Less Filling

We are helpless in the matter of food. As parents and children, the subjects of what, when, and how much to eat are vexing, endlessly debatable, and, I think, a source of skepticism that can often stretch lifetimes. Considering the hours we have probably logged projecting false confidence that our children will actually like what we are foisting, and overlook it’s textural challenges, and olfactory deficits, the fact that it’s not cake – really, they would be foolish to completely trust us about anything ever again.

Have you ever tried lima beans? Please do. They are excellent. They and leafy vegetables, despite how your parents mistreated them. And all of us – grandparents in particular - can we please stop referring to the muscle-building properties of spinach? Cook broccoli for one minute, not twenty? Can we please just start calling it cake?

How much easier then to be polar bears, say, eating half our body weights at a time, then napping and hunting and fasting for weeks, sometimes starving, but secure in our polar bear brains that we are merely obeying nature’s imperative, as our ancestors did, and their ancestors before them, at least until that dumpster appeared around the mountain.

Where food ends up, and where it comes from, can seem so magnificently convenient sometimes, it’s no wonder we fail to attach value - or risks – to all of its exotic variations. In these I’m in no way an expert, though I am blessed to live near a crossroads of fruit trucks and fish trucks and vegetable trucks and curious garbage. When each of my sons was very little, the easiest way to call myself a good father and a good homemaker and in any way otherwise useful, was to take them for a spin around the aisles of our overstuffed market, learning and debating the colors and titles of produce, and popping wheelies in our overstuffed cart. I hope this paid dividends in ways that were not apparent to me at the time, but what it did not create was good eaters, in fact my youngest is very nearly terrified of fresh fruit, or the thought of me pushing it, though he is game to dig into hot vindaloos, stinky cheese, and will even slurp on an oyster as long as he was the one who suggested it.

So I do not have answers, but we could probably do worse than to imagine food as an adventure, as it is depicted in How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, where each of a number of ingredients require a separate journey. Or a magnificent accomplishment like in The Giant Jam Sandwich where the inhabitants of a bee-stricken village pool their resources to build a very big solution.

As surprisingly expressive actors in a rescue drama, like the pepper and mushroom in Gus and Button, returning a wayward spinach leaf to something like a magical kingdom of Crudités. Or hilarious escapees, as in The Runaway Dinner.

As a monument to indomitable nature, sprouting spontaneously in the middle of an emperor’s courtyard in The Mighty Asparagus. Or the happy little consequence of a boy’s good faith and carefulness in The Carrot Seed.

Then, lastly, as a testament to the wonders of evolution - and original thinking - in The Red Lemon. Red or yellow, harrowing or huge - we do not suffer from reminders that the nutritional content of a piece of food is often the least interesting thing about it.

Consider pomegranates. Ostrich eggs. Squid. Look at an ear of corn for heaven’s sake: imagine happening on that at the top of a seven foot stalk without knowing better. Of course we take such food for granted when it is removed - or we are - from it’s shapes, shades and places of origin, and so anything which attempts to restore the thrill of whatever McDonald’s suspects it is lacking when it dresses its French Fries in the color of an actual ripe tomato, well, of that I am generally in favor. Let’s furnish the happy meals before they do.