Eve Schaub and I have a lot in common. We
are both 40-something writers who have adopted Vermont as our physical and
spiritual home. Seduced by the New
England small town and rural aesthetic, we know our way around a farmers'
market and can wax rhapsodic on the virtues of local, seasonal, and organic everything. We were both lapsed vegetarians, albeit for me only briefly, a
transformation in attitude occasioned by the availability in areas like ours of
locally and humanely raised meat. For vacation we'd both go back to Tuscany
before we'd go anywhere else. Finally, and most relevant here, we both became
aghast at the insane amounts of sugar in American food and attempted to wrest
some control of the volume of sugar in our diets from multinational
corporations and well-meaning bake sale vendors.
For Ms Schaub, her sugar epiphany was
catalysed by a video on the evils of sugar. Whilst far from being ignorant
about healthy eating, she experienced a dawning horror at the amount of sugar
her family, particularly her two daughters, was mindlessly consuming despite
her avoidance of fast food and obviously empty calories such as soda. Avoiding sugar entirely seemed impossible
but, not being one to shy away from a challenge, that is exactly what she set
out to do, for an entire year, with her family joining her.
Predictably, there were tears from her
children, but her husband, leery of radical diets from having grown up with a
father who experimented with bizarre dietary extremes, was surprisingly game. Her
book chronicles the setting and enforcing of the no-sugar rules for the year,
which budgeted for monthly treats, a "birthday party rule" that
allowed the girls to make their own choices about what to eat when they were
away from home and their peers were eating sugar, and a personal exception for
each family member – the one form of sugar they could not live without for a
year. The difficulties of shopping, dining out, eating at someone else's house,
negotiating holidays like Halloween and Xmas, are all described with unvarnished
candour.
They made mistakes, especially in the first
few months, not realising, for example, that balsamic vinegar contained
sugar. I think my favourite mistake was
when they bought their daughters some strawberries and plain yoghurt for an
afternoon snack in Florence only to discover the yoghurt was actually whipped
cream. I bet the girls were in heaven. Some recipes adapted to be made with
dextrose (an allowed form of sugar in her experiment) were a success but others
failed to gel, literally. As an appendix, Ms Schaub lists recipes that are
sugar-free as well as recipes for their monthly sugary treat. The latter I found a bit odd as recipes with
copious amounts of sugar are, to put it mildy, not difficult to find and
somewhat at odds with the tenor of the book.
But I understand that readers might be curious about them, considering
how evocatively she describes their monthly sugar mirage, and how carefully
they selected their most beloved family recipes as treats.
Another thing Ms Schaub does not sugarcoat
(sorry—I was going to have to use it at some point, so best we get it out of
the way) is her children's reactions.
But it is clear that neither girl will have cause to look back on it as
the Year from Hell. The number of
exceptions, the sweet but sugar-free treats made from dextrose and fruit, and
their opportunity to eat sugar at school if they so chose, hardly made it a
literal year without sugar. The scary
thing, as Ms Schaub notes, is how much less this still notable amount of sugar
was compared to a typical year, let alone a typical American child's diet. Remember, these were kids who had a mom that
bakes bread and who had never set foot in a fast food restaurant, so their
sugar consumption was already far below the norm. The most striking point,
which the author emphasises repeatedly, is that the girls adjusted in many
respects more easily than the adults because they had less time on earth to
become addicted to sugar. At five, the
youngest was the quickest of the entire family to adapt, and by the end of the
year the palates of the entire family had changed to such an extent that they
willingly chose to eat less sugar even when it was allowed.
In addition to the gradual alteration of
their palates, another point the book makes is how the process of avoiding
sugar in 21st century America exacts a mental toll due to the
vigilance necessary to police the sugar content in every morsel that drops into
our shopping carts or passes our lips.
As consumers in America, we have more nutritional privilege, more
choice, than people virtually anywhere else on the planet, but that illusion of
choice evaporates when faced with an entire aisle of cereals or sauces all of
which contain some form of sugar.
Skipping dessert, as Ms Schaub explains trenchantly, does not cut it. Go
to a cookout steeling yourself to resist the s'mores and find that the buns,
dogs, condiments, side dishes, even the chips, all contain hidden sugar – and
the only drinks without real sugar contain poisonous artificial sweetener,
which is worse. Any event of significance, from major holidays to ostensibly healthy occasions like a 10K
fundraising run, is accompanied by vast amounts of sugar. Avoiding it requires superhuman will power or
complete social isolation. During her
family's year of no sugar, they employed both of those tactics, along with the
aforementioned judicious exceptions to make holidays and birthdays bearable.
I have taken a far more moderate approach
to the sugar problem–there was never any possibility of me having the will
power to give up sugar entirely, let alone when on holiday in Florence,
surrounded by gelato–but I experience this same frustration and horror at sugar,
sugar everywhere. When I picked up the
book, I knew exactly how the author was going to react when she started looking
for the hidden sugar in everything because I have been there, and continue to
rage impotently against the purveyors of sugar. I, too, peruse labels and cook and bake from
scratch. That is simply a necessity. I wish I did not have to. It would be nice
to stop for an ice cream with friends or enjoy a cookie in a coffeehouse that
did not contain ten times the amount of sugar necessary. Also, as Ms Schaub notes, making everything is
time-consuming. I prefer baked goods and ice cream with much less sugar than in purchased varieties but it is not practical
to always bake or make my own ice cream.
But the more prepared foods you eat, the more
sugar you ingest, and any food, whether it contains sugar or not, is more
satisfying when it is homemade. The ultimate
lesson of her book is not just about avoiding sugar for health reasons but
about appreciating food. Mindless eating is invariably less healthy than cooking
local, seasonal, organic, fresh ingredients from scratch. Kids, she notes at
the end of her missive, are inherently aware of this. They will take homemade
bread over store-bought cake. Children know, she concludes, what is special. That
sense is something we have lost in the world of corporate food where sugar is
used as a drug to stimulate unhealthy consumption and addiction. It is less
will power than an appreciation for real food that may save us.