On one hand, eating real foods is pretty easy. What’s more convenient than grabbing an apple? In a world where we’re told from a young age that so many things don’t, apples do literally *grow on trees.* No prepping, no cooking, no plating.
On the other hand, man cannot live by apples alone. Real foods take some planning. Real foods take some time. One of my favorite breakfasts right now is grainless banana pancakes. It’s eggs, bananas, a little coconut flour. I’ve sometimes added coconut flakes, cinnamon, vanilla. But they don’t keep, so you only make a serving at a time, and they take a little longer than a regular pancake to heat through. They’re a little trickier on the flip.
Generally when we have a spaghetti night, I’ll make traditional noodles for my family and make spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles for me. My youngest daughter loves the zucchini noodle for its sheer size — sometimes as long as she is tall. But where fusilli has a shelf life of months, zucchini is a little less hardy. There have been times that I’ve realized that, because I put off this Italian-esque feast til later in the week, the spaghetti squash sprouted, the zucchini spotted. Plan B.
And at 8:11am, which is about the last possible moment for making lunches on a school day, real foods aren’t always convenient. Real foods don’t always like the microwave. Foods with a shelf life measured in months or years also tend to come in really convenient packaging, easier to pack cubic Tetris style in lunchboxes. Lunches of whole foods tend to come in a mountain of Tupperware, so that by the end of the day, you can create a faux wall of plastics to keep out the world.
Full disclosure, my family still eats a lot of convenience food. Food that I purchase because they like it; because sending a Little Debbie in a lunch is a like sending a little mid-day hug. While my brain may know that calcium stearoyl lactylate isn’t actually an ingredient of love, I haven’t cut the cord. I may have substituted granola bars for Lara bars and Kind bars, but let’s face it. They’re both basically sugar bombs of a different origin, with lengthy shelf lives of their own.
It’s hard to separate food from emotion, and in many ways, I don’t think we should. Why is Thanksgiving such a beloved holiday? It’s not all about handprint turkeys and football games. But it is about family recipes, family memories, traditions. It takes a day to make a Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps an hour to eat it, but it’s the continuity that we’re celebrating. It’s why we hand recipes down from generation to generation. Food is love, and interestingly, and not discounting the deliciousness of an Oatmeal Cream Pie, the more time we take to make it, the more “real” it tends to be.
While our family hasn’t disavowed the fast and the convenient, I think we’re making progress. For breakfast today, my oldest daughter cut an apple into slices, arranged them on top of her cereal in a pinwheel, and sprinkled them with cinnamon. It wasn’t the fastest option, but it fueled more than just a summer morning of play. Our relationship with our food is important, and when we take the time to prepare it with intention, it becomes its own reward. Maybe even a little hug we give ourselves.