It’s taken a couple of decades, but I finally understand my relationship to food. I am what I call “food-dependent.” I need constant infusions of high-quality food. I’m not one of those people who can skip a meal. And I go to work every day armed with a million snacks.
I can see the inkling of this 25 years ago when I was in high school. English class was torture because my stomach would growl. How embarrassing! I began bringing saltines to school and scarfing a few between classes. In that same time-frame, a friend noticed that whenever I got grumpy, I’d always feel better if I ate something.
When I went off to college, my parents (God bless ‘em; did I ever thank them for sending me to college?) signed me up for a two-meal-a-day meal plan. More torture, because I need about five meals a day. My solution involved stealing bagels and buying pop tarts. Yuk and yuk.
I left college and went off to Israel to live on kibbutz. Forgive me if you are getting tired of the litany, but there was yet more embarrassment and misery. Working in the date orchard, I could barely tolerate the stretch between breakfast and lunch. We’d bring fruit with us for a snack. But fruit wasn’t enough. Between the desert heat, the low-blood sugar, and my baseline depression there, I was lethargic and unhappy every day.
Fast forward to graduate school in Wisconsin and my roommate Maddy using the phrase “Scooby snacks.” I needed Scooby snacks. They were things like little orange crackers, Quaker granola bars, and Carnation breakfast drink. None of those Scooby snacks would pass muster with me today.
In February, I was away from home for a few days and had blood sugar crises about twice a day. It brought into sharp focus how regimented I am about food, and how helpful having a regular work schedule is to keeping that regime.
Today, I am like Kramer bringing a roll of crackers to “work” (if you recall, he wasn’t actually an employee) in his brief case. My snacks are better than a roll of crackers, but they are the biggest part of what I schlep back and forth every day. Each day, I set off with some combination of the following: an apple, a banana, a few clementines, cashew butter spread on seedy whole-grain crackers, a slice of home-made banana bread, an expensive protein bar, and a baggie of nuts. And I also have a Tupperware or two of last night’s leftovers for my lunch. Unless a meeting goes long or I completely mis-plan, I never have a blood-sugar crisis.
And now we’re back to where I started my story – it’s taken me many decades, but I finally understand my relationship to food. I need to eat. I understand that and accept it and plan well for it. I’m still a little embarrassed when I’m traveling and am around others. That’s why I’m grateful to my job, where it’s so easy to stick to a routine, and where I happen to be surrounded by others who also have delicate blood sugar levels.
So what does a food-dependent person like me eat for breakfast? These days, I’m eating uncooked oatmeal. Yes, uncooked oatmeal. The Swiss would call it muesli. I was buying foil-packed Swiss muesli for over $5 a pound, when I realized that I could take my reusable containers to the Co-op and fill them with quick oats for just $1 a pound. Each morning, I add a different combination of dried papaya, prunes, figs, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, banana chips, dried cranberries, almonds, and ground flax seed. Then I drown that in milk. I still need a mid-morning snack, but for now, I’m liking this breakfast. I know every ingredient that goes into it, and it’s not processed in any way.
In retrospect, I’m sorry it took me so long to recognize the obvious about my need for high-quality snacks. But that’s life – harder than it needs to be. I wish you godspeed in figuring out who you are when it comes to food.
What is important, is it takes me less than 10 minutes to crank out to containers of hummus. I don’t add olive oil anymore and I don’t miss it (I use spray olive oil on the pan when I need to). I use the liquid (brilliant tip from Mike Ford) from the can of chick peas, conciously spending an extra 30 cents on the organic chick peas from Whole Food that are flavored with Sea Salt and do not have the strange preservative that Progresso uses. These are just 2 examples of how I am conciously improving how I eat by monitoring what I am cooking with.
