Health Food
Love in the time of cod liver oil
In her last months, my mother would carefully examine food labels. She’d only buy food that contained unnatural additives, she declared. After years of wholegrain, cold-pressed, preservative-free living here she was, dying from cancer at 47.
I can smell my childhood in the aisles of a health food store. Wafts of carob, rosehip, dried apricots (sulphur-free), piles of indeterminate grain in sensible brown paper packaging. I would trail along behind my mother, she in masseur sandals, me hoping I might get a sesame bar at the end of it.
They must have been around, but I wasn’t aware of any other health food mums in our little pocket of 1970s Sydney suburbia. While other kids had strawberry Quik after school, my brother and I could at best hope for unsweetened orange juice — sometimes with a cheeky shot of cod liver oil thrown in.
Note: orange juice does not in any way disguise the taste of cod liver oil.
We could buy footie cards, but had to throw out the chewie. We had party food, but the fairy bread was wholemeal, with real butter. School sandwiches were cheese and lettuce on Vogels bread that always tasted stale no matter how new it was. Completely unswappable.
And for what? I finished my childhood with no sense that all that roughage had given me an edge over my devon and tomato sauce on white bread friends (oh how I envied them.) Quite the opposite. Their families didn’t seem to fall apart or their mothers die.
I know that’s not a connection that stands up to scrutiny, but there it is. Of course the health food didn’t actually kill my mother. But it sure didn’t save her either.
I wasn’t a health food mum when my turn came. Fish fingers featured heavily in the toddler phase. There’s McDonalds sometimes and brightly coloured packets with ingredients I don’t fully understand thrown into kids’ lunchboxes — the playground bargaining power I never had.
I do want my kids to be healthy. There are compulsory vegetables and probably too many rolled oats. But I guess I’ve settled on a view that beyond a broadly sensible diet, making food into a big deal doesn’t really help. Restrictive diets might be healthier in a technical sense, but they can also be stressful, consuming, isolating. The things that have really made me feel good and happy and healthy over the years aren’t to do with food at all; they’re relationships and sleep and laughing and engagement with the world.
And yet. I still get drawn in, seduced by the idea that eating better will fix things. If I just gave up caffeine. If I just got the kids off sugar. I find myself staying up late reading improbable rants about the dangers of grains or certain cooking oils. Then there are the promised miracle foods: bone broth! Coconut water! Chlorophyll! And I finally, deeply understand the desire of my long-gone mother to protect us from the world through one of the few things she could really control, our food.
As my son set off for his first day at high school, I found myself baking. My muffins sat on the bench for at least a week, high-fibre bricks of linseed meal and coconut flour. Not yummy. Not eaten. A health food amulet to protect my beautiful boy from the evils of adolescence, doomed to fail. A reminder of a mother’s overwhelming desire and limited ability to protect. A low-sugar, protein-rich symbol of love.
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