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 8

A Year of No Sugar,

As expected: there are some bumps in the road on the way to no-sugar nirvana. Last night after reading my post my husband Steve took issue with the “fruit juice rationale” that I had so carefully worked out, and I got a little emotional. Maybe more than a little. (“You just don’t care about this project do you? Sniff!”) I was tired, cranky, sweet-deprived, and worst of all he had a good point. I couldn’t even have a piece of chocolate to console myself about how hard this all is. It doesn’t help when I remind myself that this is only day ten, with 355 more to go.

Have I mentioned this is hard? Like, “sugar-is-out-to-get-me-and-lurks-around-every-corner-waiting-to-pounce” hard? True confessions time: in addition to still trying to throw-out/give away/finish eating the sugar-ingredient-ed items in our pantry- Pepperidge Farm goldfish, Late July crackers, the now-infamous organic chicken broth, and so on- Steve and I have each faltered and had a bite (okay three) of desserts put in front of us at various events (Steve’s downfall: bread pudding, mine: homemade chocolate birthday-party cake). Okay, okay, I know it’s only been a week, but this “working out the parameters” period is killing me!

Nevertheless, so far we have managed to establish the following guidelines:

  1. No sugar. Which means no:white sugarbrown sugar

    cane sugar

    molasses

    maple syrup

    honey

    evaporated cane syrup

    agave

    brown rice syrup

    dextrose (check your french fries!)

    artificial sweeteners of all stripes

    and yes… fruit juice

     

  2. The exception: as a family we’ll pick one dessert to have every month which can contain sugar. If it is your birthday that month, you get to pick the dessert.
  3. Eve’s “fruit juice rationale” –ie: the idea that fruit juice is okay if there is actual fruit present- is to be used only in the event of a food-emergency. As in: “we need to eat dinner tonight and it’s either this or toast.” (see also: Murphy’s Law of Hats and Sausages.) Translation: no more Polaner All-Fruit jam, no more fruit gummis. Darn.

Next hurdle: our youngest daughter’s sixth birthday is this week, but her party is this weekend. It’s already been decided that we’ll have cupcakes at the kid party (she wants chocolate with strawberry icing)- but then, how do we have a family birthday party- for a six-year-old- without a dessert? That’s the $64,000 question.

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Information About The No Sugar Project

 

A Year of No Sugar: Post 7

A Year of No Sugar, , ,

Here’s one for you: how is a DRY CLEAN ONLY tag like sugar? (This inspirational metaphor came to me after I discovered this morning I had shrunken my favorite winter hat in the wash after failing to read the tag.) Answer: precisely the moment you make the assumption it isn’t there, is when it will be. Call it Murphy’s Law of Hats and Sausages if you will.

You see, Friday night I had grand plans of trying out a new soup recipe, so I headed with the kids in tow to the store with a shopping list that read:

  • 3 oz. Spinach
  • 8 oz. Tortellini
  • 1 lb. Sausages
  • milk

I was feeling optimistic about cooking more meals from “scratch” and thereby avoiding the sugar issue altogether.

Silly me. Although the spinach and milk posed no problem, I was in for a surprise at the refrigerated pasta products section as package after package of tortellini revealed the presence of sugar thirteen or fourteen ingredients down. Strike one. Fortunately, I was delighted to find that the small bags of cheese tortellini by the dried pasta section would work.

Next, wandering by the seafood section the kids clamored for one of our favorite treats: smoked salmon. Because I’ve been feeling like the sugar drill sargent of late, any edible indulgence that doesn’t involve sugar is suddenly very, very attractive. Buuuuuuut- can you guess? Oh yes, our favorite brand of smoked salmon let us down in the sugar department. Luckily the brand next hook over would do.

On to the sausages. And you can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? You wouldn’t think it’d be hard, but try finding supermarket sausages without sugar, I dare you. By this time I was pulling my hair out in large fistfuls wondering if we’d be reduced to eating dirt sandwiches for the next twelve months. What have I gotten us into? I wondered. It was at this moment I found a package of sweet sausages which listed in the ingredients dried apples and fruit juice.

Now, making rules for our project thus far has involved splitting quite a few hairs and the fruit juice issue has been a big one. As Dr. Lustig points out in his lecture Sugar: The Bitter Truth, fruit juice is sugar- and without the fiber of the originating fruit it is every bit as detrimental as the other forms of sugar we know and love. Our rule regarding fruit juice has therefore become this: no products containing fruit juice unless they contain actual fruit as well. Therefore we have been able to buy Polaner All-Fruit Jam with which to flavor our yogurt, as well as fruit sauces, fruit leather and fruit gummi-like snacks for the kids to take in their lunches. It felt like a bit of a stretch, but technically the sausages did have both fruit pieces and fruit juice- so the sausages went into my basket with a sigh of relief.

Phew! I was deeply grateful catastrophe would be averted for yet another night. That night as I prepared the soup I realized I will have to revamp my definition of “convenience foods” to include virtually anything that has a list of ingredients. Nonetheless, despite everything, we had done it. Tonight we would eat, a nice, interesting, and fairly homemade meal- with no sugar.

I went to pour in the six cups of organic chicken broth I have stored by the box in our pantry, when a terrible thought occurred to me. I stopped. No. Couldn’t be. But what if….? Cautiously, as if defusing an explosive, I turned the box over to check the ingredient list: Organic Chicken Broth… Organic Chicken Flavor… Natural Chicken Flavor… Organic Evaporated Cane Juice- DAMN!

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Information About The No Sugar Project

 

A Year of No Sugar: Post 6

A Year of No Sugar, , ,

I am now a savory person living in a sweet world. Do I feel deprived? Well- I cannot tell a lie. A bit. Yes. Definitely.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m speaking relatively here. Are there lots of topics probably way more important than whether or not Eve Schaub got to put honey in her coffee this morning? Yes.

That being said, I wouldn’t be bothering with our family “experiment” if I didn’t think it had value. In fact, if you listen to the lecture which inspired the idea of attempting our family year without sugar, you might just wonder why more people aren’t talking about sugar and it’s omnipresence in the contemporary western diet- quickly becoming the contemporary diet of all industrialized nations. In this talk posted on YouTube, “Sugar: the Bitter Truth,” pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig makes the case for sugar being the root of every evil from obesity and Type 2 diabetes to hypertension, cardiovascular disease and stroke. If we could find a way to reduce the incidences of all of these maladies, wouldn’t it be worth talking about? If there’s another way to look at- or perhaps even opt out of- the treadmill of diet and disease in our culture, shouldn’t we be talking about it?

So when I say deprived, I mean relatively so. I know- there’s a tiny little violin playing somewhere just for me. And yet, it’s funny the things over which one feels more mournful than others. Last night at dinner at our favorite local restaurant, I managed not only to forgo the Oh-My-God Bread Pudding, (gasp!) but when our dear friend Carol enjoyed it, amazingly enough, it really didn’t phase me. Really! However, it was another matter entirely this morning as I stared longingly at the Crispy Hexagons cereal box on the shelf… (forgot to toss those out- darn!)

Another phenomenon I’ve noticed is the “waiting for the other shoe to drop” feeling I’ve been getting at recent meals: it’s as if I’ve just seen three quarters of a play when suddenly- the curtain goes down and everyone goes home. It is so thoroughly ingrained in me to expect a little- or a big- sweet finale at the end of a meal, but especially at the end of a labor-intensive home-cooked meal or a rare evening-out meal, that I find myself experiencing a sort of phantom dessert syndrome. “What, no fireworks? No crème brulee or tiramisu? Not so much as a mint?” my brain chemistry complains.

Yep, one week and my brain is already talking to itself. Well, this should be an interesting year.

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Information About The No Sugar Project