I read Asako Yuzuki’s Butter recently. I knew I was going to like it, because I do enjoy food and as a general rule I love socialising with people with the same wild enthusiasm for flavours – of course, to write a book about food, you would have to belong in that group. Yes, writers research and can write on topics that are not personal to them, but I feel like people who don’t necessarily care about food wouldn’t be drawn to have it as a subject for a book. It’s not something you find interesting as an observer (and not a partaker!); it’s a very hands-on interest, if you could say that.
The story itself was fascinating. Touched on lots of issues I enjoy thinking about (on top of food) and definitely has tempered my enthusiasm about the general Japanese diet. I used to feel like the Japanese have really figured out how to do food well – they’ve managed to educate their population on healthy eating and it’s been a big success. Except that… is it? It was interesting to read about it all from the perspective of the protagonist of Butter – a Japanese woman who is learning to love food. Much of her food education is French – which, to me, is another pinnacle of food culture, really. I think the most amazing thing about French food culture is that it proves that butter, bread and wine don’t seem to be as bad for you when done well as some might suggest. In the book, French food is shown as being looked down upon by the Japanese as being too fatty, too rich and too heavy on the stomach. Of course, while the latter is an inevitable outcome of two clashing food cultures, fat and richness seem to actually be the considered unhealthy, as they can lead to stomach upset and putting on weight. It was interesting to read how staying slim (not even a healthy weight, but actually slim) is a morally lauded “trait” in Japan. Gaining weight is viewed as a failure of willpower and self-control (and as letting down people around them?), for women especially. Madness, isn’t it? To me, (and god knows how I, a person who is heavily influenced by just about anyone and anything, have managed to develop this completely unshakable opinion) food can’t hurt you if you enjoy it. Anything that feels good (if you do take time to tune in on how you feel during and as a consequence of eating) is healthy and the more colours and textures you can have in a meal, the better. This, as I think of it, includes butter and meat and sugar (as well as their balancing counterparts – the fibre, the carby sides, the sour/savoury/umami food) and all those other things that we are told to minimise in our diets. I personally like meat, but cannot for the life of me, enjoy meat without fresh veg. Anyway, this is just to set the scene on the book vibes and where I am with my food attitudes.
Feeding
The fascinating part of motherhood is thinking about all the things you do on autopilot with this new kind of scrutiny: why should my children do this? Is it good enough for them? What is important to me personally? What is important for my children’s development? Food, as you either know or can imagine, is a rollercoaster in a house with kids. So much obsolete guidance that is treated as gospel, so many preferences, so much advice and opinions, so much setting of boundaries and teaching/learning of lessons. My children have made me hate making food (these periods rarely last, but they’re intense) and have also made me feel like it’s the most worthwhile thing I can do in our house. They’ve made us try out a number of approaches to feeding and cooking, and have helped me and my partner face some of our long-held beliefs about what food should look like and how it should be eaten. It’s, to put it mildly, a very thoroughly researched topic in our house. Books by Ellyn Satter, I have found, probably sum up my general attitude toward food the best. I say probably, as I’m still yet to finish a single book of hers, but as slowly as it’s going (I struggle to finish books without an audio version nowadays – not to say I’m not enjoying it), she has, from what I’ve read so far and heard about her, probably the closest to my approach to eating/feeding.
The appropriate amount of joy
Out of all the food related questions I have struggled with throughout my journey of making children eat well, the one that was reawakened by Butter is whether it’s healthy to console children with food. My no-thinking response is “of course not!”, but there’s layers to the response that I take time to think about. A book I really, really love is Magic Pill by Johann Hari. It’s illuminating on many cultural attitudes about food, on issues that are caused by an unhealthy relationship with food, and last but not least, issues that are managed/alleviated by food. It was pure joy reading such a thorough examination of eating and its causes and consequences, and it’s from there that I finally got the initial push to stop and think about whether food is the actual problem or merely the symptom of a problem, or even a helpful solution. And then Butter made me rethink food’s main purpose being the provision of sustenance. It might be a coincidence that Nigella Lawson has just this week come out with a glorious quote about food being a pleasure of life we should take whenever we can. Butter was pretty much 14 hours of a similar sentiment (I’d love to tell you the number of pages instead of the hours, but it’s been way too long since my child-rich life has allowed me to finish a printed book). I loved that the pleasure of eating was shown as something that would be silly to think of as shameful or gluttonous, and that instead it may be thought of as tying our souls to the earthly plane through the grounded sensation of nourishing our bodies by putting food into our mouths. Even in Ellyn Satter’s books, one of the strongest impressions that I was left with so far is the story of a girl, barely a toddler, who was eating with utmost pleasure that most people who encountered her as a child found wonderful to witness. But whose mother was so embarrassed by the joy she exhibited while eating, that she ended up teaching her to suppress her appetite and feel ashamed for enjoying her food. Which, of course, ended up being the cause of an eating disorder. I generally find that the biggest tragedy of childhood is children losing that spark of individuality and no longer being their completely wild and unfiltered selves. So this story left a deep dent in me, and I feel the saddest when I think of the mother of that girl ever realising how brutally she has killed off a massive part of her daughter’s world by enforcing her own unconscious beliefs about food.
But, back to the question of whether it’s okay to ever use food as a solution to kids being upset – I’ve decided that if I consistently stuck an oaty bar into their mouths every time they got upset, then yes, it probably would lead to them developing unhealthy associations. But food is not even my second or my third choice of a solution. Crucially, my solutions don’t replace my love or attention, they add to them if needed. Also, 9 times out of 10 my eldest will calm down completely after a drink of water, and I recently realised I wouldn’t think to worry that water would create unhealthy coping mechanisms! Food is one of those very heated topics that just attracts all kinds of passionately held beliefs. I love thinking about food, but honestly, won’t always choose to talk about it, because especially as the main cook in the family, it’s hard to face criticism or differing opinions which imply that I’m doing this extremely important job badly. I think it’s this insecurity in the face of one’s own potential failings with feeding that makes people come on so strong with their beliefs about what food is and isn’t and how it should be done. I’ve butted heads about food with my mother-in-law in less than graceful ways enough times not to have learned how strongly we hold on to what we think is right for our children.
Let them eat cake
It’s a funny one. Just as I decide I’m very chill about most food, cakes come along. The problem with cakes is that thinking about savoury food in general, most people would have a neutral association. With desserts, it’s “I let myself eat them, but try not to eat too much” at best, and “I shouldn’t eat sweet things but can’t stop myself” at worst. Oh wait, no, there’s also “sugar is evil and I will never have any” people who actually miss out on the joys of baked goods. Basically, everyone knows (used here as a shorthand for “has it drilled into their subconscious from a young age”), desserts are …naughty. Now, that aside, let’s talk about UPFs. And I don’t mean ultra processed foods in the strict sense of anything with more than 2-3 raw ingredients. I’m talking about foods full of preservatives and additives, some of which cause cancer and some of which affect your hormones. Yes, surely there’s some that don’t, but the point is, the average person is not keeping track of what each of the million additives does. Let’s cut them all to be sure.
Now, let’s mix sweet/savoury food attitudes and UPFs together into one big happy pot in my head. This is what goes on in my brain when someone talks about food – neutral associations, me imagining lovely home-made meals. Now once someone says “cakes”, “sweets” or anything in that vicinity, this is what goes through my mind: food is a necessity, so most people have to make food from scratch as it’s pretty unaffordable for most people not to. Cakes are not a necessity, so people have them less often. When you don’t have something often, you don’t often know how to make it. So the dessert isn’t homemade. Also sweets are a treat, you don’t want to work as hard for a treat as you would expect to for sustenance. So – the sweets/cakes/desserts must be shop-bought and absolutely brimming with all sorts of nasties I don’t like and don’t want anywhere near my children. It’s not a crazy thought, but also it’s not really a thought. It’s the subconscious process that I imagine happens in me without my knowledge. I think. Because I’m ready to fight when someone mentions dessert and the person I’m talking to isn’t someone who I know/imagine makes their own cakes. I fly into this rage of objection that makes me think JUNK!!!! before any information surfaces on the actual provenance of items being talked about. Funny that that’s not my first thought about savoury foods, even though many people base their home cooked meals on sauces full of preservatives, unwashed fruit and veg, low-salt salt (my favourite joke) and meat spiked with antibiotics. It can all be terrible. But my brain just leaps to the worst conclusion about the desserts. In all fairness, you can explain your wanting or not wanting a dessert fairly easily as an adult. It’s when I’m making decisions for my children that I run into absolutely wild opinions: “They’re gonna have to have sugar some day, you can’t keep it from them forever!” “But I don’t want them missing out” “It’s just a bit of [insert the name of a dessert that is 95% sugar with a dollop of jam/caramel ice cream/2-inch icing on top]”. I’ve just re-read my last sentence and I think you can hear the rage seeping out of me. I’m not going to lie, I’m keeping my children from sugar (the older one on a “treats occasionally” diet) mostly due to beliefs that I can’t shake since my childhood. And I totally know sugar’s not nutritious in any way, but with my logical brain I also know it’s still okay to have some when you feel like it. My older child is allowed cakes/ice cream etc when we’re out or celebrating, but we don’t normalise the tuck shop and don’t usually have dessert on weekdays. I do have objective reasons to keep my children from a lot of the sugar, one is that our dentist is always impressed with their teeth (and they’re not the best at brushing), another reason is that children can’t always stop themselves from having a lot of something tasty (can’t wait to read the parts of Ellyn Satter’s books that touch on this though) and it’s easier to never start eating something when your self-control isn’t good (than being told to stop before you’re ready to be done), and finally that nutritional specialists who I listen to say that early taste experiences naturally build a baseline for the tastes that children tolerate in later life, and having too much sugar doesn’t help them develop a full palate. We don’t want that! We here want adventurous eaters that’ll try anything once (or ideally over 10 times as Ellyn Satter suggests). So I do have reasons that are good enough for me to feel confident in my decision, but my god the rage that rises in me when this comes up for discussion! It’s primal. And I don’t know how to work through it yet. I personally eat as much sugar as I like, and thankfully a lot of sweet stuff tastes wrong to me in recent years. I have found that sweetener-based desserts are just not to my taste at all, and that most chocolates just taste fake. It might be my clever body changing my palate to stop me from eating things that are not good for me, or it might be that the quality of sweets has truly become atrocious since my childhood. Either way, it’s all working out, and I prefer savoury foods anyway. Thinking about which takes me back to the protagonist of Butter, and some of the lovely recipes she dreamed up towards the end of the book. I really quite adore the general type of dishes she ended up liking to eat and make, and thought that although not consciously, I’ve probably been on a similar journey to find what I enjoy and don’t throughout my 20s. It’s so worthwhile to learn to love food. I don’t know if this particular passion is innate or can be taken on, but I do recommend it wholeheartedly.