I’d Rather Have My Mushrooms Fresh with Maggots than Processed with High Fructose Corn Syrup

I guess I’ve been thinking more lately about how to feed my children healthily (without instilling in them my own seriously warped food issues) because everyone has.  You know, that peanutbutter thing.

Then, on Friday, I read an op ed piece in the New York Times entitled The Maggots in Your Mushrooms. Suddenly, it all became clear.

I am, it turns out, far more grossed out by unrefrigerated processed cheese goo than by the specter of spider eggs in my cereal (as long as they haven’t hatched yet) or a little e. coli coating my organic spinach  (as long as it didn’t come from the rear end of a plant worker but rather from a rodent crossing the spinach patch unhindered by pesticides).  (And, yes, I wash even my pre-washed spinach, so it’s not that I’m happy to actually eat e. coli — see Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy? for my recounting of what happened when Jake did, in fact, do just that.)

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a household where if there was a little (or a lot of) mold on the cheese, you just cut off the moldy parts and gave them to the dogs before putting the rest on a plate with some crackers for human consumption.  Where my sister and I spent many a morning holding a questionable carton of milk under the other’s nose and saying, “Does this smell all right to you?” and then agreeably pouring it on our cereal if the other sensed nothing too dangerously off-putting.  To this day, I’ve got to wonder what surprises my refrigerator would hold if we didn’t have a compost bin and a policy of feeding our hounds any leftovers more than four days old as both a health measure and, honestly, because it ends up saving us money on dog food.

But really, I think it has to do with yoga, of course, and with the kind of life I would like my children to find as they navigate their way through a world that still offers more unavoidable toxins than choices.

Turns Out There Are Some Things You Can Control (A Little Bit)

First of all, it seems important to explain why I am far more suspicious of processed food than dirty food.

Yes, processed food is highly regulated.  But if, like me, you have spent time working in a law firm with a thriving FDA practice and have seen that it’s all a matter of how many lawyers a company can pay to push its product to approval, you wouldn’t feel particularly comforted by that.  (Just as I don’t care how many regulations the FDA puts on baby formula; when we had no choice but to feed it to Jake I trusted organic far more than what the FDA said was safe.  Um, melanine, anyone?)

And, yes, processed food often comes fortified with things that Jake might choose not to eat in his daily life, like the vitamins that come from the vegetables he shuns.  Michael Pollan makes a good argument, however, that it’s not the nutrients that keep us healthy, but the package in which they are delivered to us.  In other words, the vitamins are just plain healthier when they come to you inside the flesh of a vegetable than saturated with high fructose corn syrup in chocolate-flavored cereal.

The thing for me is that processed food is yet another example of how our society has become so enamored of science that we think we can out-nature Nature.  On the topic of food, I really can’t say it nearly as well as Pollan, so pick up one of his books or articles to get the lowdown on how we keep marching down this path that’s supposed to lead us toward health and in fact is sending us in the opposite direction.

My real reason for writing this piece is to explain why I found myself laughing but not particularly grossed out by the op-ed piece cataloging exactly the levels of gross things the FDA allows in our food.

And the answer is:  it might be dirt and bug larvae, but it’s natural.

There are many of you, I don’t doubt, who are thinking of all sorts of ways in which “natural” isn’t always better.  You know, the vast majority of us who aren’t too keen on long term backpacking sans toilets and showers.  Or those who would be quick to point out that, yes, I once put mouse poison in my crawl space because — natural as they were — the mice scampering across my ceiling every night were just plain annoying.  And, hey, three weeks away from my due date, I am well aware that a natural birth is a great goal but that I am equally grateful there were doctors around at my first birth, vacuum extractor at the ready.

The line I find myself recognizing is the one between accepting the natural and embracing the processed.  In other words, I would rather use “all natural” as my default setting and then hypocritically race for the nearest scientist when I need one than hop on the science bandwagon and forget that there’s any such thing as natural.  Or associate it exclusively with maggots in my mushrooms.

The best reason I can offer for making this distinction — the bit of yoga wisdom I’d like to offer you — is that the science-and-processing route is a great palliative, the sort of thing that makes you forget that we’re not in control.  Instead, you figure you can “control” your cholesterol with the low-cholesterol margarine, “control” the risk of heart disease with the right oatmeal, or, I don’t know — I don’t read the fronts of packages any longer.  Only the small print with all the ingredients.

Defaulting to natural, on the other hand — haughtily heading to the expensive grocery stores that, yes, have plenty of processed foods on their shelves as well, just not quite as many — is a reminder that we live in a world that still isn’t of our own making.  That our children can get e. coli from drinking fresh pressed apple cider made of apples grown and gathered at the local college’s orchard.  That the spinach scare that broke out during my first pregnancy came from the organic variety.  That I do, indeed, like the idea that someone else has cleaned up my drinking water for me.

In other words, much as in an asana practice, the natural default teaches us to be aware, not to assume that the risks don’t exist in the first place.  Any yoga pose, for example, holds out the risk of injury if we aren’t attentive to our bodies’ limitations and our own abilities.  Not that walking down the street doesn’t carry the same set of risks — we just don’t spend much time thinking about it.

Shouldn’t it be the same when we eat?  Put things inside our mouths, chew them up, swallow them, and let them travel through our internal organs?  Just because they don’t always make us immediately sick, does that mean that everything’s okay?  Or just out of the range of our consciousness?

Now How am I Supposed to Live in this World?

Right about now I’m feeling like a giant buzz kill.

I’m thinking about all the people who live in towns where there isn’t a whole lot of unprocessed food to be had at any price.  Or who couldn’t find a good acupuncturist within a hundred miles to help with the fertility issues that a nearby doctor promises to banish with a few doses of Clomid.  Or who are standing face-to-face with our economic crisis and have lost a very many choices I still, luckily, have.

And I realize how I’m sounding.  Like someone with too much time and too much attitude on her hands.

But, really, it’s not that.  I came here through a slow and steady journey where it finally dawned on me that I do feel the effects of what I eat.  (And that it doesn’t always stop me from having that ice cream sundae on Valentines Day and then again last night because, you know, the ingredients were still in the house.)  I was led part of the way by my life partner, who brought to our relationship a better awareness of how things like garbage disposals affect the environment.  (We do, by the way, plan to install one one day, for the stuff that doesn’t end up in the compost.)  And by articles like the one on maggots in my mushrooms that gave me more reasons to ponder and become just a tiny bit more self-aware.

So, no, I can’t be aware of what’s going on in your life, and I don’t mean to tell you what should be.

I’m just offering you a way of looking at what’s in front of you and, perhaps, finding a way not to be so scared by the salmonella in the peanutbutter.  To see where you do have choices, to make them, and to feel good about them, whatever they are.  And, where you have no control, to let that be a fact of life.

Because it is, whether all the FDA scientists out there realize it or not.

Urdhva Danurasana (Upward Facing Bow) — Arriving There With Consciousness

One could, of course, approach every single asana with the kind of awareness I’m talking about.  But I offer urdhva danurasana here because it requires consciousness on many, many levels at once.  Are your shoulders open enough?  Are your muscles strong enough?  Is you back limber enough?  Is your mind ready to look at the world upside down?  And is your heart ready to embrace being this open?

There’s a good chance that if you’ve never done urdhva danurasana before it’s because you’re not yet comfortable with all those levels of risk and self-awareness, not because you’re not physically ready for it.  And that’s the beautiful thing about this pose, in this context.  (As well as a reason to instead practice setu bandha sarvangasana, or bridge pose.)

It’s profoundly about trust.  Something we all have to find our way toward, even in a world that can be, at times, so very hard to trust.

Urdhva Danurasana Instructions

Tagged as: maggots in mushrooms, processed versus natural foods, salmonella in peanutbutter, yoga and motherhood