by Jen Hatmaker
“Jesus, please help me find gratitude. This whole thing feels stupid.”
It took a minute, but here is what came to mind:
I remembered how my friend Krista made a test version of her sweet potato soufflé with only 7-sanctioned ingredients, declared it still delicious, offered to bring it over, and sent me the recipe with happy thoughts and encouragement.
I recalled the twenty phone calls and e-mails this week from friends who love me, checking on 7 and cheering me on.
I thought about these seven healthy foods jam-packed with nutrition, fueling my body. My energy has doubled and I feel really good. I have the luxury of eating healthy, organic food, an extravagance in most of the world.
I remembered The Council, sticking by this project with absurd enthusiasm. I recalled their diet as they ate like the poor: rice, cornmeal, some beans, simple breads. These girls are deeply living 7 alongside me, and I’m so grateful.
I realized my slightly reduced life is still extraordinary in every way. There is no end to my advantages. For whatever reason I was born into privilege; I’ve never known hunger, poverty, or despair. I have been blessed, blessed, blessed—relationally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. My life is so happy it’s almost embarrassing.
So I thawed into a gratitude puddle, exchanging my physical aching for spiritual communion. It was a good trade. I exhaled and breathed, “Thank You.”
Oh! I also remembered the dried apple slices I found at Sprouts, my favorite new natural grocery store, which I do believe counts as a snack. Lots of little somethings I can pop into my mouth that don’t taste like tree bark and make a decent substitute for the chips and salsa I would sacrifice a child to have.
Thank You, Lord.
Day 19
At the DFW airport today, I almost bought a coffee. I stood four feet from Starbucks and nearly ordered. These were the sinister thoughts I entertained, nay, coddled for two minutes:
No one would ever know.
It would just be one cup.
I need the caffeine. For energy.
The letter of the law is not the point.
It would make me happy and, thus a better speaker tonight.
I want a soy vanilla latte so bad I could spit.
In one teeny moment of resolve, I sent an SOS text to The Council: “I’m about to buy a coffee. I-am-this-close. Somebody help me.” The texts started buzzing in.
Susana: It probably tastes like dirty underwear anyway.
Shonna: Ask for hot water in a coffee cup.
Becky: I should say something spiritual about Jesus being your caffeine, but really that just sux.
Jenny: I say coffee is acceptable. Love, Your Favorite Council Woman. (This permissiveness is why Jenny was selected for The Council.)
I escaped narrowly by chewing gum like a quitting smoker. I should tell you that every time I’ve been in Sprouts, I’ve put my nose directly on the glass cases of bulk coffee beans and inhaled like a deranged weirdo. I mean, deeply inhaled. For at least ten seconds. Nose to the glass. The only possible way I could act more disturbing is if I ground up some beans, made a line with a razor blade, and snorted it in the middle of aisle 9.
My gosh. I think I have a problem. A friend asked if I was quitting coffee after this month was up. I told her I’d considered renouncing coffee exactly zero times, and if she ever brought up such foolishness again, I was going to quit her.
Yeah. I definitely have a problem.
Day 21
So, between my pantry, refrigerator, and freezer, I have around 240 food items. This is the kitchen my kids holler in about having nothing to eat. Nearly everything in my pantry is processed. We may not eat enough raw broccoli, but we are getting plenty of soy lecithin and sodium acid pyrophosphate. Most have at least fourteen ingredients, and there is an excellent chance our blood has turned to straight high fructose corn syrup.
This bothers me.
Occasionally I come across a book that is so insightful it is a real struggle not to plagiarize the entire thing. If I could insert the entire content of In Defense of Food right here, I would do it. It has revolutionized my ideas about food and nutrition. This is the main premise: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
What author Michael Pollan means by “food” is “real food” that came from the ground, a tree, a plant, or an animal without messing with it, food that hasn’t been loaded with corn syrup or injected with hormones. He writes not as a nutritionist overcomplicating something simple, but on the authority of tradition and common sense.
By the 1960s or so it had become all but impossible to sustain traditional ways of eating in the face of the industrialization of our food. If you wanted to eat produce grown without synthetic chemicals or meat raised on pasture without pharmaceuticals, you were out of luck. The supermarket had become the only place to buy food, and real food was rapidly disappearing from its shelves, to be replaced by the modern cornucopia of highly processed foodlike products.7
Our grandmas ate local meat and vegetables from their gardens; we eat Pop Tarts and Velveeta. Today in America the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented. This machine is driven by a thirty-two billion-dollar food-marketing engine that thrives on change for its own sake, not to mention constantly shifting nutritional science that keeps folding in on itself every few years.
Pollan explains:
Like a large gray cloud, a great Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition—much to the advantage of everyone involved. Except perhaps the supposed beneficiary of all this nutritional advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters. For the most important thing to know about the campaign to professionalize dietary advice is that it has not made us any healthier. To the contrary: it has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.8
Clearly. Four of the top ten causes of death in America today are chronic diseases with well-established links to our industrialized diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. These health plagues remain rare in countries where people don’t eat like us, even if its local diet is high in fat or carbs, the two straw men America decided to fight. The basics of the Western diet include:
• The rise of highly processed foods and refined grains
• The use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures
• The abundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat
• The massive consumption of fast food
• The shrinking diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy (thanks to vigorous lobbying and strategic subsidization by our government)
• The conspicuous absence of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains9
This bodes terribly for us, and it is downright disastrous for our children. In fact, U.S. life expectancy was projected to rise indefinitely, but a new data analysis from the New England Journal of Medicine suggests this trend is about to reverse itself due to the rapid rise in obesity, especially among children. Our kids are the first generation in the history of America that has a shorter life span than their parents.10
There is a way out of this madness.
We get to vote three times a day against this toxic food supply with our forks.
Do you know what happened this month? After eating only whole foods and virtually no fast food, my pants are falling off. I feel energetic during my typical afternoon slump. My cheeks are rosy. My allergies disappeared. I haven’t had a single digestive issue. My canker sores went dormant. I swear, my eyes are whiter.
There’s more. What used to take two hours shopping at the big store now takes thirty-five minutes at the farmer’s market. I’ve spent only half my grocery budget by not buying extra garbage. Plus, you can’t imagine how much we’ve
saved by eating mostly at home. We’re wasting less; you better believe leftovers get eaten—this was rare before 7 because we had so many other choices. (Why eat yesterday’s food when you could have new food?) More than ever, the family has gathered around the kitchen, chopping and stirring and rehashing our day.
Maybe food simplification is a good idea for all of us, and for more than one reason. Spiritual clarity and health come to mind. Waste reduction and time management and financial responsibility and gratefulness deserve some line space, too. There are other things, but that’s a decent start list.
Barbara Kingsolver is a better foodie (and writer) than me, so let’s wrap up with her oh-so-good thoughts:
When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. “Hey, ladies,” it said to us, “go ahead, get liberated. We’ll take care of dinner.” They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. . . . But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.11
I’m hoping for a way back home.
Day 26
I’ve read In Defense of Food, Animal Vegetable Miracle, The Maker’s Diet, Fast Food Nation, and watched “Food, Inc.” with my horrified children, who I am not ashamed to brainwash. Here’s my conclusion:
I feel had.
I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid the marketing industry, food lobbyists, nutritional “experts,” and the FDA have been selling. You say oat bran is the new messiah? Check. Include in every recipe from 1988 to 1991. Fat is our enemy? Got it. Enter margarine, only one molecule away from plastic. Now carbohydrates are evil? Delete from menu. Insert angry feelings toward orange juice and other sneaky foods conspiring to make me fat. High fructose corn syrup is healthy because it’s made from corn? Bring on the, well, ten million products it is pumped into.
After all, according to its Web site12 high fructose corn syrup “can be part of a balanced diet”, and these people would never lie to us. Evidently, our obesity epidemic has nothing to do with a highly processed sugar diet, but “a decrease in PE classes and other plausible explanations.” (I know I haven’t had a decent PE class since 1991.) Also? Good news! Its expert panel concluded that frequently consuming soft drinks will not increase our obesity risk at all.13 Sweet surprise indeed! Dr. Pepper for everyone and pass the Oreos.
But beware of the carrots. They have an agenda.
Honestly, I have swallowed this whole. I haven’t had a glass of orange juice in four years, but I’ve had no problem drinking Diet Coke, with substantiated links to cancer and kidney failure. But it’s fat free. My nutritional perspective is so tainted by marketing I’ve lost touch with common sense.
I thought I was safely bubble wrapped within 7 since my menu contains all whole foods except bread, but that’s as wholesome as a toddler with dimples, right? Then I read this little gem under Pollan’s food rule of thumb:
Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup:
Consider a loaf of bread, one of the “traditional foods that everyone knows” . . . As your grandmother could tell you, bread is traditionally made using a remarkably small number of familiar ingredients: flour, yeast, water, and a pinch of salt will do it. But industrial bread—even industrial whole-grain bread—has become a far more complicated product of modern food science (not to mention commerce and hope). Here’s the complete ingredients list for Sara Lee’s Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread:
Enriched bleached flour [wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), folic acid], water, whole grains [whole wheat flour, brown rice flour (rice flour, rice bran)], high fructose corn syrup, whey, wheat gluten, yeast, cellulose. Contains 2 percent or less of each of the following: honey, calcium sulfate, vegetable oil (soybean and/or cottonseed oils), salt, butter (cream, salt), dough conditioners (may contain one or more of the following: mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, ascorbic acid, enzymes, azodicarbonamide), guar gum, calcium propionate (preservative), distilled vinegar, yeast nutrients (monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate), corn starch, natural flavor, beta-carotene (color), vitamin D3, soy lecithin, soy flour.
There are many things you could say about this intricate loaf of “bread,” but note first that even if it managed to slip by your great grandmother (because it is a loaf of bread, or at least is called one and strongly resembles one), the product fails every test proposed under rule number two. . . . Sorry, Sara Lee, but your Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread is not food and if not for the indulgence of the FDA could not even be labeled “bread.”14
For the love of Michael Pollan.
Sure enough, my 100 percent whole wheat bread had twenty-eight ingredients. I counted. I felt smug about this choice just weeks ago, but it has more ingredients than the most heinous box of sugared cereal I’ve ever bought.
So I decided to make my own bread. This sounds like nothing to you who roll out piecrusts and can your own tomatoes or whatever, but this was seriously new territory for me, so give me this Laura Ingalls Wilder moment. When I mentioned this brainchild to my girlfriends, I had a tsunami of offers for bread machines:
• “I have one in storage.”
• “I have one in the attic.”
• “I have one I couldn’t sell in my garage sale.”
• “I have one to set out when my mother-in-law visits.”
So I borrowed a bread machine, and with four days left I’ve made six loaves. I want to report that homemade bread has changed our lives, making us more grateful and connected to the earth. I’d planned to wax nostalgic about the smell of baking bread and the delectable, warm goodness of eating the first piece. I mean, if homemade bread isn’t the bull’s-eye of domestic excellence, I don’t know what is. Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s accounts of rising dough and general delight in hearth and home made me want to build a brick oven and milk some cows. Here is my actual report:
My loaves have been gross.
I’ve used different mixes and different settings; I’ve sliced it super thin and as thick as bricks. I’ve eaten it warmed, toasted, baked, and room temp. I’ve tried wheat, half wheat, 9-grain, and rye. My bread was slathered with baked apples, used for a sandwich, toasted as croutons, and employed as a sponge for over-easy eggs. I’ve tried, people. I’ve really tried.
But it’s just icky. My first loaf was as hard as cement and about as flavorful. The next five didn’t fare much better. Maybe the wheat mixes are the problem. There is a reason people love white, fluffy bleached flour—nutritionally void but oozing with white-bread deliciousness. Perhaps I’m so used to bread sweetened with HFCS and lightened up with chemicals that I can’t appreciate four-ingredient bread anymore. Maybe the omission of butter on fresh bread is just too criminal. Maybe this just needs to be done the old-fashioned way, um, whatever that is.
I don’t know.
My sixth loaf came out an hour ago, I spent twenty minutes chopping apples and cooking them down into a spread, only to take one bite and nearly gag.
I guess I need to call my mom for cooking instruction like I did during the first few years of marriage when I was a domestic tragedy. I still believe in you, homemade bread! I know you can be delicious and soft. I won’t be thwarted by my false starts, because clearly I have no idea what I’m doing in the baking department. It’s like trusting a monkey with a baby; I need to be trained before handling another innocent mound of dough. Bread will not defeat me, I say! I have a college d
egree, I’m raising three decent humans (and none have perished), and I haven’t run out of gas in six years.
I can make bread.
Day 29
I recant. The homemade bread is cement. I’m buying my bread. So what.
Day 30
God bless The Council. What began as an innocuous e-mail (“Hey girls! Anyone want to come over for appetizers and brainstorm an idea with me?”) turned into a group project that involved me getting avocados and sweet potatoes while they ate cornmeal. After letting this first month settle a bit, Shonna wrote her thoughts on the food fast, and I dropped it back in here for your reading pleasure:
Fasting has always seemed like a radical thing to me. People like Gandhi fast. Not people like me. I have never really even considered a fast as a way to gain clarity or to better hear God’s voice. My biggest problem with fasting is: I like to eat! I have seriously considered keeping breakfast bars in my nightstand. When my belly is empty, I feel less clear-headed, not more focused. I get grouchy and quick-tempered when I have not eaten in a few hours (or so I’m told).
When I volunteered to be a part of 7, I thought, Sure, this is really not about me, it will be easy! I figured my participation would be in the support role. During the month Jen ate only seven foods, a small group of us chose an alternative. We selected seven countries and ate what the poorest residents of each country would eat for three days.
There was rice and plantain. There was rice. There was rice and plantain. People in underdeveloped countries don’t eat much, and when they do, it’s most commonly rice. I ate rice at home, I ate rice with my friends, I even ate rice at a restaurant. That last one got a funny look from the waiter; he must have thought that I was trying a new diet fad to lose weight. To be honest, I got a lot of comments. One friend even told me that I had become a bit “eccentric.” I mean, look at me: eating rice and talking about Haiti and Ethiopia!