Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.
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Forget that stuffing in a box! Re-posting this video from two years ago, so you can follow along to make my favorite stuffing, with No Added Sugar. A holiday without a boatload of added sugar is not only possible but it is delicious and something you don’t have to feel guilty about afterwards!
Important note:Make the stuffing the day before, allowing the flavors to combine nicely.
Link to a post that has the full recipe for the Oyster Stuffing: https://eveschaub.com/2016/11/17/thanksgiving-stuffing-without-all-the-stuff/
When it comes to Halloween candy, how much is too much?
Halloween is over, but the memory lingers on. You can find it in the form of new residents of kitchen counters across the land: bags, pillowcases and plastic pumpkins full of added sugar. Have you ever looked at one of these bags and wondered: So.How much sugar is in there?
I mean, sure, it’s a lot. A ridiculous lot. But how much of a ridiculous lot?
Hmmmmmmm.Three pounds of candy
While looking at my daughter Ilsa’s haul soon after it appeared, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder this very thing. So, in the name of questionable, nosy-parent, food-nerd science, I set about to find out. Ilsa’s candy bag weighed in at just over three pounds. I dumped the contents onto a blanket and sorted it just like the kids do after coming home with it, grouping by type… Kit Kats over here, Sour Patch Kids over there, weird off-brand candy no one will trade you for over there.
The real question: does Ilsa realize how nerdy her mom is?
I compiled a list of all the different candies. And then it was time to figure out the sugar content of each and every piece. (After checking many sites, I found this one to be the most useful: https://www.nutritionix.com.) Once I added it all up, Ilsa’s fairly average candy haul turned out to contain approximately: 795 grams of sugar.
To put this in context, on their website, the World Health Organization currently recommends added sugar not exceed 10 percent of daily calories, or 25 grams per day. So, if we divide the amount of sugar in Ilsa’s Halloween bag by the WHO’s recommendation per day— 795/25— Ilsa’s candy is enough to provide her with all her added sugar for 31 days.
Interestingly, though, there’s more. The WHO website then goes on to further recommend that, actually, it would be even better if people restricted added sugar to 5 percent of daily calories, or half the amount they recommended just a minute ago, in the previous sentence. http://www.who.int/elena/titles/guidance_summaries/sugars_intake/en/
By this new and improved standard, of course, Ilsa’s candy lasts twice as long, or about two months. This assumes, of course, that she hasn’t eaten added sugar anywhere else in her diet.
But even if one never eats any dessert at all, we know that most people are getting added sugar from other sources in their diet. From juice. From ketchup. From store-bought chicken broth or salad dressing or crackers or mayonnaise or bread or flavored yogurts… you get the idea. What this means is that having more than one piece of candy per day is extremely likely to make you exceed your recommended daily limit of sugar. So if you can manage to limit your kids candy consumption to one piece per day (dare we hope for every other day?) that’s best. That’s the first take-away.
But there’s another, more important take-away; it starts with the fact that one pound of sugar is equal to approximately 454 grams. If Ilsa had brought home a three pound bag full of sugar- just sugar, without nuts or rice crisps or additives or any other ingredients- it would amount to… 1362 grams. So, working backwards, knowing that her bag actually contains 795 grams of sugar tells us that her bag is just over fifty percent pure sugar.
Caution: feet are not edible
I promise not to ask you what time the two trains will meet. But here’s the kicker: weighing in at three pounds, Ilsa’s bag contains, roughly, a pound and a half of pure sugar, right? As we’ve already concluded, this means that the WHO would recommend she eat her candy over the course of a month or two, but really more like three or four if you include the fact that she will very likely be getting added sugar from some other sources in her diet.
Meanwhile, according to Livestrong.com, the average American eats three pounds of sugar per week. https://www.livestrong.com/article/474832-recommended-grams-of-sugar-per-day/ So what the WHO is recommending Ilsa eat in one or two months, the average American is consuming it’s equivalent in… (wait for it)… three and a half days.
Let me say that once more, because it’s important:
The amount of sugar the WHO recommends we eat in one or two months, the average American eats in three and a half days.
Try to imagine eating 95 pieces of candy, an entire trick-or-treater’s bag, in three days. That’s about 27 pieces of Halloween candy a day. This level of sugar consumption is not theoretical- this is what the average American already does, Halloween season or not. So. Does the obesity epidemic make a little more sense now? (Not to mention the diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, liver disease, and hypertension epidemics?)
In this light, the statistics bear revisiting:
Right now, sixty percent of Americans are overweight or obese; if nothing changes, within two decades it will be ninety percent.
Already, being a healthy weight in the United States is the exception, not the rule.
Perhaps worst of all, this generation of children will be the first in modern history to live shorter lives than their parents.
We’d like to think that Halloween is a special time of year when we indulge in sugar a little more than we should. The reality— and the real lesson of my nosy-parent science experiment— is that those big bags of added sugar do not represent the exception. They represent the rule. It’s Halloween in America- Every. Single. Day. And the consequences of our unwillingness to recognize this fact are enormous.
Thank U Smarties! The one candy that has no fructose– the bad guy of added sugar
I know no one wants to be the dorky parent who hands out erasers or nickels at Halloween, or the no-fun parent won’t let her kid have more than one piece of their hard-earned candy every day or two, but you know what? I, for one, am embracing my dorkiness. Also, I’m hiding Ilsa’s candy bag in the freezer.
Garfield has been staring at me reproachfully all summer.
It all began so innocently last April when I had a seemingly brilliant idea… on my blog I would feature some of the more bizarre items I was having trouble parting with and my faithful readers could help me to shed them.
(Remember: I am, what one might refer to as a Clutter-Monger, so even after writing an entire book on the subject of clutter, the struggle continues. By the way “Proto-hoarder” is also a term that works. I tried the term “Baby-hoarder” but that just sounded like I hoard babies, and that would be a different conversation entirely.)
So… in theory: an entertaining subject (my strange things) with a noble purpose (both getting rid of it and showing it can be done. Hopefully.) Perfect, right? To that end you may recall I took what was intended to be the first of many reader polls, regarding one unfinished latch-hook rug of Garfield, the famed cartoon cat, that had been leftover from my youth. What should I do with it?? I implored blog readers. Tell me!! The verdict returned resoundingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly: Get rid of it Eve!
The majority instructed me to donate Garfield to some appreciative cause, so I settled on our local library children’s room as an ideal recipient. (Cause “Garfield” is kinda literature…. right?) Then came the difficult part: in order to make this item something anyone, anywhere, might actually want, I had to finish it, even though I had never done anything of the sort before.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m crafty as all get out; I love making stuff. That’s part of the problem… I can make stuff out of other stuff all day long, which leads to keeping all manner of weirdo orphan objects in the vain hope I may someday get around to turning them into something wonderful. So yes, I sew, BUT- I am entirely self-taught. Because of this fact, I am still trying to figure out things like the proper, non-Eve-improvised way to incorporate a zipper, or what the hell “ease” is, or why the automatic buttonhole foot looks like a little tiny medieval torture device for mice. This all leads to the occasional moment of distress when I am attempting anything more complicated than a Halloween costume.
So I’m gonna be a pillow. Big, fat, hairy deal.
So, every time I glanced in the direction of Garfield-the-Latch-Hook-rug there was this big, fat, I don’t know staring me in the face. If you have a clutter problem in your life, then you know that the emergence of an “I don’t know” is more than enough to halt everything— EVERYTHING— indefinitely. Perhaps forever. So all summer long, no matter what I did or where I went, when I got back home Garfield was there waiting for me, staring at me from the chair where I had draped him, with that grumpy look on his face, awaiting the answer to I don’t know.
Which brings me to the fact that, after weeks of truly Olympic-level procrastination, about two weeks ago I found myself at our friendly neighborhood Jo-Ann Fabrics, and I realized the moment had arrived. Having pretty much no idea what I was doing, I purchased what looked like the right zipper and a half-yard of some black velveteen.
Yes, I was now spending actual money in a quest to make someone take this item from me. But never mind that- I brought the items home and laid them out on the sewing table and stared at them. Garfield looked dubious. You are going to kill me, aren’t you? he murmured balefully.
No. Yes. Maybe, I replied. I pulled up a series of YouTube videos on the subject of zipper sewing and got to work.
It’s amazing to me the enormous, paralyzing power of I don’t know. Throughout the entire process I could feel my brain resisting, earnestly trying to talk me out of this… I ended up having a weird conversation with myself as I tried to install the zipper.
My brain: Hmph! This is ridiculous. What if you ruin it?
Me: Then at least I’ll have tried. If I ruin it then at least I’ll finally feel justified in throwing it away. Either way my problem is solved.
My brain: Don’t you feel stupid spending time on something you aren’t even keeping?
Me: It’s my time to spend how I like. Some people carve soap. Some people dye eggs. Some people do whimsical taxidermy.
My brain: You are so going to muff this up.
Me: Well, okay, but what’s the worst thing that could happen? I mean, besides sewing my finger to a cartoon cat? At least then I could claim the title of the weirdest emergency room visit that day.
The voice in my head was right on at least one point though— I did feel supremely stupid. Who did I think I was kidding? I couldn’t do this! As I tried for the third time to install the zipper the velveteen began to unravel in places. Crap! Then, just as visions of making another trip to the fabric store to spend even more time and even more money on something just so I could get rid of it were dancing in my head, at last, the zipper was in. I wasn’t winning any prizes in Home-Economics class mind you, but it was in. I had a look of rather grim determination on my face and the thought occurred to me that my expression was beginning to resemble Garfield’s.
Last came the pinning and sewing of the pillow to the backing fabric. And here, I was totally making it up- I hadn’t even watched a YouTube video on this. But you know what? Turns out there really aren’t all that many ways to make a pillow. It worked! I did have to undo and resew a few bits, to make the latch-hook canvas less visible and to get the ears properly pointy but once that was done, and stuffed with filling, I was amazed. Garfield actually looked just as I always imagined he would, way back when I first made him as a kid. Just like a latch-hook rug looks when you have it made into a pillow.
I brought Garfield-the-Now-Pillow to the living room and displayed him, trophy-like on the ottoman. Everyone humored me by ooh-ing and ahh-ing. What’s funny is how ridiculously proud I am of this irrelevant accomplishment. You’d think I’d found a cure for ear hair or something.
I think what I’m proud of is not the fact that I’ve made a halfway decent pillow. What I’m proud of is that I didn’t let that voice in my head stop me. The fear of “making a mistake” can be a blind-sidingly powerful fear, and these days I understand that it is that fear which is at the root of all my clutter. Letting go of that fear, or at least refusing to listen to it, is the very best thing I can do. If I can overcome my fear, then I’m pretty sure I can overcome my clutter. Even if it doesn’t all happen to have reproachful eyes that can follow me all summer long.
All that’s left now is to contact our local library. And break the news to our cat. She’s taken rather a liking to Garfield. Hmm. Do you think she could be considered an appreciative recipient?
No. Yes. Maybe, I replied. I pulled up a series of YouTube videos on the subject of zipper sewing and got to work.
Last came the pinning and sewing of the pillow to the backing fabric. And here, I was totally making it up- I hadn’t even watched a YouTube video on this. But you know what? Turns out there really aren’t all that many ways to make a pillow. It worked! I did have to undo and resew a few bits, to make the latch-hook canvas less visible and to get the ears properly pointy but once that was done, and stuffed with filling, I was amazed. Garfield actually looked just as I always imagined he would, way back when I first made him as a kid. Just like a latch-hook rug looks when you have it made into a pillow.
Eve O. Schaub 