As someone with both a sensitive gut and a strong belief that nutrition is at the root of most questions of health and wellbeing – physical, emotional, mental – I can’t just throw caution to the wind and eat whatever while on vacation. Our extended families respect our dietary needs, but that doesn’t mean that holidays don’t require a lot of planning if I want to stay healthy. And if I want to avoid giving my son the idea that he’s missing out on something good.
Even with everyone’s best of intentions and understanding of our diet at heart, I still find myself confronting uncomfortable feelings about how to stick true to my values about food – which are pretty important values to me – and also to be tolerant of other people’s choices.
I tell my almost-four-year-old son that everyone eats different food depending on what is right for their bodies. This comes in handy for dealing with him (and me) being gluten-free and for appreciating that other kids can’t eat other things, like nuts. But the truth of it is that I do think my choices to privilege vegetables (along with fruit, meat, and nuts) over grains and to avoid pasteurized dairy and processed foods are pretty healthy choices for most everyone. And I don’t want my son tempted yet to make other choices.
My husband’s brother and sister and their families are big bread eaters, but that was about the extent of what I’d call junk food that came into our house over Thanksgiving. Unless they kept it out of my view, I didn’t have to contend with chips or soda. And since my husband and I were cooking most of the food ourselves, it was very easy to share our style with others, not to mention enjoy all the compliments!
Christmas was different. We traveled to two different parts of our family having sent (by request) our grocery lists ahead of time. I’m thankful for the time and expense spent on us. But travel sure does point out how much time and money my way of eating takes.
In one corner this Christmas, wearing SmartWool and outlet Patagonia, were my husband’s brother and his family, who surpass even my crunchy quotient. Having recently become more avid students of ayurveda, they chalk up most health problems to dosha balance issues (which nutrition and herbs can address).
When they visit my mother-in-law’s house, we all live free of a microwave and heat up even our plain drinking water on the stove (the better for digestion, of course). The dad and kids are gluten-free and are used to buying raw milk in the supermarket back in Maine, where it’s legal. My sister-in-law’s New Years resolution is to not eat any meat she doesn’t know, as in having a connection with the farmer. So clearly I left this house feeling good about most of my choices and even wanting to go further than I already have in the real food direction.
Then we traveled to another corner, the land of mainstream American eating. Wearing Christmas jammies and sweaters are the members of my family. Again, I’m grateful for the acceptance and understanding of my son’s and my dietary needs and generosity to seek out the foods we need prior to our arrival.
But I still crave a shared belief about food being really connected to something besides the moment of eating. There were so many different bags of chips, tins of cookies, boxes of doughnuts and packages of microwave mac n’ cheese floating around, I felt like I was in a 7-11. I was simultaneously disgusted and also desirous of the junk myself for the first time in a long time.
The power of suggestion is, well, powerful. Watching my siblings and nieces dip bread in egg yolk, I felt compelled to toast myself a piece of millet bread for breakfast, something I almost never do. Watching six children and eight adults nibble sweets all day, I sought out and gobbled down the gluten-free “blondies” my mom had made even though they were full of canola oil, sugar, and “chocolate-flavored” chips.
At home, with our Thursday farm food orders, it’s easy for me to stay true to my food/consumption values. On the road, I felt the pull of lifelong associations with certain foods, especially starchy and sweet foods. As long as this kind of eating is on other people’s turf, I’ve been thinking that my son sees it as just a different cultural habit. So far, he’s taken most GF accommodations and substitutions in stride. Still, as I fought my own entrenched temptations, I bristled at him seeing four days of unbridled gluten consumption as part of a happy family time; I want to keep him free of those associations.
My son was so busy playing with his cousins and enjoying unfettered access to my (low-sugar, gluten-free, dairy-free, coconut-milk-heavy) pumpkin pie, he didn’t even ask for foods I didn’t want him to have.
(Well, not much, anyway. After restricting his dairy based on observations of his behavior and under-eye circles, we let him have a whole mango lassi at an Indian restaurant and some other dairy back at my sister’s house. He woke one morning not laughing and chatting like normal but instead kicking and screaming at us, demanding, “I want cheese!” Yikes. I had to take him outside on a freezing cold morning at 6:25 a.m. and promise him a Pecan Pie Lara Bar -- an acceptable sometimes-food snack in our world -- so he wouldn’t wake up the other 11 sleeping people.)
But he did come home talking about how he “just looked at the crackers” and “didn’t eat any.” The expression on his face might as well have gone along with telling me he “never inhaled.”
I don’t want him thinking that other people’s food is evil or bad or that it’s so mysterious as to be something he feels compelled to try when we’re not looking. But I also, frankly, don’t want him eating it.
Jessica Claire Haney is a freelance writer, editor and tutor. Her writing has appeared in parenting publications and poetry journals. A former high school English teacher, Jessica is mother to one son and is passionate about holistic health and well-being. Find more reflections on parenting at her blog, Crunchy-Chewy Mama, and on DC Metro Moms Blog. Jessica also shares health reflections and recipes at Inexact Science: Raising Healthy Families.
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