Oh, The Irony of It All!

Lately I have been completely immersed in reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. She has always been one of my favorite authors, and now she has written a book documenting the results of her family’s decision to live an entire year solely on foods they have either raised themselves, or purchased locally. It’s an incredible feat, one that I doubt I will ever be able to emulate in its entirety, but I do aspire to many of the ideals put forth in her book: local produce as much as possible (goodbye bananas, which Kingsolver terms “the Humvee of fruit” ), homemade whole grain bread, locally raised and grass-fed animals, etc. She has even inspired me to try my hand at cheese making—once we’re home, of course. The size of my kitchen is challenging enough just to make a batch of tortillas or peel vegetables while cooking rice (no counter space!). Nevertheless, visions of jars of home-canned fruits and spaghetti sauces have definitely warmed up my evenings lately.

And so where did my kids, who have been raised on whole wheat everything, homemade sweets and never—well, hardly ever—pop, where did they go for lunch today with Vanetta?

How surreal is this?

Yup, the Golden Arches. They had never been to McDonald’s back home and this was never really a problem, since none of their friends frequent fast food restaurants very often, no peer pressure. Sure, we do take out—pizza and burritos are favorites—but Dave and I decided long ago, even before Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me came on the scene, to stay away from fast food in general, and to be picky about where we ate when we did go out. When the aforementioned book and movie came out, our concerns over what we put in our bodies, and what fast food practices in general do to animals, vegetables, and labor, were validated. We were on the right track, moving towards whole foods, looking for more local produce and meats. A big hearty pat on the back, oh aren’t we so clever, seeing the fast food world for what it is, and only putting the best we can into our growing children’s bodies.

Of course, once we came to China we had to loosen our standards considerably—not because the Chinese eat horrible food, because they don’t. In fact, I see more people, young and old, eating fruits and vegetables than anyone I know back home. Certainly, these things are cheap, fast food is not, and the Chinese have a traditional cuisine that is just the tops. No, we loosened our standards because we were bewildered, jetlagged, and dealing with kids who were not happy to have left home. So the floodgates opened and in flowed Sprite, ice cream bars everyday, Gatorade, candy bars. Sure, it’s comfort food, and when you’re not able to eat anything else (at least the kids weren’t), it’s calories.

Still, we reasoned, even as we took the kids to Pizza Hut once in a while, that at least they’d never been to KFC or McDonald’s, all three of which are within spitting distance of each other on one of the biggest shopping streets in Hohhot. KFC quickly popped that bubble, followed today by McDonald’s. Grace got all nervous beforehand because she knows that we don’t eat there for a reason, though we’ve never gone into more details than that the food is very bad for you. Obviously, this isn’t always the best way to get a kid not to do something—or me, really, knowing about those hazelnut Ritter Sport candy bars in the freezer that every night I seriously contemplate eating, then manage to resist the temptation, mostly because I fall asleep thinking about them. [I bet you just caught me in a bit of a contradiction: visions of homemade bread and home-canned spaghetti sauce alongside candy bars? I never said I was perfect, just striving for an ideal.] Her stomach “started hurting” as she worried about the implications of eating at McDonald’s. Despite our better judgment, we found ourselves encouraging her to eat there: “Hey, the french fries there are great!” (We didn’t tell her about the injected flavoring.) Sometimes you gotta get a kid to just do what frightens them so they can see it’s nothing to fret about. Kind of like shots, but that’s another story. Everything in moderation, even ideology, right?

Gah!

Anyway, you can see by the pictures that they both suffered terribly. Does this mean that I will let them regularly eat fast food now? Fat chance. But if one of their friends here wants to take them out once in a while, I think the experience of being with others, and away from us, will outweigh the occasional dip into horrid-, chemical laden-, unfair labor practicing-, animal mistreating-, diabetes and obesity causing-fast food. :)