Is Your Family Addicted to Fast Foods?

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By Dorothy Nixon

I remember passing a McDonald's one day, way back when I much younger and decidedly unlived, and watching a mother feed her toddler some crispy golden french fries. I thought, in that superior way, so typical of youth, "What an awful mother! How can she let him? When I have children, I'll never let them eat french fries. I'll never ever take them to McDonald's!" Well, "HA" on me. A double "HA HA." A tender, juicy "HA HA" topped with lettuce and tomato in a sesame seed bun. My family lives at McDonald's.

To be fair, I was 21 or so, and probably in one of my many health food fads -- maybe even in a vegetarian phase. I knew nothing about kids, except for having been one once (all the babies for whom I had ever babysat had remained fast asleep in their cribs!). I could talk your ear off about Tolstoy and MacLuhan, but if anyone had asked me at what age a child learns to walk or talk, I would have been, as the young girls say these days, clueless.

Alex Trebek: "Now, Miss Nixon, the Daily Double Jeopardy Answer in the Baby Category is: 'In their first year'."

Contestant Nixon: "When do children get their own T.V???" BUZZZZZZZZZZ.

Alex Trebek: "The question is, `When do most children start learning to walk and talk.' You silly naive thing. I hope you are not planning to have children soon!" (I wasn't!)

But isn't it just so ironic. A whole generation of Boomers like me, devoted readers of books like "Diet for a Small Planet," are raising their children on Happy Meals and McNuggets, not to mention pizza, sauceless spaghettini, and fish sticks.

Now, don't give me that superior sneer. There's no foolin' anyone. You're a good a parent, like myself, with the very best of intentions, too. You're a virtual storehouse of nutritional information gleaned from decades of best-selling books and magazine articles on the subject, not to mention afternoon talk shows and message boards. And you, too, visit McDonald's, (or Pizza Hut, or whatever). Regularly. I see you there. (There must be a good reason those golden arches have erupted all over the landscape across North America this past decade. McDonalds up the ying yang. This summer we took a drive past those picturesque 18th-century villages along the Lower Saint-Lawrence River, and what d'ya know? A McDonald's in every port. A giant orange and yellow statue of Ronald McDonald even loomed, ludicrous, over the tiny fishing village of Saint-Louis de Ha Ha , Quebec (a real place, go look it up!), probably making the town's good-natured patron saint spit fireballs up in heaven.

I once confessed our family's fast food addiction to my pediatrician, herself a mother of two. She paused for a moment and then reached, with a brisk, authoritative stab of her hand, into her desk drawer, retrieving a rather dog-eared article from a pediatric magazine claiming that a typical McDonald's meal was quite nutritious -- if taken with milk. Sigh...

I felt exonerated, light-headed with approbation. I could breathe easy, at least in this one instance. But, I must admit, when it comes to food issues, that like most women in this society -- especially women who are mothers -- my pantry is somewhat over-stocked.

Let's start at the very beginning: I was living with my future husband, whom I was just getting to know, when I was overcome with the impulse to spend my entire paycheck on food, food, wonderful food. I had this unexplained urge to make brilliant, exotic meals for my mate. I was suddenly, out of the blue, feeling rather motherly toward him, rather homebodyish -- and that was so UNLIKE ME! I spent days visiting the specialty stores of Kingston, Ontario, poring over cookbooks in search of wild taste experiences. One day I really went berserk and whipped us up a beautiful "Rouladen," beef rolls stuffed with pork and dill pickles. Now this was not any ordinary Rouladen, but a complicated recipe from Craig Claiborn's "Go Broke Eating" cook book. I spent the day shopping for the best quality ingredients: fresh beef scaloppini, imported Dusseldorf mustard, white wine and arrowroot. I sliced, filled, folded, and tucked the little crimson patties into shape, frying them first, then simmering them over reduced heat, stirring occasionally. Then I took a deep breath and cried "Yuk," recoiling from the stove. "THE SMELL!" I screeched, "this meat is rotten." When my bewildered boyfriend stared at me, I barked, "Smell it yourself!"

"It smells fine to me," he replied.

"Something must be wrong with your nose!" I shrieked, tears beginning to form in the corners of my eyes. (Or was it the onions making me cry?) "It's disgusting. I'm going to throw up!" So, to be short, one spectacular Rouladen hit the garbage!

And, yes, I was pregnant!

Now, food was to become an even bigger issue in my life. (I had good reason: I wanted only the best for my baby!) I was proud to be the only mother-to-be in "pregnancy class" whose diet never raised an ounce of concern with the nurse-facilitator. "Wow," she'd say. "You're an example to all pregnant women."

But things soon turned sour. After the birth of my lusty ten-pound-plus infant, I found breastfeeding to be a kind of torture. Despite the concern and support of my La Leche League friends, I couldn't hack the pain. "Is this typical?" I asked my pediatrician.

"Sometimes, " she answered. "it helps to grab two pillows, one in each hand, when your baby first latches on. Then lean back on the bed and grit your teeth." Wow, the things that mothers do! But my son seemed to have the jaws of a pitbull. No way would other women put up with this pain, I thought, no way! And I put my son on a bottle, which pleased my own mother to no end. Having raised kids in the fifties, the idea of breastfeeding made her uncomfortable. And besides, now she could participate in the bottle-feeding of her grandson.

Food and Moms. Moms and Food. What a complicated issue, redolent with myth and memories, occasional sadness and no mean measure of guilt. And at the breast is where it all begins. Just read the breast feeding message boards in this forum if you don't believe me!

Like many fifties Moms, my mother didn't breastfeed, but I am sure she took great (guiltless) pleasure in all the rigmarole involved with the bottle-feeding process. Feeding her family meant a great deal to my mother. Food was, indeed, the measure of her motherhood. How well she fed her family was a matter of prestige. (I recall how proud she was, each week, to fill two heaping shopping carts with produce, a full 60 dollars worth of food!) We may have had to wade through a holy mess in our house most of the time, and our clothes had tears in them, but we ate like emperors.

My mother was a creative and accomplished cook, a utensil-whirling dervish in the kitchen, the result of this being that I never learned to cook myself. I opened thousands of cans over the years, stirred a lifetime's worth of batter, and became a whiz at converting fractions in my head (for my mother wasn't confident at math), but I never cooked anything. My mother wouldn't let me and neither would my brothers. They had it too good. Everything my mother made was delicious. And she liked to experiment, too. We ate Mexican, Oriental, and Italian as well as traditional and French Canadian. Chicken Mole, Falafel, Beef Stroganoff, and Pudding Chomeur. YUM!

Only years later did I realize that not everyone had a mother who could cook. My good friend at college, who came from a very well-off home, always complained about her Mom's lack of talent in that area. "We ate hamburgers always half-frozen," she once told me, in a tone that betrayed a deeper malaise.

Luckily, most children grow up to have fond memories of their mother's cooking. Even if a Mom is slapdash over the stove, there's at least one dish that will stand out as "the very best," the very best spaghetti and meatballs, the very best southern fried chicken. There's a scientific explanation for this: smell and memory go together in the brain. But I prefer a more Jungian explanation: it's all about symbols. And food is a symbol for love.

"When you are grown up, will you tell everyone that I was a good cook?" I ask my son, Mark.

"I'll tell them that grandmama was a good cook... (pause) ... and you, too," he adds cautiously.

"Really? So what do you like best about MY cooking?"

He thinks hard and replies, "I liked the meat pie you made last night."

"But that was ready from the store," I say. "Pick something I make!"

He reflects some more and then asks, "What DO you make?"

Hamburgers, fish sticks, sauceless spaghetti and pizza pockets. I shudder at the truth of my children's diets. But they won't touch anything remotely exotic, not one solitary lentil. "This is disgusting," is their final word on anything out-of-the-ordinary I might concoct. Is this because I lack a talent for cooking or is it the ultra-lean beef I use? Or, maybe, the fact that I cut down on salt? Or are they just typical kids with conservative taste-buds? I don't know. All I do know is that they stuff their little faces on chicken cacciatore and French Canadian tortiere when they visit their Grandmama's. I think they can sense how IMPORTANT her cooking is to her. In their little hearts they understand and eat it all up.

Food and Motherhood, a loaded issue to be sure, as least since that first group of women with infants secured to their bosoms headed out onto the savannah to gather the nuts and berries which supplied 80 percent of their tribe's food. And most probably ever since the first mammalian baby reached for its mother's nipple.

And you know the saddest thing about Food and Moms? We shop for it , cook it, and dole it out at the table, but we aren't really supposed to eat it ourselves. Not without even more guilt. "Try this recipe for scrumptious chocolate mousse cake," a magazine in the supermarket beckons, warning us on the same cover of the danger of "thunder thighs."

Now, that really makes me want to upchuck. (And, NO, I am not pregnant again!)

Dorothy Nixon, all rights reserved