Food Fights: Kindergarten, Bad Food Weekend, and Other Moralizing Moments

I belong to a listserv of people who study food and this morning I posted an article that was in the New York Times about how the current nutrition obesity war climate has meant that many schools are banning bake sales as fundraisers. I just got this email from my friend Charlotte, who said:

Check out the second picture in the article ...there is a woman teaching a kindergarten class about "good foods" versus "bad foods". Apparently chocolate is a bad food, and its at war with sushi, which is a good food. And ice cream is a BAD food? Who knew. I thought it was yum yum GOOD and full of healthy things like MILK. I was so distressed by the good V. bad lesson and then I realized that it's from the very same school where Saskia will probably be going...!

Here is what I wrote back to her and our other friends:

Ah, California, where sushi is good but gay marriage is not.

When Zoe was little (Esme was probably too small to remember it much) we used to do what we called "Bad Food Weekend" -- I would go to the supermarket with them and we would buy all the foods we saw advertised on TV but never bought -- things like Fruit Loops and Fruit Gushers and PopTarts -- and then we would spend the weekend eating them. The funniest time was when we did it at my sister's house so the bad food wouldn't come home with us. Her kids were teenagers at that point and it was really interesting shopping with them because they stood in the frozen food aisle with anticipation, wanting to buy things like ice cream (which, in my household, will NEVER be a bad food) and cake (something we eat occasionally) and chocolate (also never a bad food) and afterwards they got Burger King, which appalled Zoe, who complained to me about the smell all the way back to my sister's house.

So, the lesson we got out of it was not that the food on TV tastes like shit (which, for the most part, it did. I think Lucky Charms was the only thumbs up) --- but that "bad" is relative. My version of bad is "what the food industry wants to sell you."

Back when I lived in the Not-As-Crunchy-As Oakland-But-Almost Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, my friend Tom (who owned an Asian noodle shop and whose kids eat things like pickled herring and wood ear mushrooms) and I were on the School Lunch Committee for all of about six weeks. It was all either of us could stand, especially since there was one woman we immediately dubbed Nutrition Nazi Lady who spent every week fighting with the high school student representatives -- who told her that if she took french fries off the school menu, they would just end up going downtown during their lunch periods and getting worse food. The things the kids were really concerned about were culturally appropriate foods (rice and beans), which to me made much more sense. What really killed it for me and Tom, though, was dealing with the distributor, who insisted it was simply impossible for them to get any other kind of fruit than Delicious apples and bananas and that the local food cost them more. This is in a place with tons of local farms, a community-based organization to support agriculture, and at least two colleges that used local milk and produce to feed their student population...

Yesterday I bought a book for Zoe (who is now 13) and Esme (who is 9) called HELLO CUPCAKE! Zoe wants a container of fondant for Channukah so she can learn to decorate cakes. But she's also asking me to make stir fried tofu for dinner every night. Esme is downstairs eating a snack: a bowl of brown rice and a sliced apple. I am sure she will eat her last bit of Halloween candy for dessert later tonight.

I think we'll have to send Saskia some cupcakes when she starts kindergarten... or in the meantime, get her the same book. Oh, and just in case the moral contradictions of sushi versus chocolate are too much for you, go to this website right now (it's where the photo above originated...).