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.
