INSTINCTIVE PARENTING by ADA CALHOUN

Author:ADA CALHOUN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: GALLERY BOOKS
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Food

On Food

My son asked for more juice. I filled up his cup with some diluted Mott’s apple juice, and he returned to playing happily on the playground. But nearby children had heard the word: juice. They began to flock to us like zombies smelling brains.

“Juuuuuuice! ” they wailed.

“No, honey, here’s your water,” one father said, thrusting a reusable metal water bottle into his daughter’s hand.

My son offered the offending juice cup to his friends, but their parents quickly pulled them back.

“No, honey, juice is full of sugar,” one mother stage-whispered to her whimpering little girl.

Several kids on our playground are allowed only water. Experts are behind this trend: Parents magazine has been railing against the evils of juice for decades.

My husband, raised in Texas on candy and soda, was baffled by this water purity. “What is this,” he asked me, “ Babies in Alcatraz?”

Juice contains empty calories; I get that. But isn’t fruit supposed to be good for us? We dilute the juice so he gets the fluoride and all the goodness of water and also the flavor and vitamins. But all this no-juice purity makes me want to rebel totally and give my son a six-pack of Coke.

It’s great that there’s a move to more local and organic foods, but in the frenzy to get everything organic, a perception has emerged that everything nonorganic is somehow evil. In fact there are only a dozen or so vegetables and fruits, such as strawberries and lettuce, that are really good to buy organic if you can afford to. According to the Environmental Working Group, there are plenty more where your pesticide exposure is negligible: avocado, banana, broccoli, and watermelon, for example. 1 Also totally not necessary to buy organic: pasta, cereal, bread, and fish. When it comes to organics, there are a lot more foods to not-worry about than to worry about.

At a birthday party Oliver and I went to recently, I noticed one of the kids— a healthy-looking kindergartener— had a brown-bread sandwich on her party plate rather than the cheese pizza everyone else was eating. Lactose intolerance? I wondered. Tomato allergy? Luckily someone else asked. Her parents explained: “She doesn’t eat sauce.”

She’s not allergic. She just doesn’t eat it. Sauce.

Whatever, I thought, she’s a picky eater. They want her to have a good time at the party and not rock the boat by trying to get her to eat what’s served. Okay, path of least resistance. I get that.

But the kid complained about her sandwich the whole time and asked for cake every two seconds. She whined and fussed and negotiated. How many bites did she have to eat? How about just one more? It went on for the entire lunch. Bringing the extra food had called a lot of attention to this very special child and had been, I thought, a bit rude, as the party throwers had gone out of their way to get something almost all kids love. And the worst part: both she and her parents seemed so stressed out by the whole thing.

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