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 20

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It’s hard to know whether I’m being a killjoy or not. I mean- of course I am. No sugar? Hel-lo? But my thought along the way has been that there are lots of ways to celebrate, to have fun, to mark milestones… we’re just removing one of them, right?

And yet. My mom put it best when she mentioned she had purchased Valentines for the girls with no candy. It was hard, she said, not only because sugar is everywhere, but because buying special celebratory treats with sugar in them is “a lot of the fun.” Taking the sugar out of Valentine’s Day for my mom might be akin to taking the roller coasters out of amusement parks for others: like, why would you do that? Isn’t that messing with the point of the whole thing?

Yes- but, in our culture at least, we don’t ride roller coasters for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Riding a roller coaster is, I even would venture to say, a “special” activity. Over time, and due to the ever-increasing cheapness of corn-based sugars in particular, food manufacturers have become expert at hiding sugar in virtually every ingredient in practically every meal. So what’s my problem? Here is my problem: sugar isn’t special anymore. We just think it is.

This is how one can go, for example, to a kid’s birthday party and have a meal consisting of pizza with sugar in the crust, sugar in the tomato sauce, and a big glass of sugar to drink, by which I mean fruit juice. By the time we get to the overt sugar of dessert, we often don’t realize how much sugar we’ve already had. Multiply this by three times a day…? Add in the fact that dessert in Brobdingnagian portions is available at practically every restaurant into which one ventures? “Death by Chocolate” may be right.

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So last night my husband Steve and I enjoyed a much more successful date night than two weeks ago, managing to have a nice meal at a restaurant in a nearby town. When I asked the waitress if the nachos contained any sugar (hey- you didn’t think I was going to eat tofu and dirt, did you?) she immediately asked if I was avoiding carbs, or sugar in particular. “No sugar as an ingredient,” I clarified, impressed with her quickness on the topic; clearly she has dealt with many a client seeking to satisfy the requirements of one eating plan or another. I mentioned that I was particularly wondering about the corn chips or the salsa.

She assured me that there was no sugar in any aspect of the nacho appetizer. Despite her confidence, I had to wonder… really? I mean, how do you know? Are we counting all of sugar’s many aliases too? I mean, it’s been a month plus and I’m still learning new ones. It makes me think of the two girls in my older daughter’s class who are deathly allergic to nuts… if I end up unknowingly eating some dextrose or evaporated cane syrup in my meal, it isn’t going to kill me after all. It’s difficult to imagine how worrisome an ordinary thing like dinner at a restaurant must be for anyone with such serious ingredient concerns.

Food in our society has gotten sufficiently complicated that one feels the need to bring a magnifying glass and a wikipedia search engine to every list of ingredients one encounters, not to mention adding an extra hour to our day for deciphering. And who does that? It’s just too hard. Eat the darn thing- we say in surrender- it’s probably not going to kill you. It seems to me that today’s time-saving food products are like tax returns: the only people who know what’s in them anymore are the professionals.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 19

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Hooray! One month down; a mere eleven more to go. I thought this might be a good moment to pause and reflect on some of the things that are working for our family so far:

-Popcorn! We’re big on snacks around here, so in addition to the ever-present bowl of apples (local) and clementines (decidedly not), I’ve found popcorn to be a reliable no-sugar option. Whereas we used to buy a box of microwave bag popcorn at the supermarket fortified with about four-thousand mysterious ingredients, now we buy popcorn kernels by the pound from Ryan- a vendor at the Dorset Farmer’s market. We pop it with a little canola oil, add olive oil or butter and salt and voila! I never used to be a huge popcorn fan, but now I’m a new convert.

-Hummus!! The kids are big fans of this chick pea and tahini dip which never tastes right when we buy it from the store- I make it myself in the Cuisinart from a can of chick peas, some garlic, olive oil, salt, lemon juice and tahini. Paired with corn chips or crackers it goes so fast around here that I have yet to put any away in the fridge for later.

-Oatmeal made with milk and topped with fruit has become a breakfast staple. Sure, it’s a pain having to turn the stove on and actually cook before I’m even fully awake, but I’m getting used to it. In the last month we’ve tried oatmeal with fresh cut-up strawberries, blueberries and frozen organic raspberries on top. Raspberries seem to lend the best juicy sweetness to the oatmeal.

-Steve’s famous banana ice cream has been a lifesaver when we’re feeling deprived and in need of a dessert option. In the last month we’ve had it at least three or four times. We’ve lucky to have the Champion Juicer in our appliance arsenal, because I’m not sure how else one would achieve that soft-serve texture that it creates from the frozen banana flesh. We’re SO excited about it that we tried to make some for a friend and her kids a few nights ago even though we didn’t quite have enough banana-freezing time, and thus ended up with more of a banana pudding- which actually I thought was almost as good. (Our friend and her kids however- who aren’t as sugar-starved as we are apparently- seemed less than impressed.)

-Raisin cookies! In my mostly-fruitless search for some genuine no-sugar dessert recipes online, I found this recipe for cookies made with raisins and apples. You have to work a little harder than with most cookie recipes- the fruit gets cooked before being added to the dry ingredients, and the mixed batter must then chill in the fridge overnight… but it really does result in a cookie! Without sugar! Okay, this might be the banana pudding effect at work again; I probably wouldn’t try to stack these up against Nestle Tollhouse or anything, but for a no-sugar dessert these are sweet and chewy and definitely cookies. I wasn’t sure how I’d make a whole year without cookies!

–Anything to not feel deprived. One pivotal thing I’ve learned over the last month is that so much of our battle is psychological: we’re often fine eating at home, but when we are surrounded by friends at school or skating or movie night at the school, all having snacks or treats we aren’t, suddenly things get exponentially harder. Therefore, when we’re at skating I make it a point to let the kids buy an apple or banana from the snack bar. No, the fruit isn’t organic, in fact it doesn’t even look very good, and yes, it is ridiculously expensive ($1.50 for an apple, anyone?) but when I suggested to my six-year-old that we could bring better fruit from home she objected immediately. “It’s more fun to buy it here, Mommy.” Okay. We aren’t buying the soft pretzels or hot cocoa or french fries or gatorade that everyone else is- but at least we can buy something from the concession stand too. And sometimes that can make all the difference.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 18

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Dinner Last Night

There’s nothing like a day spent running to just not fall behind to make you appreciate your own mother. My mom has been reading my posts lately and we’ve been talking about the no-sugar project. She says the no-sugar diet isn’t all that different from what we ate growing up- prior to the super-saturation of the grocery store with convenience foods and high fructose corn syrup.

And that’s true. Looking back, I recall a clock-ticking consistency to her nightly meals: meat, starch, vegetable; meat, starch, vegetable. The meat could be a pork chop or a slice of meatloaf, or maybe a piece of swordfish. The vegetable was usually something simple and defrosted: peas, spinach. The starch was often mashed potatoes, or baked. Occasionally we’d be treated to her comfort food extraordinaire: her lemon chicken, her hamburger stroganoff or her fantastic meat spaghetti sauce. But looking back I can see that day by day she was working to provide us a diet of consistent food-grouping. Remember the four food groups? My mom was all over that.

Not to mention that she was insistent about dinner time being dinner time: no TV, no reading, no toys at the table. We’re going to sit here and talk to each other if it kills us- that was my Mom’s motto. It was from Mom that I learned the invaluable tradition of a sit-down, family dinner with healthy, homemade food.

And then every Friday, it evolved, Mom would have the night off and Dad would cook instead. He turned to Craig Claiborne’s New York Times column “The Sixty Minute Gourmet” and things would get really crazy- it was on these nights that we first tried pesto (“what’s this green stuff?”), hamburgers with blue cheese inside, and hummus. When Dad was in the kitchen, it was always a mess- there was usually flour everywhere. There was always a hint of danger, like maybe, just maybe, he’d set the kitchen on fire. Or we just might not have dinner tonight after all. And then at last Dad would emerge from the kitchen flourishing a giant cheese souffle and we’d watch it deflate like a hot air balloon as we cut cloud-like slices of it. It was from Dad that I learned to be excited about food and it’s possibilities.

It wouldn’t be until I went to sleep-away camp that I would learn about other modern culinary innovations such as Jell-O, “Bug Juice,” Cool Whip and potato flakes, all staples of our camper diet. It was a very active camp and I recall being famished all the time, but snacks were infrequent and getting ahold of an errant plum in between meals was a huge deal. When visiting parents brought cookies we’d squirrel them away in our clothing trunks like mice hoarding for the long winter. Then one summer it appeared: the soda vending machine (cue the angel choir) and we’d scrounge our dimes and nickels for another dose of that sweeter-than-sweet carbonated sugar water.

Cookies? Plums? Soda? Baked potato? Back then it was all just food. High fructose corn syrup had only been introduced in 1975, and manufacturers were just beginning to discover all the things they could add it to, to “up” the taste while reducing the cost.

So in some ways I’m returning to ideas about how to eat that I learned as a kid. And gaining a whole new appreciation for the folks who taught it to me.

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**PS- Interesting AP article on the connection between high sodium intake and American’s poor health- “Govt advising Americans to eat far less salt”- sounds like we could say the exact same thing about sugar, doesn’t it?

“Even the most motivated consumer can make only a certain amount of progress before it’s clear that we need extra support from the food industry.”

-Dr. Howard Koh

Asst. Secretary, FDA Health and Human Services Department