Sugar Cereal

Sugar cereal and Saturday morning cartoons

I joked recently on Facebook about how Southerners run to the store for milk and bread if snow is forecast, and a friend joked back "You buy groceries? I thought you guys were self-sustaining." 

It got me to thinking about how often living a simpler, more sustainable life can seem daunting in our media-saturated, consumer culture. For me, it's all about making very small changes. I'm not an all-or-nothing person. And, for the record, I have no desire to be self-sustaining, though "community-sustaining" is certainly a goal.

We talk as a family about our goals, and then find ourselves buying more organic, more local. Food is sacred. It literally creates us anew. Some Buddhist practices teach that how food is grown and prepared impacts not just the body, but the soul as well. Food prepared with a bad attitude causes a kind of metaphysical/spiritual damage, just like eating food full of hormones and pesticides can cause physical harm. 

So yes, the goal is to prepare healthy food with love...but it's also important to be honest and objective about where we are now. It's rather like filling a Facebook feed with a bevvy of gardening posts; it can mistakenly give people the impression that one is feeding a family of four from a flowerbed garden. (For the record, probably 10% of our food comes from our own garden + my dad's garden, though hopefully more as time goes on.)

Similarly, when shopping with my children recently, my 7-year-old son asked, "so mommy, is sugar cereal so bad we really should never eat it?" That gave me pause. In the pause, my son pointed out, "Well, we used to eat it once a year, on vacation, but we didn't do that this year. Is once a year okay?"

Pretty sure those honeycrisp apples in the background are not organic either.

"Yes, once a year is certainly fine," I said. "......so let's get the little boxes so we can try a lot of different things." This suggestion was well received, and then gave us the opportunity to read labels, to look at packaging claims (like "Good source of VITAMIN D"), to consider degrees of processing for different foods, and to discuss what choices mean for our bodies and the greater world to which we are connected. I love buying the little boxes, which you can cut open and use as a "bowl" of sorts. I always wanted to try even one of these as a kid, but it was completely verboten, and I coveted those little boxes.

In our world, as it exists today, we cannot avoid chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Even if I only consumed what I grow here myself (assuming I could grow enough), I would get some runoff from my uphill neighbor, or from the bird that eats it elsewhere and poops in my garden, or my wheat is cross-pollinated with GMO wheat, etc. There is no perfect, chemical-free, food-world....but this doesn't mean that my choices don't make a difference!!

Nowadays, I buy only organic strawberries and spinach. I buy organic bananas, unless they just look horrible (only usually about 10 cents/lb more than alternative). I buy organic apples about 80% of the time. (I have tried to begin with foods containing the most pesticides and petrochemicals, and/or the cheaper organic alternatives, and work from there.) And nowadays I buy sugar cereal once a year. We don't have to be all-or-nothing. The journey toward sustainability and moderation, for me, is made up of many, many small steps. 

Walk with me, hold my hand, and we won't run this race in vain!

I also have to share that my kids self-rationed these little boxes to last for several weeks, saving the last two for the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving. They didn't gorge, like I did on sugar cereal when I got to college. I found this to be very interesting, and pretty cool. For them, it's a "sometimes food," just for fun...a tiny bit of Yin that must exist in the Yang.