Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year of No Sugar: Post 40

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People are funny when it comes to sugar. Last post I wrote about a fundraising event we attended over the weekend to benefit the owners of a local general store that burned down in the night: the owners, who are much beloved by our community, barely escaped with their lives, jumping out the second story windows, and managing to save only one of their three dogs. Another local man who was sleeping in a small building next door was killed.

So the fundraiser was a tremendous outpouring of emotion in response to the sudden and tragic nature of this event. In addition to a massive dinner with live music, there was to be an equally massive silent auction and two different raffles going on throughout the afternoon, as well as a bake sale.

The day before the event, like everybody else, we went to drop off our family’s donations at the firehouse. It was very social, everyone standing around and marveling at the variety and quality of different auction items, (“Have you seen this one?”) But what I reeled at was on the other table: the bake sale table. Goodies of every conceivable shape and size were crowded across two nine foot tables, jostling for space, in the process of being neatly cataloged and labeled by my friend Rhonda. Rhonda was one of the event’s organizers, and she’s nice enough to not only read my blog, but even regularly post comments and interesting sugar-related articles she comes across.

Staring at the spread of frostings, sprinkles, chips, jellies, and coconut cream, I joked with Rhonda that I should take a photo of the awe-inspiring spread to post on my blog.

“Oh no!” she said, genuinely taken aback, “but… this is good!”

I’ve been thinking about her reaction ever since, because I think it has everything to do with how inextricably emotion and food are intertwined in our culture. I mean, of course it’s good, right? The outpouring of emotion was physically visible in response to what was a truly shocking and violent event. People wanted to express love and comfort in the name of store owners Will and Eric- to literally wrap them up in all that is warm and good and predictable, in an effort to make up for the scary thing which has changed their lives forever. What better way to do this than with a nice coffeecake or tray of raspberry thumbprints? How often is dessert intended as, and taken for, a concrete manifestation of love?

Similarly, I was recently at a potluck memorial service (yes, in Vermont we can make anything a potluck) and it struck me in very much the same way: one huge, long table of actual lunch food ran parallel to an equally long and huge table filled entirely with sweets. Again- should we be surprised if the outpouring of emotion naturally gravitated towards carrot cake and not carrots?

I’m not saying this is bad, exactly, but my friend’s reaction made me realize how deep and primal our attachment to sugar-as-love-and-comfort runs. I mean, of course raising money for a good cause is inherently a good thing. But, when we lay out a football field of sugar in the name of comfort, I also think it’s important to take a step back and think about the lesson we’re teaching our children.

Because, after all, who’s going to be eating a lot of those cookies and brownies, anyway? I know this isn’t going to be a popular idea, but I am reminded of how Dr. Robert Lustig explains that handing your kid a soda is the nutritional equivalent of handing your kid a beer.

This is what we know, but don’t want to know: sugar (fructose) is a poison, just like some other favorite poisons like alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol is an acute poison, so we notice its effects right away. Fructose, on the other hand, is more like cigarettes, in that it’s a chronic poison, we notice its effects only after years of exposure, when it can be harder to pinpoint and easier to debate… or ignore.

What Rhonda’s comment made me realize is that it’s all well and good to demonize sugar when you’re talking about the Big Bad Corporations, sneaking high fructose corn syrup into our ketchup and mayonnaise; it’s another thing entirely to go after grandma’s lovingly baked molasses cookies. The problem is, nutritionally your body can’t tell the difference between the “bad” sugar (from Big Food Inc.) and “good” sugar (from Grandma)… fructose is fructose. And an excess of fructose consumption, now at it’s highest levels ever and still climbing, is making our society sick.

I imagine that one day, when the data has become so abundant as to be incontrovertible (as also happened, finally, with cigarettes) having a buffet of sugar that rivals the actual food will be considered as socially unacceptable as smoking on airplanes or littering out your car window- things which we as a society once accepted as completely normal yet now we have come to realize the destructiveness of. Nobody’s is trying to say we can’t smoke or drink or throw things away, they’re just saying we have to be careful about how we go about it. Same with sugar.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 39

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A few months ago, when I first contemplated the idea of a “Year of No Sugar,” images of cravings, temptation and deprivation came to mind. My personal mental picture involved me in an old-west-style show-down with one of those square Ritter chocolate bars: “Let’s go, chocolate,” I’d sneer, perhaps from under a sombrero, “You and me. Mano a mano.” You know, if chocolate had hands.

But in truth the hardest moments aren’t solitary, quite the opposite. In fact, if I could just home school the kids and avoid all restaurants and social events for the year- in other words if we could just move to an new address under a convenient rock- the project would seem to be a comparative snap. Turns out, at least for me, the social isolation of being on a different wavelength from the rest of the world around you can be one of the most difficult parts of all.

Dutchies Before The Fire

For example. Yesterday we attended the biggest local event I’ve seen in my fourteen years in Pawlet: a fundraiser to benefit the owners of Dutchie’s general store in West Pawlet. Dutchie’s was a local fixture and a historic building which burned to the ground in the middle of the night two weeks ago. The event was so sudden, so shocking, so deeply upsetting to the community, that within hours plans were being fomented on Facebook for what would blossom into a huge community expression of support and love: the final event featured a pig roast and chicken barbecue, a silent auction of over a hundred items, a bake sale of gargantuan proportions, live music by a favorite local honky-tonk band, a swing set raffle, tractor rides and face painting. Phew! We showed up at five after two in the afternoon- as the event was scheduled to begin at two- to find hundreds and hundreds of people already in line for all of the above. But most of all they were in line for the food.

Now you’d think by now I’d have figured this food thing out, but maybe I’m just dense. Honestly, it didn’t occur to me that we wouldn’t be able to eat the majority of food on the menu for this event until we were already there. Meat and pasta salad? Fine, right? But baked beans, chicken with barbecue sauce, coleslaw… sugar was certainly in all of them. And you can’t very well go to an event like this, with hundreds in line behind you waiting their turn, and start asking volunteers nit-picky questions about the pasta salad. You just can’t.

Fortunately, we had been assuming we’d eat there later in the afternoon as an early dinner, and we had eaten lunch, so we weren’t starving. Instead, we focused on everything else: we bought event t-shirts, we bid on items at the silent auction, the kids swung (swang?) on the raffle swing set and got their faces painted. Practically everyone in town made an appearance that afternoon, and in a town of just over 1,000 people that amounts to a great big party where you know virtually all of the guests. Initial reports indicate that at the end of the day over $27,000 was raised to help Dutchie’s owners Will and Eric, who wandered around the event looking honestly dazed by such an outpouring of support.

Then friends of my two girls started appearing licking soft-serve ice creams. Of course this was hard. Reeeeeeally hard. You know how parents used to say “This hurts me more than it hurts you?” As a kid you never believe it, but, as a parent you learn the true meaning of this. I would’ve given anything to hand them each a dollar and tell them to, of course, go get an ice cream. But. What kind of message would that’ve sent? How many more special events were to come this summer at which “special exemptions” would be begged? How many more times would we give in, and at what point would our project cease to have any real meaning?

So the afternoon progressed and we watched virtually the entirely of our town file through the line that snaked through the firehouse parking lot and all the way down to the road. I heard at it’s peak the wait was over an hour. But we never did join the line. We chatted with our neighbors. We checked our bids at the auction. We avoided the bake sale table. We swung.

I came home with an empty feeling in me that only partly had to do with the fact that it was getting to be dinner time. Everyone in the community had come together to help our neighbors Will and Eric, and we were a part of that, certainly. But we all know food is symbolic, food is important. When people break bread together it means something. At least for now, our family is, in some small way, existing apart.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 38

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If I learn anything at all this year, it will be the fact that sugar has a way of popping up when you least expect it. Take yesterday, for instance.

After a morning of errands my husband Steve and I were looking forward to visiting one of our very favorite local restaurants: Steininger’s in Salem, New York. Steininger’s is one of those unassuming local places you can drive by a thousand times before you think to stop in, but once you do, you become a devoted fan for life.

Walking in, you feel like you’ve perhaps entered a cozy lodge in the Austrian alps. The walls are covered with chintz and the air smells like a wonderful soup of the day, perhaps tomato parmesan or cream of mushroom. Real table cloths, fresh flowers, and paintings of European markets make you feel that you’re not in Kansas anymore. The back wall houses an impressive display of house-made chocolates: glass cabinets for the trays of truffles and caramels, and a heavy wooden cabinet showcases holiday chocolates in colored cellophane, all displayed with that uniquely European enthusiasm for celebrating with style.

Easter was in full bloom at Steininger’s yesterday, with delicate chocolate eggs in baskets wrapped in seven different colors of decorative foil, along with a polite color-decoder sign to denote whether the dark green foil indicated a peanut-butter-chocolate egg or a marzipan one. Chocolate Easter bunnies were hard at work hauling chocolate baskets and chocolate wheelbarrows, (presumably back and forth from the chocolate mines at which they were enslaved by an exploitative chocolate overlord.) Needless to say, it was an unapologetic riot of sugar.

The problem is, I love this stuff. I love holidays, I love special celebrations, I love special food and treats. I love making my kids follow rhyming clues all around the house to find their Easter baskets like a buried treasure at the end- and I’ll stay up till one AM to do it too. I don’t mind.

I’ve been trying to convince myself that we can simply get through Easter with a special note to the Easter bunny explaining our situation, to which he (or she) will respond with a fantastic basket of treats that do not involve sugar. (In fact, word has it that the Easter bunny, who has ESP you know, is already hard at work on this problem, laying in Easter-themed videos and tiny stuffed animals in place of jellybeans and Cadbury eggs.)

But the display was so great, so totally up my alley, that I had to look away. Just not this year, I thought. And it’s only one year, I thought. Right?

I decided to focus instead on Steininger’s six page menu, at least half of which is desserts. I knew that even if I wasn’t having creams puffs or pastry, I’d still get to have a delicious bratwurst with sauerkraut, mustard and potatoes. If anyone knows how to make a filling, satisfying meal, after all, it’s the Germans.

Do I even need to tell you the next part? Or have we sung this song enough times by now? As always, I asked about the sugar content: of the sausages, the bread, the delicious smelling soup… and our waitress said yes, yes and … yes. All contained amounts, if sometimes only trace amounts, of sugar. I appreciated her honesty, her willingness to traipse back and forth from the kitchen to check multiple times- it would have been just as easy for her to appease me with an assurance that she wasn’t entirely sure of.

For that matter, I’m sure I have been served restaurant food this year that has contained sugar simply because the waitstaff can’t or won’t check further, (ie: there’s no sugar in the soup, just chicken broth! But did anyone check the broth…?) But the rule I’ve decided to stick by is I have to ask. If they say there is no sugar, I trust them. If they say there is sugar, I have to find something else- “trace” amounts or no.

So no sausages for me, and no soup. No bread either, which meant all sandwiches were off the table. All that remained was a vegetarian chef salad with fruit and nuts, and only if I dressed it with oil and vinegar, since the salad dressings all contained sugar too. Well, why was I so surprised? This has certainly happened enough times by now for me to anticipate. It’s just I’d been starting to assume that as long as I stayed away from “fast” or “chain” food it would be relatively easy to avoid sugar- this, however, blew that theory out of the water. Note to self: even “slow” food contains added sugar in strange and unusual places.

That being said, we are talking about homemade food, and trace amounts of sugar (well, except for the cream puffs). I’m not wagging my finger at wonderful places like Steininger’s, just abiding by my own rules, which are admittedly overly strict because of the point I’m trying to make. What’s that point again? Oh yeah… eating without added sugar is way way way waaaaaaaaay harder than we think.

Anyway the salad was… actually delicious! You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Who knew cheese, fruit and greens could satisfyingly take the place of hot soup on a chilly spring day? I mean, besides the Easter bunny.