Weekly Dish

And a month later…everything has changed again. Such is the nature of caring for an infant, I know, but I’m still not used to how impossibly fast life changes when you are enmeshed with one who measures her life in months rather than years.

I don’t know how the last month went for you, but around here, February stole through our back door when we weren’t looking, hung out just long enough to bluster and spit and stir up the fickleness that is Louisiana weather, and then, just like that, he disappeared.

Thankfully, in his wake, he left us with a baby who has learned that food is good. Which is quite a relief for us, I have to say. In case you haven’t noticed, we pay a good bit of attention to what we eat. Food is, in some sense, what we do: it’s how we spend a lot of our time, how we entertain ourselves, how we commune with each other and with our friends and family. So, for Josie to so violently reject food felt like a rejection of us somehow. I know that sounds ridiculous because it is — she just wasn’t ready yet, as all of you wise moms out there reassured me. And, she’s a baby for crying out loud.

But here’s the other thing I’ve learned about my child through this process: she is some kind of opinionated (I say that in my very best southern drawl). My mother is laughing out loud right now (can you hear her glee?) that I am dealing with the fierce independence that she faced nearly thirty years ago in the guise of another baby with a mind of her own. I’ve been hearing these stories my whole life — how when Mom tried to brush my hair, I grabbed the brush and declared, “Me do it! Me do it!” or if my dad ever actually won the game of Candyland, I would throw the whole board across the room in protest. But I never expected that strong willed streak would show up so early in my own child — it seems that her already-formed opinions have been coded into her DNA.

Regardless of how it got this way, Josie has made up her mind that she will eat on her terms, which means, she is the one who puts the food in her mouth. Once we crossed that hurdle — she grabbed the spoon out of my hand one day — she has been delighted to try all kinds of things.

And just like that, I had to figure out what to feed her. Now, I’m guessing by now that you’ve picked up on the fact that I have a few opinions of my own about food, but I should say that my philosophy is very much in process. Over the last year, David and I have been making a concerted effort to stay away from processed food and to spend as much of our food budget at the farmer’s market on seasonable fruits and vegetables as we can, but we haven’t always been this way. And we could certainly still do better, but we’re trying to stay away from food that has been trucked in from far away and move towards eating the fruits of our neighbors’ harvest.

And so, of course, looking at a jar of pureed bananas and thinking about putting it into my child’s body, I had lots of questions. Even if I buy the organic brand, where were those bananas grown? What kind of farm? How are the workers treated? How long did it take them to get here? How many nutrients were removed in the processing stages they went through to get into a jar that could sit on a shelf indefinitely? I know, I know. I’m taking this way too seriously, you might be thinking. But if I am conscientious about the food I put into my own body, shouldn’t I be even more concerned about a growing, developing body that, for the time being, I have complete control over? I know that won’t always be the case, and so, for now, yes, I’m being picky about what Josie eats. We’re trying to give her only whole foods — and to take Michael Pollan’s advice, mostly plants.

Perhaps my ideas about all of this seem hard-core or militant or just too fussy. But I believe that taste in food is cultivated, and as David and I are working towards intentional habits of eating, we’re bringing Josie into that lifestyle, and we want to prepare her taste buds for it as best we can. I’m not so naive as to think that she’ll never have sugar or refined flour or (heaven forbid!) French fries. But if I can prolong her exposure to those things and increase her taste for real food, then I want to try.
Practically speaking, this decision means that we exert a little bit more effort than opening a jar to prepare her food, but in the grand scheme of things, not that much more. One afternoon’s worth of prep work — cooking, blending, storing — will last us a whole month.

For the month of February in Louisiana, that meant a Sunday afternoon roasting a winter squash and a couple of apples, steaming spinach and Swiss chard and broccoli and carrots, pureeing it all in batches with a little bit of the cooking liquid, and spooning it into ice cube trays and tupperware containers. I also ground some brown rice and oats to make her morning cereal, and we keep whole milk yogurt in the fridge.

Once the prep work is done, meal time is as simple as opening a lidded container or thawing out an ice cube.

Clean-up, on the other hand, is another story.

You all were so kind and helpful as I worked through getting my child to eat; now, I want to know, what kinds of decisions have you made about feeding your kids? What challenges to your kids’ healthy eating have you faced? What should new moms be cautious about?

And, then, I promise, I will stop using this space to obsess about my child’s eating, and Weekly Dish will return to its regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for your patience!

Posted: Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 8:04 pm Filed under: Family, Miscellaneous Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.