By far the most accessed article on this website is the post Eggplant Pros & Cons, written during a period when I was consuming an unpresidented amount of eggplant and began to be worried about toxicity.  As an article, it is boring, and I remember very little of the information contained therein.  Nevertheless it receives approximately 17 times more traffic than any other post.  I thought, if I were to give the Internet what it apparently wants, I would stock my site full of cost-benefit analyses of various foodstuffs, stick some clickbait ads on there, and wait for the magic to happen.  Except that this sounds like possibly the most tedious job in the world, and I could probably still make more money waiting tables.

Pros & Cons inspiration did not strike again until the day when I was buying a half-gallon of Silk unsweetened cashew milk for my lactose-intolerant husband, and the bearded stranger in front of me in the Co-op checkout line volunteered that he never eats cashews because of the toxicity.  A public service announcement, I guess.  Even while I felt scornful about his food-paranoia, his warning nagged at me.  I was trying to take care of my husband's health by reducing his obviously inflammatory milk consumption; what if, instead, I was slowly poisoning him with a concentrated brew of expressed cashew toxins?

Two or three months passed during which I continued to buy cashew milk for my husband, did no further research, and witnessed the sudden downfall of our democracy.

​This morning-- a Saturday morning in December, just before the electoral college ratifies the unthinkable-- I sat with my husband, eating a breakfast of bacon & eggs, toast and clementines, and drinking hot chocolate made with cashew milk.  Please be advised: hot chocolate is NOT as good with cashew milk, though I have made it with almond milk and that is fine.  For the first time, I thought to tell my husband of the bearded man's earnest warning.  My husband scoffed.  After all, he smokes, doesn't exercise, and has an unhealthy devotion to cheeseburgers.  Is it really likely that cashew milk will take him down?

I don't know.  So here goes:

​Cashew milk (the unsweetened kind), compared to cow's milk, is low in calories, fat and sugar, but also low in protein.  It also has a lot of Vitamin E.  Raw cashews are unsafe to eat due to a chemical called urushiol-- also found in poison ivy-- which can cause skin rashes and is toxic if ingested.  However, the cashews sold in stores as "raw" cashews are actually steamed, rendering them edible.  Silk cashew milk is made from cashews which are roasted before being ground and used to make "milk," so overdosing on urushiol is a non-issue.

Beyond personal health, however, the exposure to urushiol inherent in cashew harvest and processing means that excessive cashew consumption may have ethical repercussions, as described in The Telegraph:

So there's that.  I can't determine where Silk's cashews are sourced (notably absent from their FAQs, which provide this information re: soybeans and almonds).  I would normally just give up, but in this new age of activism it occurred to me that I could ask them, so I wrote to inquire.  Will let you know if they answer. [UPDATE: Silk says that their cashews come from "Africa, Brazil and Vietnam."]

Now that we have concluded that cashews are safe, if possibly unethical, to eat, I have a few words about another current American dietary trend, our toxic friend Donald J. Trump.

An asshat, yes, you say, but a dietary trend?  What do you mean?

Just what I say.  After the election, we spoke of five stages of grief.  But, as far as I can currently tell, there have been only two stages of eating.  1) 48 hours or so (your experience may vary) of total loss of appetite, during which we had to remind one another to drink water and nobody cared if they had a splitting headache or were subsisting on a couple of handfuls of Ritz crackers.  2) A sustained, not-yet-over period of frantic stress-eating, legitimized widely by Anne Lamott confessing the same on Facebook, but shared by many, characterized by a massive intake of carbs (and sometimes alcohol) and a sudden absence of regard for one's own health or even vanity.

At some point it occurred to me to drink some bourbon, and it was like the best thing I had ever tasted.

The "Trump 10" is apparently a real thing.

And it's not just quantity, it's quality too.  I don't feel like cooking.  While broccoli still tastes great when it magically appears on my plate, I have stopped bothering to serve a salad with my pasta.  Too much trouble, and who cares, really?  We've taken to eating frozen burritos, frozen vegetables, accidentally-vegan macaroni-and-"cheese" out of a box.  I buy candy, and chips, and donuts.  This cannot be good for me, or us, or the world.  Also, I don't want to become a drunk.  

This is true toxicity, this hopelessness and insecurity and downright fear and dread that we feel.  The unhealth of Trump's own food choices has somehow become contagious, even while all his other choices are ones we repudiate.  At this rate, on January 21, the date of the Women's March, a sea of bloated, sad faces will fill the streets of Washington D.C., and we will march uncomfortably in our tight pants.

I have no solution to this.  There are so few ways to make myself feel better these days, so few routes to pleasure-- which is different from happiness, now inaccessible.  Pizza is accessible.

Tonight my husband and I will go to the bad diner.  This is the one we choose when we're feeling low-energy, like after a long, horrible weekend day at work, or when we are sick or our cat has died.  The food is unreliable and the coffee weak, but there is absolutely no pressure there.  You can eat with your coat on if you're feeling chilled, or hunch over the table with eyes closed; the waitresses know us.  My husband can get a cheeseburger.  

Someday I hope we are well again.

​

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while.  Somehow I never feel like getting around to it.  But yesterday morning I read that it was "World Eating Disorders Action Day"-- whatever that means, really-- and so it seems like the right time.  Time to get it over with.

Ladies.  (And gentlemen, but I don't feel qualified to write about gentlemen.)  Is there anyone, at least anyone of our generation (I'm 44), who has NOT, at some point in their lives, developed fucked-up eating patterns (or starving patterns, or purging patterns, or food-obsessional patterns) that would qualify as an eating disorder?  Obviously, some of us have suffered more intensely, or endangered our health more seriously, than others.  But, on a very large scale, something went terribly wrong with the way whole generations of women interacted with food and nourishment. 

Here's a quick history of me.  When I was a little girl-- about 10 years old-- I started counting calories.  I had some baby fat, the kind that hangs on right before you hit puberty and sprout into a lovely teenager.  Most of my friends were a bit older, and I think I felt that, like them, I should already be a lovely teenager.  I don't remember anybody pointing out  that I, too, would probably become lovely in a couple of years.  Probably they didn't really get what my problem was: that I still looked soft and formless in a way that didn't fit right in designer jeans or bikinis.

Among my mom's recipe books on the shelf, she had a paperback that purported to tell you exactly how many calories were in things.  How many in one chicken breast.  How many in 1/2 a cup of ice cream.  How many in one grape.  This was part two of the problem.  The grownup women of this period were collecting diet books, going to Gloria Stevens at the mall to have their thighs jiggled, and trying to cook without fat.  Ultimately, the grownups moved on from these trends, but-- unbeknownst to them-- many of them have daughters who now know, off the top of their heads, exactly how many calories are in everything.  Just like the capital cities of the U.S., which I learned at about the same time, this information is in my brain forever. 

When my mom tried to diet with her calorie-counting book, she aimed for 1200 calories a day, so I did too.  I remember evenings when, looking for an after-dinner snack, I parceled out my remaining 33 or 56 allotted calories into a certain number of peapods or strawberries.  1200 exactly, that was the goal.  I don't know if my mom was this precise in her own diet, but I doubt it.  Calorie counting fitted in nicely with my general tendency towards monitoring, measuring, regimentation.  I am still this way.  At 44, I have figured out some ways to make it work for me, but compulsive monitoring is still a beast that needs to be carefully tamed.

So... yeah, I write this blog in which I record absolutely everything I eat.  That is totally different.

Anyway.  Back to 10.  I probably overestimate in my mind how much of the time I was "on a diet" at this age.  Because there were also plenty of times I came home from school and whipped up a quick bowl of "cookie dough" (really just the flour and sugar and milk, I rarely bothered with butter or eggs), and ate that while I watched my soaps and late-afternoon comedy reruns.  Or ice cream.  Lots and lots of Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream.  Afterwards, my beloved cat Louie licked the bowl.

I was a pretty enough teenager and young woman, neither fat nor thin.  I would give a lot to be able to go back and appreciate the way I looked then, enjoy that body while I had it.  But, like most of us, I spent much more energy on hate and disgust.  With my short, solid build, my thighs looked thick in a bathing suit.  I had a weak double chin in profile.  My hips were wide in relation to my waist, making jeans-shopping difficult in the juniors' stores.

I knew I looked more or less okay, though.  So the disgust was about much more than looks.  It was about lack of self-control, the essential wrongness of eating secret candy bars and chips from the vending machines at college (I hid them in my shirt so people wouldn't know how many I was buying), the shame of whole pints of Ben & Jerry's.  I realize that my version of binging was pretty tame (a whole box of macaroni and cheese?  Two apple fritters from the supermarket?).  There was no purging, only guilt.  But the pattern remained, throughout high school and college.  There was the bad, uncontrolled girl, the weak girl, who ate ice cream and giant bowls of buttered popcorn and, that one time, hoarded an entire birthday cake and giant fruit basket in her dorm room and didn't go to class or the dining hall for a week, preferring to stay in the dark and reread Jane Eyre.  And then there was the virtuous girl, who tried to undo all that by diets and resolutions, by choosing, on one occasion when she went to her mom's house for a meal, to have only a single glass of milk for dinner.  Which one of these was the real girl?  Oh surely, surely the former. 

For me, as for so many people, none of this was front-and-center, not really.  The drama of food was a backdrop to the drama of life, making me feel vaguely bad about myself and filling up the empty corners of time with little binges and little pledges.

And then there came anorexic autumn. 

What happened was simple enough.  I got sad.  First, I graduated from college.  A summer ensued, a summer of drifting and flailing.  Plans were made, plans cancelled.  I attended half of a Chinese poetry course, then dropped it.  My best friend and I admitted we were not actually going to move together to Portland, Oregon.  I drove around Maine and Vermont, looking for a town I wanted to move to, by myself.  I took a road trip with my college boyfriend, who was an emotional leech I couldn't wait to be rid of and couldn't seem to unequivocally dump.  Then, I was alone in the house, my parents' house.  They had gone away on some international trip, for several weeks.  I was meant to pack up in the meantime, drive to Brunswick, Maine, find an apartment.

Instead, some other stuff happened.  I hooked up with an old boyfriend who lived in town, finally dumped college guy once and for all.  The hooking up was more emotionally gripping for me than for old boyfriend.  It made me a) not want to leave town, b) not want to leave his couch, and c) feel very sad when it became clear he was not serious about me, as usual.  Also.  If I was not leaving town, I had to find a fucking job.  All the stress and sadness made me not feel like eating.  Actually, it became a struggle just to ingest something, to chew and swallow.  The new routine, while I sat in my parents' empty house, in my stepfather's favorite armchair, became this: coffee, coffee, coffee.  Cook a frozen burrito for lunch, cut it in half, eat half very slowly.  Save the other half to choke down for dinner.  Coffee, coffee.  The other half of the frozen burrito.  Cry.

I found a job through the unemployment office.  It was a terrible job, working nights in a basement in the dark, answering phones.  Soon it also involved two other factors: 1) sleeping with my boss, and 2) an awareness that the business was somehow a cover for something else.  Something was wrong-- wrong with the business, and wrong with the boss, who carried a little pistol in a fancy holster under his jacket.  I'd wondered why he always went into another room to take off his clothes.  This is a true story.

All of it didn't do much for my appetite.  I'd bring lunches to work that consisted of things like: 3 cherry tomatoes, a few slices of cucumber, and 6 saltines.  But I skipped most meals.  Occasionally my coworkers would send me out for fast food (for them) and I'd randomly eat a bacon cheeseburger.  But mostly I lived on coffee and adrenaline.  And I lost a lot of weight, along with a certain amount of hair.  All kinds of jeans and other clothes fit perfectly now, even those in the juniors' section.  Even while miserable in my sinister job, first dating and then not-dating my confusing and well-armed boss, pining for my erstwhile boyfriend who wasn't interested in anything besides hooking up, and facing an entire adult life full of uncertainty-- even while looking in the bathroom mirror at the way my hair had gone flat, and my skin dry and colorless-- I celebrated my weight loss.  It was a victory pulled from the jaws of defeat.
​
After a few months, I left that job for something healthier, and the ability to eat also gradually returned.  But now emotional not-eating was part of my arsenal, along with emotional eating, and it was a weapon I could sometimes use to deal with pain.  I still got to express my feelings somatically, but not-eating had the advantage of making me feel strong, not weak; virtuous, not guilty.  Chaos, stress, and sadness, bad break-up?  I could go the ascetic route, eat very little, sleep on the floor, refuse to indulge in ordinary comforts until I was ready to feel comforted.  I learned to moderate not-eating so that I could cast myself as waif-like but not become ill or unattractive.  In my mid-twenties, cigarettes made an inevitable entrance.  By then, I ate what I wanted, but at unreasonably long intervals, and smoking (and, still, coffee) filled the gaps.  Smoking was perfect because it was both emotional eating and not-eating.  Oral fixation?  Check.  Waifish?  Check.  Zero calories?  Check.

Fortunately for me and my health, in my late twenties I also got married and then got pregnant.  I quit smoking.  I started eating more.  I gained 10 pounds at first, then another 70 pounds  in nine months of pregnancy.

As a mom and a woman running a household, my relationship with food changed utterly then.  Suddenly, food was a resource to be managed for the good of all; it was a source of positive nourishment; for a family of four living on a low income, it was not to be taken for granted.  I stopped engaging in either emotional eating or emotional not-eating.  I ate what was available to eat and what would not take key resources out of the mouths of my family.  And I ate regularly, in order to keep my energy levels consistent, and function as a parent, worker and student all at the same time.  It finally became apparent to me that food was fuel.  Food made milk for my baby; a banana or piece of cheese kept me from losing my shit when I was forced to be awake at 2 am.  My then-husband came home on his lunch break and fueled his insanely high metabolism with eggs, peanut butter, and cereal.  Our foster teenager asked nothing more than a bottomless supply of ramen noodle packets, and this worried me, because he wasn't getting proper nutrition.  What kind of hypocrisy was this?

Most of the 70 pounds fell right back off again, but the new attitude stayed.  I was still neither fat nor thin.  I was still short and sturdy.  But there were now so many things more important than my weight. 

But wait... wasn't I still obsessed with food?  I can't remember precisely when I first decided that I would cook every single recipe in the cookbooks I owned (an impossible task), starting with... which one?  Maybe this one.  I read book after book about organic gardening and farming.  I began to write regularly about food politics on the progressive blog Daily Kos.  I thought about food.  I watched documentaries about food.  After I split up with my first husband and had more disposable income of my own, I bought better quality food, joined a CSA, spent three years as a professional cheesemonger.  I worked out regularly and ate pretty much whatever I enjoyed.

That was a (relatively) healthy time.

And now... I am not sure.  Some things have changed.  I still like cooking my way through cookbooks (okay, feel compelled to cook my way through cookbooks); I belong to a CSA and buy high-quality food for the most part.  I write about food still, though in a different way.  But middle-aged spread means I have gone back to worrying about my weight, and I don't work out or run as much, and I am prone to going on "cleanses" or special diets (while claiming they are healthful diets and not for weight loss).  A focus on nutrition or food-as-medicine, and in particular our national focus on eliminating certain foods (sugar, gluten, dairy) has become a preoccupation to replace counting calories (though, shh, I still make approximations of calories in my head).  In extreme cases, this preoccupation even has a name: orthorexia.

People!  Please take note of this.  I find that almost no one I know has heard of it, even though everyone knows, in a sense, what I mean.  But I am a waitress in a town filled with health nuts and vegetarians, and I can definitely affirm that this disorder is becoming more prevalent every moment.  It is encouraged, too, in the media, who have largely replaced a discourse about the desirability of thinness with one about the desirability of healthy or "clean" eating.  It doesn't matter what exactly your obsession is, whether calories or organics or gluten (and yes, I know some people really have celiac disease-- my sister, for example)-- if you are spending all your time thinking about what you put in your mouth, and don't have a good medical reason to do so, you are flirting with an eating disorder.

When my husband is depressed and my first instinct is to nag him about whether he's been drinking too much milk, my perspective may be skewed.

So here I am, with my blog (almost) entirely about food, and my time-consuming daily food diary, and my compulsive approach to recipes, chronicling the story of how I finally developed a healthy relationship with food.  Eating is important.  Yes.  But is it that important?  A question I should remember to ask myself periodically.  If you have bothered to read this far, perhaps you should too.  Happy (day after) World Eating Disorders Action Day.

love, your host

*I have just discovered that the famous "who among us" construction that was used to paint John Kerry as an elitist in 2004 was a total fabrication by Maureen Dowd.

​May 13-- coffee!!!!!
Breakfast: lemon water, COFFEE (black), shake made from hemp milk, hemp protein powder, canned coconut milk, frozen strawberries, fresh strawberries, fresh blueberries, and spinach.

When you haven't had coffee for a significant period, for the first couple of days it becomes a fun recreational drug.  While drinking my coffee this morning, and again at noon, I felt giddy and talkative at first, and then, by the end of the cup, actually a bit high.  Sadly, I know that soon I'll go back to dependency: no noticeable effect except the relief of unpleasant withdrawal symptoms like grogginess and headache.  I hear it is similar with heroin.

Lunch: blueberries, blackberries, carrot sticks, mini sweet peppers, celery sticks, avocado, pecans.  I am very lucky.

​May 14-- coffee
Breakfast (before work, 6:30 am): lemon water, coffee with hemp milk (not a good idea: it curdled and also tasted weird), shake made from hemp milk, hemp protein powder, avocado, strawberries, and spinach.

Lunch (after work, food brought home from restaurant, 3:15 pm): chicken, asparagus & mushroom omelet with sides of carrots and broccoli.

Shopping (Co-op): Seventh Generation pantiliners, 2 cans cat food, Tom's sensitive toothpaste, white cage-free eggs, Woodstock California Supreme trail mix, 1 pork chop, broccoli, 2 oranges, 6 avocados (they were on sale for 89 cents!), 2 kiwis, 2 limes, 1 mango.  $44.

Dinner: Last Clean dinner, again at Sweetgreen.  Salad of mesclun and kale, tomatoes, carrots, broccoli and mushrooms, with almonds and avocado and a spicy cashew dressing.  Decided to skip the meat tonight, since I had lunch so late and I have had to stuff myself in order to finish my salad on my past couple of visits to Sweetgreen.  Without the chicken, the quantity felt about right.  Also, 1 can of lemon Spindrift seltzer.

Snacks: 2 cups decaf coffee, 1 cup regular coffee (at work), steamed carrots (at work).  I'm afraid that the unaccustomed coffee may have made me an impatient bitch to the less-experienced young folks at my job.  That is to say, I felt super-amped-up and stressed, and what I perceived as the excruciating slowness of certain people and activities was driving me so crazy that I was not able to control the expression of my irritation the way I normally do.  This is unusual and I feel really badly about it after the fact.  People are doing their best.  I also had an argument with my husband in the early evening about where to go to brunch on Sunday morning, which seems stupider than it should have been.  Husband blamed this on his own low blood sugar, but I'm not sure the coffee (and consequent work stress) wasn't still a factor.  Paraphrase of argument:

​May 9-- grains!
Breakfast: green tea, small shake made from quinoa milk, hemp protein powder, sunflower butter, frozen blueberries, a couple of fresh strawberries, and lots of spinach.  This shake became extremely gloppy and gelatinous after sitting for a bit-- kind of gross, actually.  I have no idea why.  I also had two thin slices of plain rye toast, from the bread we got at the farmer's market.

Shopping (Co-op): 3 avocados, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, blackberries, hemp milk, 3 rolls toilet paper, roast beef, peppermint tea, salted cashews, pecans, almond butter.  $62.

Lunch: two more pieces of rye bread, leftover split peas and quinoa with cilantro-mint chutney, leftover stir-fried beef with broccoli.

Dinner: small meat patties made of ground goat meat with onion and parsley, white rice, cilantro-mint chutney (which is perfect with the goat); side salad of perfect butter lettuce from the farmer's market, cherry tomatoes, shredded carrot, pea shoots, and pecans, with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing.  This was a very pleasant dinner.  I have missed rice more than bread, I think.

​Snacks: cup of rooibos tea, cup of green tea, cup of peppermint tea, 1 hard-boiled egg in the afternoon, few cashews before bed.
 
May 10- grains, day 2
Breakfast: green tea, shake made from rice milk, hemp protein powder, almond butter, frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries, and a few pea shoots.  Not my best work.  Husband had some toast too.

Lunch: roast beef sandwich on Pepperidge Farm bread, with cilantro-mint chutney.  Something about this tastes weird.  Oh, the bread is full of sugar, that is what.  This did not occur to me.  Also, carrot sticks, blackberries, and strawberries.

​Shopping (Co-op): frozen strawberries, frozen fish fillets, organic whole milk, dijon mustard, 2 lemons, dish soap, frozen peas, ground turkey, organic penne pasta, yellow cherry tomatoes, herb salad mix, organic cauliflower.  $52.

Dinner: penne pasta with the Spanish-style Garlic- and Parsley-flavored Olive Oil that I made for Madhur Jaffrey's Spanish-Style Grilled Portobello Mushrooms the other night, mixed with collard greens, purple carrots, green peas, fresh pea shoots, and cherry tomatoes.  Side salad of herb salad mix topped with avocado and pecans, with balsamic vinaigrette dressing.  Very nice meal.  The pasta had a subtle but excellent flavor from the garlic-parsley oil and the liquor from the greens.  And just having pasta was a wonderful treat after all this time.  Back to the clean slate diet tomorrow, though, for a little longer.

​Snacks: 2 cups peppermint tea, 1 cup green tea, 3 little goat patties with cilantro-mint chutney for dipping (mid-morning).  Small handful of cashews on my way out the door to yoga class.
 
May 11-- clean slate
Breakfast: lemon water (yes, we bought some more lemons, because we miss them, but are cutting them into smaller wedges than before).  Green tea, a very little bit of breakfast shake (hemp milk, hemp protein powder, almond butter, frozen strawberries, fresh strawberries, herb salad mix), but my kid drank some shake so I didn't get much.  The herb salad mix was not such a good idea anyway-- the smoothie tasted of parsley and dill.  Also, carrot and celery sticks dipped in almond butter.

Lunch (after work, 2:45): cherry tomatoes, whole avocado, carrot sticks with almond butter.

​Dinner: salad of herb salad mix, shredded carrot, cherry tomatoes, roasted cauliflower, green peas, and ground turkey patties, and a dressing inspired by this one, except I changed the proportions, substituted lemon for lime (though lime would have been better), and added olive oil to thin it to a pourable consistency.

Snacks: 2 cups green tea, 1 cup peppermint tea.
 
May 12-- clean slate
Breakfast: lemon water, green tea, small shake made from hemp milk, hemp protein powder, almond butter, frozen strawberries, and fresh strawberries; also celery sticks with almond butter.

Shopping (Co-op): organic medjool dates, decaf coffee, regular coffee, 4-pack of clementine-flavored Izze sodas, 4-pack of chicken thighs, organic pecans, Field Day toasted O's cereal, hemp milk, unsweetened chocolate almond milk, organic quinoa, can coconut milk, organic spinach, 6 Liberte yogurts (assorted flavors), mini sweet peppers, mushrooms, blueberries, organic blackberries, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, 3 avocados.  $90.

Lunch (before work, 11:15 am): sparkling water with berry flavoring, 2 fried eggs, 2 slices roast beef, strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries.

Dinner: chicken thighs cooked in garlic-parsley oil (as mentioned above), then braised, with fresh mint; plain quinoa; grilled (in the oven) mushroom and cherry tomato skewers.  These last were to try to approximate my husband's experience at Middle Eastern Cuisine on Sunday.  While he was touched by the effort, they didn't taste at all the same, due to my lack of proper grilling or broiling technology.  Oh, well.

​Snacks: 2 cups green tea, 1 cup red zinger tea, 1 cup peppermint tea, side of steamed carrots (at work), 2 mini sweet peppers, small glass of chocolate almond milk before bed.
​
Coffee tomorrow!