Am I guilty of child abuse if I give my 4-year-old daughter a hot dog for dinner? Will a SWAT team burst through my door if I unwrap a slice of processed American cheese or drop a Pop Tart into the toaster? Being a responsible single parent can be a daunting task when it comes to nutrition. I try to provide well-balanced meals for Leah, but after a long day at the office, I hardly have the energy to bake my own whole-grain bread, steam all-natural basmati rice or prepare a turkey casserole. And it's not like I have a history of eating wholesome, farm-fresh meals every night myself. In fact, I'd say that most of my neuroses concerning my daughter's digestive fare can be traced directly to the sugary, synthetic, freeze-dried foods that graced my own childhood plate.
Don't get me wrong. My mother was a caring, loving person. She just wasn't an expert on the nutritional value of the food she served. Her main concern was that I ate everything on my plate: "You mustn't waste," my mother railed on a daily basis. "Don't you know there are starving children in Europe?" My mother's focus on the children of Europe said more about her background than it did about the current patterns of world famine. While I don't doubt that there were starving children in Europe during the 1960s, as there probably were just a few miles from our Chicago home, global attention had long since shifted from the ravages of postwar Europe to third world trouble spots. While other parents admonished their children with the latest statistics from Ethiopia, the Sudan, Vietnam and Bangladesh, my World War II-raised mother, unable to break free from her own mother's constant admonitions, was forever locked into her own Marshall Plan of European recovery.
As I struggled to lick my plate clean, I tried to imagine how eating every morsel of my Swanson TV Dinner was going to help the wide-eyed orphans in the bombed-out ruins of Rotterdam or Berlin. When I got fed up with this guilt trip, I offered to pack up the remains of my Salisbury steak, freeze-dried vegetables and burned-at-the-edges brownie and ship them off to the Continent. There was only one problem with my plan: I'm sure that the nuclear waste that passed for American cuisine in the 1960s would have been rejected by officials of the World Health Organization.
I suspect that my short stature and premature baldness came not from genetics but from the steady diet of manufactured, chemical rich, artificial foods I consumed as a child. This is what prompts me to feed Leah nutritious, all-natural foods whenever I can. Not that I hold a grudge against my mother for her skewed view of nutrition. The new prefab goodies she fed us were designed to free American women from the drudgery of the kitchen and add quality time to family life. My mother yearned for culinary freedom. As consumer dependency shifted from the farmland to the factory, we all felt lucky and proud to be citizens of the ultra-modern United States. Our foods reflected the hopeful wonder of American technology. Why spend countless hours preparing the boring meals of our grandparents' generation when you could simply grab a box, open a can, break a plastic seal or pull back a foil lining?
My day began with breakfast cereals that boasted a staggering array of artificial colors, flavors and preservatives. Cocoa Puffs, Sugar Pops, Cap'n Crunch. My favorite was Trix -- tiny spheres of crunchy Day-Glo sugar that sent spirals of fluorescent colors strafing across my bowl of milk. I also liked Lucky Charms, which featured mini-marshmallows in leprechaun-inspired shapes. I foraged past the bland cereal bits to find the yummy hearts, moons and clovers in a spectrum of hues that never existed on God's rainbow.
Lunchtime foods sprang forth from a stock of canned goods that was big enough to outlast the Cold War. Our luncheon menu might include Spaghettios ("the neat new spaghetti you can eat with a spoon!"), Chef Boy-Ar-Dee mini-raviolis, Goober's peanut butter and jelly swirled together in the same jar or the glorious marshmallow fluff, a pristine white concoction of sugar and air that was made into heavenly "fluffernutter" sandwiches. When she had a little extra time, my mother prepared comforting Kraft Macaroni 'n' Cheese. As she mixed the powdered topping with milk, it was magically transformed into a cheesy goo guaranteed to stay in the colon until Nixon's resignation. All of these treats were washed down with refreshing sugary beverages such as grape Kool-Aid, strawberry Fizzies, Tang, Fresca or chocolate-flavored Yoo-Hoo.
- - - - - - - - - -
For our nightly dinner meal, my mother demonstrated a flair for the exotic. Hawaiian meatballs made with canned pineapple in heavy syrup; lemon chicken, cooked all day in a Crock-Pot with frozen lemonade concentrate. Sometimes she served honest-to-God fresh produce: wedges of watery iceberg lettuce drowning in the dazzling gelatinous red-orange of Kraft French Dressing. In an era that worshiped brand names, our dinners were offerings upon the altar: melted Velveeta, cubed Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese, ReaLemon juice, crushed Kellog's Corn Flakes, Kikkoman Teriyaki Sauce, Wish-Bone Italian Dressing, Lipton Onion Soup Mix, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, Durkee's French Fried Onions. Capitalism was alive and well in America and living in our pantry.
My mother's desserts rivaled science fair projects. She made Dole pineapple upside-down cake, sticky Rice Krispies treats and the infamous "mock" apple pie made of Ritz crackers instead of fruit. My favorite dessert was the short-lived Jello 1-2-3. Although prepared like regular Jello, this amazing product would separate into three distinct layers as it cooled: creamy top, fruity middle and plain artificial black cherry bottom. Top the whole thing with non-dairy Cool Whip and you have a dessert fit for an Apollo astronaut! I didn't care for the gritty middle layer but I was not allowed to bypass it and move on (remember those hungry tots in Europe!).
One result of all the forced plate cleaning was that I forgot what it felt like to be hungry. Whether or not we felt like eating was never a factor in our mealtime plans. In truth, our schedules were related more to the TV Guide listings than to our stomachs. Our 12-inch Sony sat at the end of the white Formica kitchen table as a full-fledged member of the family. I remember the meals of my childhood in conjunction with what was on TV at the time. During breakfast we watched "Dennis the Menace," "Captain Kangaroo" and "Rocky and Bullwinkle." At lunchtime we enjoyed "Bozo's Circus" followed by "Let's Make a Deal." Dinner usually began with 15 minutes of gruesome color footage of the Vietnam War followed by a changing schedule of sitcoms: "My Mother the Car," "The Munsters," "Mister Ed," "My Favorite Martian," "The Mothers-in-Law."
Looking back, I'm surprised I was a thin child. I should have been clinically obese. Especially when you take into account the overstocked candy bowl at the entrance to our kitchen. This bottomless candy bowl was legendary in our neighborhood and responsible for a good portion of my local popularity. I never left the room without grabbing a Mars Bar, Milky Way, Butterfinger or Hershey's Almond Bar. Other daily snacks included Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Suzy-Qs, Fiddle Faddle, Screaming Yellow Zonkers and my favorite delicacy, pink snowballs: globes of cream-filled devil's food cake cloaked in a thick layer of the softest marshmallow and coconut that science could deliver.
A rare nod to our high calorie intake during these years was the occasional purchase of Diet Rite, a soft drink loaded with soon-to-be-discredited saccharin and cyclamates. In the late 1960s, perhaps as a backlash to a decade of chemical experimentation on the American public, the virtues of natural foods began to move into the spotlight. At first, my mother's version of "natural" was using maraschino cherry juice as a food coloring in her cake batter, but eventually we started consuming a few "health food" items such as Roman Meal whole wheat bread and tubs of soft artificially colored margarine that replaced butter on our frozen waffles. Whatever ad campaign persuaded Americans to forsake wholesome butter for these nasty polyunsaturated mixtures was a stroke of marketing genius.
I'm not quite sure what the official repercussions were of ingesting all that junk food, but I don't want to play nutritional Russian roulette with my own young daughter. I wouldn't dream of letting Leah near a box of Trix or Lucky Charms and I worry that every bite of a Big Mac or sip of a sugary soft drink might take an inch off her height or a month off her life. Over the years my own metabolism has slowed down to the speed of Log Cabin syrup and it's become very difficult for me to shed any of the 20-or-so extra pounds I've put on in recent years. I know the sludge I grew up eating is partly responsible: I visualize the mutated molecules of pink snowballs jumping onto my fat cells and hanging on for dear life.
I must admit to one serious infraction with my daughter, however. Recently, out of a wistful sense of nostalgia, I brought home a can of Franco-American Spaghettios. The moment I opened the container and got a whiff of those sauce-covered circles, I was transported back to my childhood dinner table circa 1965. I could close my eyes and see my mother setting down the accompanying Tater Tots and Ball Park Franks. I could hear the strains of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song in the background. I gingerly placed a bowl of Spaghettios in front of my daughter and watched her take her first bite. Her eyes grew as big as pink snowballs and she smiled from ear to ear in a chemical-induced reverie. But before you call the child welfare bureau, rest assured: Whatever the current status of starving children throughout the world, I did not make my daughter eat every bite.
