Year of No Sugar (16 page)

Of course, I've had many, many s'mores since then (I insisted we have them the night of our wedding reception, for example), but none was ever as good as that very first one. Maybe it wasn't about the s'more as much as it was about everything else that night: the campfire, the after-dark chill in the air, the fact that I was away from home,
really
away, for the first time, and it being exhilarating and frightening and eye-opening all at the same time. I was beginning to realize that I could exist as a person without my family to lean back on, to define me, and decide for me what I thought. And my homesickness changed, evolved into a new kind of strength I had never known before.

Yes, all that can come from one good s'more memory.

So you see my dilemma. Granted, being my daughter means that Greta has had her share of s'mores from the get-go. (“Is that car engine over there on fire? Honey, where are the marshmallows?”) And yet, could I bring myself to deny Greta what seemed to me to be a reasonable facsimile of my own s'more experience? Surrounded by her friends, far from home, on the verge of pre-adulthood? How much of a hypocrite
was
I?

And so, after a Hamlet-like hemming and hawing (To
s'more
? Or
not
to s'more?) I decided we would embrace the s'more. In the end, I was awfully glad we did—despite being really, truly, ridiculously sweet, they are still one of the most delicious things I can possibly imagine. The thing is, it only,
only
works if you are tired and sweaty, muddy and smoky,
and sitting around a campfire in the dusk in the middle of nowhere. (Anywhere else? Not, repeat, NOT the same. My next bumper sticker will read:
Ban the Microwave S'more!
) Greta, for her part, was so giddy to enjoy the forbidden treat that she was dancing.

But it was more than that, more than just what our taste buds were telling us. We all, kids and parents alike, partook together of the same foods that night—capped off by the sensory fireworks display of the s'more—and I was reminded of that strange, ineffable bonding power in the sharing of food, even if it's just hamburgers and chips on plastic plates. I was glad of my decision to participate in the meals fully, for reasons on many levels.

As for
the rest
of the food, every item on the dinner menu that night had both a sugar and non-sugar option: Green salad (great!) with dressing (sugar!)? Hamburger or hot dog (fine) with ketchup (sugar!!)? Potato chips (okay) with BBQ flavor (sugar!!!)? If you picked and chose carefully, you could either avoid sugar almost entirely, or enjoy a meal overflowing with that nonessential ingredient we love so well. Amazing how easy it is to go from one extreme to another—how similar two plates could look even while one is loaded down with that familiar toxin and the other abstains. Because we knew what to choose, we got through dinner relatively unscathed.

Breakfast the next morning, however, made dinner look monastic by comparison. Breakfast was sugar with sugar and would you like some sugar on that? My head was reeling: hot cocoa (sugar) was followed by Nutri-Grain bars (sugar), graham crackers (sugar), and white bread (sugar) with jam (sugar). There was also a choice of banana or apple, which were the only sources of fructose (sugar) still at least wedded
to their original fiber. All that was missing from this meal was whipped cream, sprinkles, and a cherry.

“But what
could
you have done?” you may well ask. Way out there in the middle of nowhere with no omelet station in sight? Well, we could've brought bagels, with hard-boiled eggs and cream cheese in our coolers. We could've made plain oatmeal over our campfire and washed it down with some cups of peppermint tea. Yes, as we have seen, breakfast—even a camping breakfast—is hard. But it's not impossible.

However, in this instance, we had no choice but to have dessert for breakfast and hope that somehow we would magically be able to create enough energy out of it to power us through the hour-long hike back out of the forest that was to follow. How do they expect these kids to function on a breakfast like this? I wondered, wide-eyed. I was horrified to recall that it was not all that different from what is served every day for the
school
breakfast.

Now, let me reiterate once more, for those who might have missed it previously, that I LOVE our school. I love our teachers, and I think they are incredible and amazing people for daring to lead this excursion of preteenagers into the woods every year—they certainly don't have to. They do it, I imagine, because they know it will be a terrific bonding experience for their students, that it will stay with them as a powerful memory not only throughout the school year, but—and I'm not overstating the matter here—throughout their entire lives. Small childhood events can have magical power like that.

Many of the kids on this trip had never been camping before. A significant number had never even
been
to the forest and farmland where it was held, despite the fact that we all live within a few miles of it and that its walking trails are free
and open to the public. The kids were wildly excited about small things: telling scary stories around the campfire, getting to sleep sardine-style in the lean-to, playing Manhunt with flashlights in the dark, having s'mores.

So far be it from me to rain on the parade. The problem, as far as I can tell,
isn't
the teachers or really even the school as much as it is the culture that has grown accustomed to eating sugar with every meal and, frequently, in every item on our plates. This is what we have come to consider normal. How do you undo “normal”? That's the $64,000 question.

I got to know the kids in my daughter's grade better than ever before on the course of this overnight, and I have to tell you—they're fascinating. I was endlessly impressed by their humor and creativity and leadership and resilience and energy. But I'm deeply worried about them and what the future holds in store for them if we can't fix our food culture in time.

_______

Interestingly, most people necessarily assumed going for a year without sugar would be harder on the kids than the grown-ups, and most of the time I shared that assumption.

Then every once in a while, my kids would surprise me. Like the morning I asked if Ilsa would like some bananas on her oatmeal. It was the kind of question we ask that is a total formality, in the vein of “Would you like to have an after-school snack?” or “Would you like to go on that roller coaster?”

But Ilsa stopped me in my tracks. “No,” she said.

!

I was pretty sure I had misunderstood, so I asked her again.

“No,” she repeated. “Sometimes I like to have it without.”

!!

Instead of asking her “Who are you and what have you done with my six-year-old?” I watched her eat an entire bowl of oatmeal with milk. Plain. And then, as if the forces of the universe hadn't toyed with my sense of the proper order of things quite enough, Greta came in next and proceeded to do the very same thing.

The thought suddenly occurred to me: perhaps children may have an easier time with the omission of sugar in their foods, since they haven't had as many years to get addicted as us tall people.

It wasn't the only time such a thing happened either. Once it started to get warm out, both kids had been mentioning that not having ice cream in summer was going to be one of the hardest parts of the project. Therefore, when I saw some plastic make-your-own-Popsicle molds, I jumped at the chance to replicate an ice-cream-ish experience in our own no-sugar universe.

_______

_______

Greta was especially excited and asked to make them…repeatedly. Folks, this child has the determination of a jackhammer.
After a few days of not making popsicles I, in desperation, ran out and bought the ingredient we had been lacking: yogurt. We raced home and mixed up a batch of banana yogurt popsicles that were—hooray!—frozen by dinner.

You know where I'm going with this: they loved them. The kit makes six popsicles, so we were set for a satisfying dessert for the next three nights. Next time around, I tried to be a bit more creative, adding in fresh strawberries so they turned pink in the blender (turning anything pink is always a good move in a house with two girls) and then adding some frozen berries to float randomly about like little prizes. Again—super big hit. Huge.

But here's the kicker: one night I tried one and—don't tell the kids, but—I wasn't as impressed as they were. It was good but…very icy. Like sucking on a milk icicle. And not, forgive me,
sweet
enough.
Gasp!

So there you have it. I had officially become fussier than my kids. Imagine.

 

³⁸
Or as I've mentioned before, the
illusion
of choices.

³⁹
From homemade, no-sugar bread.

⁴⁰
Supermarket
bagels contain added sugar, but those of our local bagel shop, as it turned out, did not.

⁴¹
See exception number three: “The Birthday Party Rule.”

Originally, when I first contemplated the idea of a Year of No Sugar, images of cravings, temptation, and deprivation came to mind. My personal mental picture involved me in an Old West–style showdown with one of those wonderful square Ritter chocolate bars: “Let's go,
chocolate
,” I'd sneer, perhaps from under a sombrero. “You and me.
Mano a mano
.” You know, if chocolate had hands.

But in truth, what I was finding was that the hardest moments
weren't
solitary, quite the opposite. In fact, if I could just home-school the kids and avoid all restaurants and social events for the year—in other words, if we could just move to a new address under a convenient rock—the project would be a comparative snap. Turns out, at least for me, the social isolation of being on a different wavelength from the rest of the world around you was one of the most difficult parts of all.

For example, one day in April we attended the biggest local event I'd seen in my fourteen years in our town: a fundraiser to benefit the owners of a general store that had burned to the ground in the middle of the night two weeks prior. The event was so sudden, so shocking, so deeply upsetting to
the community, that within hours plans were being fomented on Facebook for what would eventually blossom into a huge community expression of support and love: the resulting blow-out event featured a pig roast and chicken barbecue, a silent auction of over a hundred items, a bake sale of gargantuan proportions, live music by a local honky-tonk band, a swing set raffle, tractor rides, and face painting. Phew! We showed up at five minutes after two in the afternoon—as the event was scheduled to begin at two—to find hundreds and hundreds of people
already
in line for all of the above. But most of all, they were in line for the
food
.

Now, we'd been doing no sugar for months now, so you might think by this point I'd have figured this food thing out, right? But then there's that annoying fact that I can be—only
sometimes
, mind you—a little slow on the uptake. Honestly, amazingly, it really didn't
occur
to me that we wouldn't be able to eat the majority of food on the menu for this event until we were already there. Meat and pasta salad? Fine, right? Wait—no, pasta salad would have mayonnaise, the pork and chicken had barbecue sauce, so, um, what else? Baked beans, coleslaw…sugar was certainly in most of the menu items if not all of them. And you can't very well go to an event like this, with hundreds in line behind you waiting their turn, and start asking volunteers nit-picky questions about the pasta salad. You just
can't
.

Fortunately, we had been assuming we'd eat there later in the afternoon as an early dinner, and we
had
eaten lunch, so we weren't starving. Instead, we focused on everything else: we bought event T-shirts, we bid on items at the silent auction, the kids swung (swang?) on the raffle swing set and got their faces painted. Practically everyone in town made
an appearance that afternoon, and in a town of just over a thousand people, that amounts to a great big party where you know virtually all of the guests. Now, in our neighborhood, a fundraiser is considered a walloping success if it raises anywhere near the thousand-dollar mark. At the end of this particular event an unheard-of $30,000 was raised to help store owners Will and Eric, who wandered around the event looking dazed by the outpouring of support.

_______

_______

Then friends of my two girls started appearing, licking soft-serve ice creams. Now
this
was hard. Reeeeeeally hard. You know how parents used to say “This hurts me more than it hurts you”? As a kid, you never believe it, but as a parent, you learn the true meaning of this. I would've given anything to hand them each a dollar and tell them to, of
course
, go get an ice cream. But. What kind of message would that have sent? How many more special events were to come this summer at
which special exemptions would be begged? How many
more
times would we give in, and at what point would our project cease to have any real meaning?