All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

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About Eve Ogden Schaub

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.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 56

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I’ve been on pins and needles all this last week, worried about Thursday. Thursday Vermont Public Radio reporter Steve Zind came to interview me about the No Sugar project.

Ack!

See, here’s the thing. As I sit here writing my fifth sentence, (does “Ack!” Count as a sentence?) I realize I’ve already gone back and changed the first sentence at least three times. That’s what I love about writing- the process of going through and getting it to say exactly what you mean to say in exactly the way you mean to say it. This is the reason I’d be a truly terrible politician, for example, or trial lawyer, or radio interviewer for that matter: I don’t really do “off-the-cuff.” I live in perpetual awe of those who can.

Instead, I do the opposite. I love finally finding the right word that hits your meaning on the head like a soft, firm hammer. I love the fact that I can sit down and write for ten minutes and when I look up I realize it has actually been two hours. I love going back and reading something I thought maybe wasn’t all that great and totally surprising myself by being entertained or interested by it after all- as if it had been written by somebody entirely different from me.

But the interview went fine- I mean it probably went great. Steve Zind is an incredibly nice guy, and besides that he was honestly interested in our weird little project. He asked great, to-the-point questions and worked to steer me back on course whenever I got away from the original question too far or completely lost my train of thought. (Hello? Earth to Eve!) He even went with me to the supermarket for a bit of grocery shopping and it was fun sharing with him my nomadic life on the fringes of the supermarket. Like the old adage, we stuck to the store’s outer perimeter of produce, meat and dairy, steering clear of the darker inner sanctum of processed everything. Like we were on a recon mission, we ventured in on our rappel ropes only to quickly nab boxes of Shredded Wheat and Triscuits before zipping back out as if those scary florescent Cheetos might suddenly launch a surprise attack.

In addition to not being so terrific on the spot, another insecurity of mine is the whole not-being-a-doctor thing. I mean, I can read David Gillespie’s Sweet Poison and watch Dr. Robert Lustig’s “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” till I am blue in the face, (I am up to four times through The-90-minute-Bitter-Truth at this point) but I just can’t quite seem to keep all those metabolic transactions in my brain at one time. No- that’s not true. I can keep it in my brain, mostly, but not in the super thorough I-know-this-stuff-like-the-back-of-my-hand-way that is required when you are called upon to coherently explain the matter to someone else.

But I did my best anyway- and ever since I’ve been going it over in my head wondering how much of an idiot I really sounded like. Of course, another bad thing- but also a really good thing- about being interviewed is that sooner or later someone will ask you a question you haven’t heard yet, and haven’t prepared an answer for.

“What about joy?” he asked me as we drove toward the Price Chopper. “Isn’t some part of eating fundamentally about joy?” It’s a great question. Way better than “but you eat honey, right?” or “have you lost any weight?” or any of the other questions we regularly get asked.

I don’t remember my answer, but using my super-human powers of interview revisionism, I would like to re-answer that question now. What I should’ve said is this: A lot of people, my husband included, either take or used to take tremendous joy in smoking cigarettes. The question is, at what point does that joy get overridden by the realization that this thing is very probably addictive, and going to kill you? Because that’s what we’re talking about: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, liver disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer and… have I mentioned anything that scares you yet?

My Aunt Bonnie died of alcohol-induced diabetes. Although I didn’t know her very well, my understanding is that she didn’t have the money or the insurance to care for her illness, but she sure as heck wasn’t about to give up drinking. That wasn’t even on the table. The way my cousin tells it, Aunt Bonnie made her choice.

Bottom line: how much substance-related joy would you be willing to give up, if you knew it was going to kill you? Cigarette smokers, drug addicts and alcoholics the world over have been forced to answer that question time and again, and I suspect, eventually, all us sugar consumers will be too.

Can we have occasional sugar? Sure, if we think about the right way: like the occasional drink, or the occasional cigar or cigarette (if we’re one of those rare individuals who can smoke the occasional cigarette.) If we can restore sugar to its place in our culture as something truly special. I don’t know about you, but if I eat something at every meal including breakfast and snacks… I don’t consider that special.

That’s what I should’ve said.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 55

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I’ve been experimenting with brownies, and no, not that kind. Sheesh. I’d really almost forgotten how much I LOVE to bake. Sure, once in a while I get to make our Monthly-Agreed-Upon-Sugar-Containing-Special-Treat… but that is like dispensing water to a goldfish with an eyedropper.

I miss everyday cookies. I miss after-school cakes. I miss just-because pies. I miss having something sweet for no particular special occasion at all. Is it really just the sugar? Or is it something more metaphorical than that?

I’m not sure. But now I have my elephantine-size jar of dextrose and the world of treats is opening up again. First, I made Strawberry Ricotta Cake– whose recipe is available at David Gillespie’s website howmuchsugar.com– and the angels sang. Then, last week I began playing around with brownies in the hopes of bringing something to my daughter’s fifth grade class that wouldn’t invoke any gag reflexes. I was shooting high- I didn’t want to fall back on banana-and-raisin cookies, which I imagined the kids- who haven’t yet learned how to be as aggressively polite as grown-ups- would be tentative and lukewarm about. I wanted something more dramatic than that… something that looked and tasted like something they’d choose for themselves… on purpose. Something they might actually be surprised to know contained no added sugar.

So of course I went a little overboard, baking three different batches in two days. Everyone in my house was delighted with the sudden flood of brownies and repeatedly being asked to (sigh!) taste them.

The first two batches came from David Gillespie’s website again, but this time from a paid subscription portion of the site, which is to say that if I gave you the recipe I’d have to kill you. That’s okay, because unlike the Ricotta Cake, I didn’t have lots of luck with the Chocolate Fudge Squares Recipe: they came out undercooked and pudding-y inside, and my attempts to bake them longer did result in a better brownie, but a tad cakey and dry.

For the third attempt I decided to be truly daring and improvise a dextrose version of my favorite King Arthur Flour brownie recipe- you can imagine my shock when it actually worked and they were quite good. As in: if-you-didn’t-know-it-was-a-dextrose-brownie-you’d-never-know-it-was-a-dextrose-brownie-good. I’ll post the recipe here. If you read the last post you know that the kids ate them up, no questions asked, nary a surreptitious napkin spitting in the bunch. I was so proud you’d have thought I invented a cure for Fruit Loops.

Most recently, I tried the other day another howmuchsugar subscription recipe: Coconut Cake. As you may recall, we have a coconut pudding cake recipe that is much beloved in our house, but has yet to make it onto our Desert Island Dessert list… so this seemed like a good next attempt.

And how. Seriously, the kids were so excited by the wonderful smell of baking coconut and warm cake they couldn’t wait for it to cool completely before attacking the top with spatulas full of dextrose-cream-cheese icing. It was a bit of a runny mess as a result, but boy was it good! And it was so nice to have this ordinary, everyday-feeling cake, without having to feel required to go crazy and make the Mona Lisa of desserts since it would be a-whole-nother thirty-some days to till we got to have another one.

So dextrose is starting to look a lot like our friend. I can’t lie to you and say the desserts which result from it are just as sweet as what our culture is used to: they’re decidedly not. At thirty percent sweetness of traditional table sugar, you basically can’t fit enough dextrose into most traditional recipes to achieve that level of sweet-iousity. To us, however, with our recalibrated taste buds, they taste plenty sweet, maybe even preferably so. We don’t have to feel quite so completely in denial of all things sweet-ish, which is lovely.

Now, we just have to work on the image problem: dextrose just sounds too clinical, too science-y. I don’t care how good they are, you won’t find “Dextrose Coconut Cake” on the menu of your favorite restaurant anytime soon, and “Glucose Coconut Cake” is even worse, like something astronauts might eat in space. So how about it people, suggestions?

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 54

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Now that we are creeping up on- dare I say it?- halfway through our Year of No Sugar (!!!) there is a very pleasant law of dietary inertia setting in, that is: a person not eating sugar tends to stay not eating sugar. Compared to our shaky beginnings on January first, we’ve acclimated significantly to the challenges of shopping differently, eating differently, and talking to people about it. I still make mistakes, dumb ones, like just the other day when, for variety’s sake, I picked up a package of Applegate Farms organic ham slices at the health food store instead of the usual Applegate Farms organic roasted turkey, without double-checking the ingredients… um, Eve, hel-lo? Still, we’ve gotten to a point where we might be what you’d call… fairly well used to it.

To celebrate meeting the nebulous milestone of being “fairly well used to it,” Greta, my eleven year old daughter and I did a short presentation for her fifth grade class which we might’ve titled “Yeah, Like, What the Heck is Greta’s Family Doing, Again?” I was nervous. I realized that for all the talking and reading and thinking and agonizing I’ve done on this subject, I haven’t spoken before a group about it at all. Sure they’re fifth graders, not a congressional inquiry, but nonetheless I had visions of difficult biochemistry questions being lobbed at me by kids who aren’t about to give up their chocolate-covered Twinkies without a fight.

Worse, as I made up my notes for the talk, I was having trouble striking the right chord somewhere in between being the world’s most boring health teacher (“Can anyone tell me the incredibly fascinating difference between lactose and galactose? Hmmm?”) and scaring the pee out of them (“Well, according to what I’ve been reading, sugar causes obesity, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, prostate and breast cancer, not to mention elephantitis of the pores, rampant yellow toe fungus, the end of the world and not getting asked to the junior prom!!! AIIIGHHHH!”)

Most of all, I worried about the same thing all mothers of pre-teen girls worry about: budding eating disorders. The last, last, LAST thing I wanted to do in the course of discussing important topics like the national epidemic of obesity, was to inadvertently encourage some fifth grade girl not to eat. Have I put enough pressure on myself yet? Just wait till I have to talk to The New York Times– I’ll melt into a little savory puddle on the floor.

But I think it went okay, after all. I focused on some key terms and statistics I thought might perk their interest: how every man, woman and child consumes on average 2.7 pounds of sugar per week (I held up a five pound bag of sugar to demonstrate one person’s two week allotment. Interestingly, the kids seemed rather unfazed by this), what a “Western Disease” is (guesses included “pneumonia” and “malaria”- so good we talked about this one), and how doctors decide whether a person is a healthy weight, overweight, or obese. I mean, you hear about an “epidemic of obesity,” but what does that really mean?

I put the BMI (Body Mass Index) formula on the board: weight in pounds times 703, divided by the square of your height in inches. Amazingly, the kids really perked up at this. There were sudden shuffling noises as kids grabbed for pieces of paper and pencils, presumably so they could calculate their own BMI, although I have to admit that I wasn’t about to start figuring out what sixty-six squared is on paper. I demonstrated how I got my own BMI by plugging in my own height and weight… and whipping out my handy dandy calculator.

The other two most popular part of the hour was more predictable: when Greta distributed my most recent dextrose dessert effort: carob chip brownies. I was delighted to see that everyone ate their entire brownie- which to me equals success, not just for my changed palate, but to kids who may very well view sugar as one of the four food groups. That’s one of the things you can still say about kids at this age- they haven’t learned to varnish their opinions yet in the name of politeness. Most fifth graders aren’t going to eat a yucky brownie just to be polite to someone’s mom.