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 5

A Year of No Sugar, , , ,
Health Food??

Today I spent a fair amount of time at BJ’s Warehouse in the attempt to buy food. This is a really good idea, at the rate at which I am getting rid of food around here.

Happily- I did manage to fill my cart, but not without some serious label reading. More than once I picked up a package which listed sugar as the umpteenth ingredient (gotcha!) only to go back to the drawing board and find another brand of the same sort of item which (hooray!) did not. Two seemingly identical bags of pistachios revealed their true nature when flipped over: one had sugar listed among a myriad of other ingredients, the other listed pistachios and sea salt.

See, now was that so hard? Is is so hard to just put food in our food? I mean, I’m just saying.

But forgive me: I’m tired and cranky from all that small type and realizing I had to throw my favorite breakfast cereal out this morning (Crispy Hexagons, how could you?) Okay, some sugar items are pretty blinking obvious- Nutella, hello?- but I continue to be blindsided by many others, ie: the number of items from the health-food store/section of the supermarket that I have now been forced to take an honest, unflinching look at… call it the Evaporated Cane Syrup Brigade, if you will. What? You mean I can’t have peanut butter Clif bars anymore?? Wait, nobody told me that!

Meanwhile, last night when dinner was over our five-year-old started describing the kind of little thingies-with-the-something-inside she would like for dessert and I gently reminded her about the “family project.” She was sad for a moment- but quickly rebounded, much to my surprise. Despite our preconceptions about the love affair between children and sugar, I’m beginning to wonder if the family project may actually end up being harder on Mom and Dad. After all, we’ve been around a lot longer, we’ve had a lot longer to get hooked.

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Information About The No Sugar Project

 

A Year of No Sugar: Post 4

A Year of No Sugar, ,

It’s pretty amazing the number of times sugar can come up in a day. Today I got blind sided when I least expected it: at school I was asked to buy Girl Scouts cookies by the same friend who asks me every year. Ordinarily I would’ve responded with a sizable order, heavy on the Tagalongs and Thin Mints, please. Hey- it’s a good cause! Instead, I surprised my friend- and me too, really- by declining.

Now normally I’m a big supporter of, well, just about everything. That’s because I remember being a kid and selling things, and how hard it was: flower seeds and greeting cards and glass jars of popcorn and Florida oranges.. you name it. Sometimes it was just to benefit the very deserving Eve Would Like to Have Some Cash Fund, but just as often it was for German Club or the Methodist Youth Group’s upcoming trip to Somewhere-or-Other. And then there were those big yellow cartons of M&Ms which benefitted… what? Band I think. Of course those sold themselves: all you had to do was place the big box on top of your books as you walked down the hall and kids would practically throw themselves off the stairway landing to buy a pack or two, scrounging coins and crumpled bills from the bottom of their pockets.

I remember even then feeling like: this is weird. Why is this so easy compared to selling everything else? And maybe, just maybe, there was something a little wrong with selling candy to a captive teenage audience… were they paying with bus money, I wondered? Or lunch money? Another less ethical but more immediate dilemma came in the fact that I was my own best customer and often had to quickly come up with my “cash drawer” shortfall. Whoops!

So today the sugar project has me wondering: how many things do we justify in the name of a good cause, that we ordinarily would object to? How hard would it be to find alternative ways to express our support?

Hmmm. I think… I think I’ll ask my friend about making a donation, instead.

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PS- Yesterday for the first time I asked a waitress if there was any sugar in the meal I was ordering. I’ve been toying with all kinds of plausible justifications from “I’m allergic” to “It’s for religious reasons,” but in the end simply asked her if she could check.

“You don’t want it in there?” she asked, without too much interest.

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Information About The No Sugar Project

 

A Year of No Sugar: Post 3

A Year of No Sugar, , ,

I am quickly coming to the realization that prepared foods are going to be pretty much off the table. I deduced this last night when I got out some of our favorite canned chicken chili to have over brown rice for dinner and gueeeeessss whaaaat. Yup- ingredient number seven, right between onion and tomato paste. Who knows how much that ingredient-number-seven sugar that really amounts to? A teaspoon? A tablespoon? Does it matter?

So, once again, we were having sugar with our dinner without really intending to. Greta, our ten year old, who got teary only the night before when we talked about starting the “family project,” was incensed.

“I can not be-LIEVE we’re having sugar for dinner,” she proclaimed loudly, with the conviction of a truly gifted proto-teenager. I found myself in the very odd position of pleading with her: “It’s just for tonight…” I rationalized, “It isn’t very much.” I promised we would do better as we got more acclimated to the new way of eating… which is to say I ‘ll be cooking more meals from scratch than ever before.

Part of me loves this idea- after all, I love to cook and bake. Then again, one of my favorite things to cook and bake is dessert. Huh. Also- the planning involved with so many home-made meals, not to mention the dirty pots and pans that result, is my not so favorite part. So a re-tooling is definitely in the cards for my meal methods.

Meanwhile, I had my first cup of tea with no honey in it this morning- cue the shrieks and screams. Oh, the horror. For me, altering one of my beloved little morning rituals, this was a HUGE step. My mind keeps waiting for that sweet kick at the end of every sip, and- alas- it never comes. Still, the caffeine was reliable, and a little milk helped too. Hey, I thought, I can do this. M-m-m-m-maybe.

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Information About The No Sugar Project