SLOw FOOD NATION

by Bridget Quinn

Five years ago I baked a batch of frosted oatmeal muffins for my husband’s birthday. They came out pretty good considering -- though I did have a crescent-shaped burn on my right wrist for about a year afterward -- and my husband was impressed. Impressed because in the ten years we’d known each other, in the six years we’d been married, in the six homes we’d shared, this was the first time I’d ever turned on the oven. I handed over the plate of muffins smug with self-satisfaction and content to rest on my culinary laurels.

Four months later I was pregnant with our first child and it occurred to me that cooking might be something I might reasonably be expected to pursue over the course of the next decade or so. However, I committed the crucial error of many new parents -- I figured I’d learned to cook once the baby came, " when I’d have so much unstructured time". When that time arrived, of course, I discovered that unstructured time can be very hectic, one might even say exhausting. So with baby in hand, then underfoot, and now another babe in arms, my culinary learning curve has been a slow one.

Like many childless young urban adults, my husband and I ate out a lot and ate a lot of take-out and prepared foods, but except on the occasional road trip, fast-food never figured in our lives. But now that I have a toddler, fast-food has come to us. Call it part of the kiddy collective unconscious -- you can eschew television, never eat the stuff yourself, avoid suburbia and all places where fast-food joints lurk together in gangs, and the words “Happy Meal” will still somehow enter your child’s (pleading) vocabulary.

How is this, you might ask? To get to the bottom of my son’s sudden McDonald’s obsession last year (and admittedly, to steel myself against it after pregnant and tired and wanting to make him happy, I’d given in to him on upper Haight Street one too many times, only to be entirely disgusted with myself afterwards) I turned to Eric Schlosser’s much-heralded book "Fast Food Nation", now out in paperback. The answer to my question came very early, on page 4 : “McDonald’s operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States [over eight thousand]. It is one of the nation’s largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus.” And on page 47 : “As American cities and towns spend less money on children’s recreation, fast food restaurants have become gathering places for families with young children. Every month about 90 percent of American children between the ages of three and nine visit McDonald’s.” And that would explain how all children, regardless of location or media insulation, know about it.

That last statistic is so jaw-dropping, it’s almost impossible to take in. Ninety percent? Why would this be? Well, for the sad reason Schlosser gives above: McDonald’s and other fast food chains are some of the few places left where families feel welcome. But another reason can be found in my own giving in: I wanted to make my son happy. Schlosser cites an internal McDonald’s memo saying that parents come in because they “want their kids to love them ... it makes them feel like a good parent.” Schlosser spends nearly 300 well-researched pages explaining -- when he shouldn’t have to -- why this is not good for anyone. From childhood obesity to hideous deaths from contaminated meat, from the horrors of the stockyard to horrible working conditions for meat-industry and fast food employees, to much, much else, we should all be aware of how much fast food really costs us.

Of course as parents we don’t intend to raise our kids on fast food. But life has a way of getting pretty hectic and even if we don’t go as far as running into Taco Bell when we’re too late to get dinner on, we might find ourselves swinging by Starbuck’s for breakfast, Noah’s for lunch, or filling our cart at Trader Joe’s with more food destined for the microwave than the stove or mixing bowl. But that’s not the same as fast food, right? No doubt a frozen Trader Joe’s organic pizza doesn’t contain the same ethical or health hazards as a McBacon Cheeseburger Deluxe, but it is lacking something our children need.

My mother raised nine children in a time when bread meant pre-sliced white sponges and soup meant Campbell’s. She baked her own bread, made soup almost daily, and filled the house from earliest morning until night with the rich, varied smells of real food. I’m fairly certain that one of the reasons I resisted learning to cook was a fear of being “enslaved” by it. I saw my mother’s cooking as her bondage to us rather than her gift and her own gratification. And yet, when she comes to visit -- which is often -- I beg for her soda bread or snail rolls or Grecian bean soup. I take intense, visceral pleasure in seeing my son slather butter on a warm snail roll, the way I once did, with the same tangy yeast smell from my childhood filling my adult kitchen.

We all have our own homes now and my mother can’t routinely cook the big meals she once did. But every Monday she bakes several dozen chocolate-chip cookies and places a single peanut M & M in the center of each one. This gives the otherwise dullish brown circles a brighter, festive look, which I assumed was their purpose. Monday afternoons my mom takes her cookies to imprisoned teenage boys, most of whom are in jail for gang activity. She gives them cookies and lets them talk if they want to. Many tell her about their own mothers and families. Some tell her how they were framed, or how it was that their short lives lead to this. When they are released -- if they are -- many return to the gangs and of those who don’t, some have been killed for not going back. In short, these are young men caught up in violence.

I once joked to my mom that M & M’s have artificial dyes that have been linked to behavioral disorders and that maybe she should skip putting them in cookies intended for violent teenagers. That’s when she told me why she does it. She wants each boy to look at his cookie and know that she touched it, that she took the time and the care to put an M & M right in its center just for him. She wants these boys to know that they deserve this extra care, that she is thinking of them. In each bit of candy, there’s a little prayer.

It seems to me this is why we need to cook for our children. So their bodies are nourished with whole and healthy foods, yes, but also so that our children sense our care for them and see that they are worth our best effort.

Last night, my son said that for dinner he wanted, “Gravy. With chicken pieces in it.” I know where this comes from -- my mom made it for him the last time she was here. I’m sorry to say that I had to make him something else, since I didn’t have any chicken and I don’t know how to make gravy. But we did call Nanny and leave a message and I expect to hear back from her soon, maybe in time for dinner tonight.

"Bridget Quinn is a writer who lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children, where she is a founding member of the Parents' Support Network. "Slow Food Nation" originally appeared in the PSN newsletter, Wellspring. Bridget's essays have appeared in numerous publications including Literal Latte and Mademoiselle, and in the anthologies Two in the Wild (Vintage) and Solo: On Her Own Adventure (Seal Press). She can be reached at b.quinn@earthlink.net."

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