No Food Left Standing // Can you be too health-conscious?

As told to Naomi Raksin

I remember my mother telling me about her childhood. There was no such thing as a loaded frozen section in the grocery store and Oma would spend hours every day making food on the tiny slab of counter space that is still her kitchen today. As my mother spoke, I would think of Oma’s homemade pickles that made me gag and her bland egg salad that never got finished. I felt really bad for my mother.

I grew up in a different world. Both of my parents held full-time jobs. My mother worked in a bank and my father was an accountant. We’d come home at the same time every day: my father lugging his heavy laptop case, my mother in a stiff, starchy suit, and my two sisters and me with our schoolbags banging against our backs. My mother would dig into the freezer, pick out some hot dogs, burgers, or frozen chicken nuggets, and toss it into the oven with a bag of fries. It would be ready in 30 minutes and we’d bury it all under ketchup and barbecue sauce. On some nights, she’d throw together a quick pot of macaroni and cheese and sometimes we’d order in pizza or falafels. I know my mother must have been tired after a full day of work but it wasn’t only that. She preferred to dig the car out of a foot of snow to pick up pizza from the other side of town than to make something in our own kitchen.

As my sisters and I grew into adolescence, we never thought to take out the mixing bowls and help out in the kitchen. There was plenty of store-bought food around—fresh, frozen, and sealed-in-crinkly-packaging in the nosh pantry.

Before my wedding, I went to a cooking class to learn the basics. I stuffed my new fridge with sauces and dressings to make up for the rest. My husband—whose mother was a cook in a yeshivah—was literally raised on yeshivah lunches, and he was perfectly content with my dinners. On his way home from work, he’d often stop at the ice cream store and bring me a milkshake.

Our family lived in our puff of cotton-candy bliss until the day my youngest sister, Rachel, decided to become a nutritionist. With her new health-minded outlook, she convinced my parents to go for a full-panel of blood work. My father had intense doctor-phobia but even my mother was not very good with scheduling doctor appointments.

My mother called when the results came in. I was walking down the avenue, the heavy sounds of traffic competing with her voice. But even with the noise, her confusion came through the line, thin and reedy, with sentences that rose at the ends like questions.
“Ilana? You there, Ilana? So, Tatty has… diabetes? And I have… pre-diabetes?”

I stared at the phone and then plugged my other ear. “I don’t hear you. You have… what?”
The first thing I thought of was the picture I’d seen a while back of a chubby-cheeked kid sitting behind an Olympic-sized plate and soft drink at a fast food chain with the caption DIABETES in block letters above. It made the disease seem almost friendly. The truth was I didn’t know much about it. I knew it exploded to epidemic proportions in America. Like obesity. I was pretty sure they both went hand in hand.

“Um, Mommy? Did you speak to Rachel yet?” It was the only thing I could think to say. Rachel would probably have a lot to say on the topic.

Rachel did indeed have a lot to say on the topic.

When she was done with the sermons, she micromanaged the pantries and dragged bags of cookies, chocolate bars and soda cans to the curb. She went grocery shopping and cooked healthful meals. She sat my parents down and made them watch “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”—the famous lecture about the dangers of sugar. My father later admitted to falling asleep in the middle.

My parents tolerated it, but just barely. We all thought Rachel was a little over the top.
A couple of weeks later, my husband and I moved into my parents’ house for Shabbos. The turnover was shocking. We sat around the Shabbos table crunching on whole-grain matzah and taking tiny bites of dry salmon. Everyone was miserable. After the meal, my husband and I scrounged around the cabinets for something to eat. Round tubs of oats and neat rows of brown rice stared back at us.

“Do you see this?” I said to him. “There’s nothing here.”

“Well,” Rachel’s voice came from the table where she sat with a mug of green tea. “Maybe if you came earlier on Friday and offered to help me cook for Shabbos, there would be more food to eat!”

I looked at Rachel, really looked at her. There were dark, bluish marks under her eyes, like bruises. Her mouth sagged at the corners. She looked ragged. She liked to cook just as much as the rest of us liked to cook. She was doing it all to help my parents’ regain their health.

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