again as I write this — is to try not to let all the information storming our brains overwhelm our ability to make a choice that feels right.  In other words, it’s yet another case where the world we live in makes it way too easy to stop paying attention to our hearts and think we can do everything “right” if only we think it through.

This is not to say we shouldn’t educate ourselves.  I just wrote a Living Social review of In Defense of Food bemoaning the fact that more people don’t read Michael Pollan.  We don’t live in this world by closing ourselves off from it.

But it does mean that there is a difference between inviting information in and refusing to process it.  Between learning something from someone else and making it our own.  Between our heads and our hearts.

So perhaps I can’t explain logically why it is so very important to me to feed Jake the very best food I can and to live in fear of the day I find myself handing him a McDonalds Happy Meal because at some point it’s cruel to deprive him of what everyone else is having.  (This being Asheville, perhaps my fear is misplaced.  Surely the people who frequent the McDonalds up the road aren’t the same ones who send their kids to school with him.  But, then again, what else could explain the neon tie-dye-colored goldfish snacks?)

But logic doesn’t really matter, especially when you’re a parent.  What matters is what your heart tells you is best.  And my heart has a lot of “bests” in it, and a lot of energy to keep doing everything I can to keep my child safe and healthy.  In fact, I have so much crazy energy that I choose to worry about things like off-gassing mattresses (Jake will be getting our old, long-ago-off-gassed one in a couple of weeks) and what kinds of glues hold the rugs in the house onto their backing and what kind of chemicals are or aren’t in Jake’s sunblock; I muster all this crazy energy precisely because I know he will get poisoned in plenty of other places.  He developed in-utero in Long Beach, for goodness sakes, where we lived close enough to the Port of Long Beach to be inside what is officially referred to as “the circle of death.”  I’m not making that up.

So, you tell me, could eating a little high fructose corn syrup really be all that bad for him?

Probably not.  But we make our choices, and these are mine.

I’ll repeat that — these are mine.  I’m not asking that anyone else adopt them.  I’m simply saying that we all make the choices we need to so we can live in a very complicated world.  And suggesting that, where we can, we make those choices from the heart.

Because, really, that’s all we can do.  And maybe be a little bit afraid of snakes.  (Okay, I confess, I like snakes.  For me, it’s cockroaches.)

A Simple Heart Breathing Exercise

I owe this one to Erich Schiffmann, who ran one of the first yoga workshops I attended and has a lovely book called Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness that particularly influenced my early years discovering yoga.  I thought of it immediately, even if I couldn’t remember the particulars, because I still recall the simple revelation of how to listen to my heart.

You can try this any time — as part of an asana practice or while sitting at your desk or just at the moment you are trying to decide between pulling into McDonalds to satisfy your starving child on a long car trip and forcing him to eat another rice cake from the bag of healthy treats you have packed.

Or just try it for how good it feels to get out of your head and to open your heart joyfully.  You never know where it will lead you.

Expanded Heart Breathing Instructions

Tagged as: eating responsibly, feeding my child, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan, yoga and motherhood