Year of No Sugar (3 page)
Authors: Eve O. Schaub
At that point, I knew we didn't go so much as a single day in our house without having some form of sugar or other, perhaps not even a single meal, so this experiment was pretty much guaranteed to wreak all kinds of unpredictable havoc with our lives. I loved it.
I would start a blog and write about what happened, the day-to-day events that were bound, I thought, to be interesting or surprising, or frustrating or funny. The writer in me loved the idea of searching out the answers one by one like a kitchen-cupboard Sherlock Holmes. Not just for ourselves, but for others as curious as I was. Had anyone done this before? Could we really do it? What would actually happen? Would we all be abjectly miserable for twelve months? Would we all grow thin and haggard for lack of cheerful sweetness in our diet? Would we develop superhuman levels of health and agility, able to leap tall boxes of Bran Flakes in a single bound? Would we secretly hoard candy in our shoes and cupcakes in our sock drawers? And oh, God, what about
Halloween
? And
Christmas
??
Well, I reasoned:
There's only one way to find out.
_______
Now I can hear you saying, “But wait a minute! That was quick. Didn't you put up a fight for your beloved sugar? Didn't you go for at least a
dip
in the river of Denial?”
Well, perhaps I should back up.
Up until the year of the experiment, weâmyself, my husband, and our two daughters, Greta and Ilsaâwere a
fairly
normal family when it came to food, I think. Perhaps a bit on the liberal, organic, dirt-worshipping side, but nevertheless, still
fairly
middle of the road. We ate meat. We liked snacks. We liked desserts. When the circus came to town, we'd throw caution to the wind and purchase big, fluffy balls of electric-pink cotton candy despite all our better judgment. Life is short, I reasoned, and although I have my requisite worried-Vermont-mom concerns, (hormone-free beef? GMO corn? pesticides in the potatoes?), I tried to keep them in check. I didn't want my kids growing up being afraid to
live
.
We had come to this particular, carefully balanced point after a fair amount of dietary experimentation, especially before the kids were born and we had time for such nonsense. I had been a steadfast vegetarian of varying shades and colors over a period of two decades, and my husband had dabbled in the vegetal arts as well, although rumor has it he did it to impress a certain girlfriend who turned out to be me.
Once we were good and married, Steve began, over time, to reveal his carnivorous side. I did most of the cooking around the house, so vegetarian still remained the house rule, if not always that of its inhabitants.
What I didn't realize when Steve and I wed was that I was inheriting a family nutrition expert as well: Bill, Steve's father. Perhaps
expert
isn't quite the right word for someone who changed his mind so frequently, and sometimes radically.
Obsessive
might be closer. He was a man possessed by the idea of superior health and the use of nutrition as a means to that end.
Bill, who passed away a few years ago, was a vegetarian before people even knew what that was, back when health food stores were fringe operations frequented and operated by folks who still thought communes might be a really good idea. But Bill Schaub was no long-haired hippy; he was a trim, clean-shaven lawyer who rose over a period of decades to become Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board and be conferred the rank of Meritorious Executive in the Senior Executive Service by President Bill Clinton. I try to picture him walking into the Toledo-area granola shop in his fresh-pressed suit, his aftershave clashing with the smell of patchouli and wheat grass.
In one favorite Bill Schaub story, he grew a mustache. (Of course he did! It was the seventies!) This development coincided with the peak of his interest in the nutritional value of mangos and his decision to import boxes of the fruit himself, which of course resulted in his brown mustache turning bright orange from the sheer volume of fruit that passed his lips.
There are lots of Bill Schaub anecdotes like this, illustrating not only his passion and single-mindedness when it came to the subject of nutrition and food, but also his mercurial natureâone year it was mangos, the next it would be something else. When we had Greta, while other people were sending us
The Poky Little Puppy
and
There's a Wocket in my
Pocket!
, Bill sent us
Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right
. He had a subscription to
Dr. Shelton's Hygienic Review
and
The China Study
was his idea of some light evening reading. The first time I heard about the Atkins diet was when Bill went on it. After thirty years as a vegetarian, he woke up one morning and would suddenly eat nothing but meat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Steve is his father's son and inherited from him not only an attentive attitude toward food and nutrition, but also the ability to endure strange and restrictive diets. He is also a former marine, and that generally means he can be his own best drill instructor. I've watched him try water diets, egg and meat diets, vegetable diets, various vitamin regimensâyou get the idea. So far I've been able to talk him out of fasting, which Bill turned to alsoâonce for a distressing period of over two weeks (albeit in a supervised setting).
The one diet Steve and I tried together was the MacDougall Plan, which, as I recall it now, was comprised primarily of eating brown rice with brown rice on top. I wandered around all day dreaming about grilled cheese sandwiches and yogurt. “Have an apple!” Steve would cheerily suggest when I complained of feeling hungry in between meals. I lasted about two days.
So, between Steve and his father, I now knew more than I ever wanted to know about food fads and nutrition crazes. I was tired of extreme eating that was supposed to be The Answer to everything from having more energy to curing cancer. I wanted my family to eat healthily but in a way that was psychologically sustainable.
_______
FEAR OF FOOD
â BY STEPHEN SCHAUB â
Food and I have always had a very complicated relationship, in part due to my father's obsession with diet and health, so when Eve began talking about A Year of No Sugar for our family, it sent my mind and emotions into a bit of a dark flashback to my own confused childhood with regards to food.
My father was a very intellectual man and always looking for the perfect diet that would provide a life of good health free of disease, most of all cancer. Some of my earliest childhood memories of my dad are of him fasting, eating LOTS of lettuce, and taking my brother and I to the local health food store for fresh fruits and vegetables. The time he took us to see
Star Wars
at the movie theater, I wasn't very excited at first, because I figured he was probably taking us to a lecture on the virtue of broccoli or something. He bought reverse osmosis water in enormous jugs and talked about the benefits of shark cartilage. He tried weird hobbies no one had ever heard of like yoga and organic gardening. Over the years, his diet slowly ranged the entire map of food extremism as he read new books and nutrition literature: one day he'd be eating only vegetables and standing on his head in the living room, the next he'd be eating only meat and talking about Russian strength training. This was my dad.
My mother, on the other hand, loves snack foods and always worked very hard to be a buffer from my father's sometimes-obsessive dietary diatribes. While Dad did his own thing, for the rest of us she cooked regular, Midwestern
meals: meat, vegetable, starch. Her chocolate pudding desserts as an after-school snack were loved by both my brother and me, but we knew they needed to be finished, without a trace of them in the fridge before my father was home from work. Don't get me wrong, my father was not some food-controlling tyrant, but rather he felt he could save us from all the bad stuff out there, from the health consequences a poor diet would create in our lives. It was love in the form of carrots and lettuce.
So when my father was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty-nine, I could not help but feel that so much of his life had been built on a belief that had betrayed him. Good food makes you healthy. The sacrifice of not eating a particular snack or type of food would be outweighed by a better quality of life and longevity. Had he been wrong? Despite all his efforts, all his studying of nutrition and all the dedication to one plan of eating or another, he nonetheless came down with the one disease he feared most.
Even after the diagnosis, though, my father refused to give up on his belief in the power of nutrition and extreme eating, which was probably very important, since his belief in the healing power of modern medicine was shaky at best. He listened to his doctors to a point but put his true faith in what he ultimately decided was the perfect anticancer diet: a grueling regime of liquefied lettuce, large slices of watermelon, and the occasional plain, baked sweet potato.
Perhaps it really did help prolong his lifeâafter the initial diagnosis of stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma he would live another five yearsâbut if so, it was at a tremendous cost.
This new diet would require an effort beyond all the others which had preceded it and would alter our relationship with him for the rest of his life. During these years, visits were difficult. Meal preparation took a significant portion of every day: shopping for, washing, drying, and finally juicing fields of fresh lettuce into kryptonite green drinks. Traveling and eating out were all but impossible. We supported his need to have a sense of control over his own life and made the best of a very difficult situationâwhat else could we do? We loved him.
In the end, like so many who suffer cancer, my father died a horrible death. I will always feel sadness thinking about the separation from his family members and friends that his relationship with food created throughout his life.
So it was with this history rooted deep within me that I heard my wife's suggestion with a sense of both curiosity and panic. Eve is a very, very levelheaded woman. I knew for her to suggest such a radical idea, especially with her knowledge of my father and his longtime history of food fears, meant that this was terribly important to her. We have had a strong marriageâat that point thirteen years and counting. For even longer than that time, she has been my best friend, my partner, and my greatest advocate for my work as an artist. How could I not support her now?
After weeks of talking and conferring with professionals that we were not going to wreck our children's childhoods or create a fear of food in their livesâas still exists to some degree in mineâI cautiously gave my vote to do the project. Eve was already full-steam ahead.
_______
Meanwhile, we nonetheless found ourselves members of a larger community increasingly rife with dietary restrictions, both voluntary and otherwise. Unlike when I was growing up, when it seemed to my kid-eyes as if pretty much everyone ate pretty much everything, these days we have many, many hyphenated friends: we have gluten-free friends for whom I never remember to leave the noodles out of the soup. We have organic-only friends who raise and slaughter fifty-two chickens every fallâone for every week of the year. We have vegan friends and local-only friends and nut-free friends and lactose-intolerant friends. We have friends for whom I can't figure out what is left for them to eat but cardboard and paste. Sometimes it's voluntary, other times decidedly not, and most often the necessity of such restrictions falls murkily somewhere in between, as in, “No, I haven't been diagnosed celiac/lactose intolerant/digestively opposed to purple, but I just
feel
so much better when I avoid wheat/cheese/eggplant and grapes.” You can understand why all the etiquette experts are repeatedly queried by anxious hostesses about how to deal with so many different potential guests who
1.   can't eat
2.   won't eat
3.   would rather be boiled alive than have it suggested they consider eating
â¦so many different things.
And did I mention we live in Vermont? Home to back-to-the-landers, experimental-living-arrangements, and more massage therapists than you can shake a stick at? I have seen
more god-awful things put forth on plates in the name of healthful sustenance than I care to recount here, but suffice it to say that the jicama-and-zucchini salad is
never
as good as you hope it will be. I'll never forget when Greta was little and a fellow mother was incidentally describing how her kids were playing with their regular breakfast of “tofu and carrots,” and I had trouble listening to the rest of the story.
Seriously?
I thought.
Tofu and carrots
for breakfast? Should we all just have our taste buds commit hara-kari
right now?
Then again, because Vermont is still part of America, the
other
side of the spectrum is also everywhere around us too; you could call it modern-day Caligulanism. Greta, at age eleven, regularly came home from school regaling me with tales of her classmates' trips to Pizza Hut and McDonald's and ice cream for dessert every night. I myself had been dismayed to witness kids bringing armloads of Lunchables and Snackwell's and whole liters of Mountain Dew on school field trips. One day at the supermarket, I stared in open-mouthed horror at the cart of the woman in front of me who was buying nothing but sugar in a variety of different colorful packages: soda, sports drinks, Kool-Aid mix, pudding cups, frosted cereals. Though we lived in the same town and she had a small child in tow, just like me, I marveled at how different our two carts could possibly be, as if we came from two different
planets
. Or species.
So, long before the fateful day when I sat down and began to watch Dr. Lustig's medi-mercial, I had already given the question of how one should best eat a considerable, really
inordinate,
amount of thought. What is the best path to follow, in between eating everything and eating nothing? Where did our family fall, between the McDonald's folks and the tofu-and-carrots-for-breakfast folks? Between worrying all the time
and never worrying at all? Many was the time I had felt that there were
so
many different parameters that I felt morally, ethically, and nutritionally compelled to obey that following them all at once would likely mean making our family's diet a full-time unpaid job. Organic? Free-range? Hormone-free? Local? Eco-friendly packaging? Non-genetically modified? Free of laboratory-born, unpronounceable ingredients? And what about pasteurization versus raw? Were we even allowed to
care
whether it tasted good? The more we know, the better off we are
supposed
to be, but the unvarnished reality was that the more I knew, the more frustrated I was guaranteed to be at the supermarket.
