recognizable food

Years ago, when I first moved to the country, a friend sent me information on how to find hormone-free meats. I wasn't as country-rural-savvy as I am now, because now I know that most ranchers you can buy from only sell hormone-free meat. Of course I didn't have an allergic child then whose every sweet breath and unselfconscious smile I wanted to preserve with all my might, and whose condition prompted me to research the whole-foods movement.

It took a while, but we've finally done it. I've already mentioned the 1/2 cow we bought in October from a local rancher. Someone I know personally, in fact. Furthermore, in fact, the cow was raised by a former student on grass I've probably seen driving to school and back.

Now, finally, on Tuesday, we are going to get our first food box from the local...I'm not sure what you'd call it. It's a gas station/convenience store/organic potato outlet and, I've just learned, a distributor of organic produce, bread, and eggs. A gal I work with was chatting about it at lunch one day. You sign up for a plan, and every other week on Tuesday, a huge cooler box full of organic produce shows up on your front porch. You set out the old cooler and they take it and replace it with the new one full of fresh food.

Food that shows up on your doorstep??? That's organic? And fresh? Hello.

A word I used in one of my last posts has stuck with me for a few days, now. Recognizable. I want my food to be recognizable. "Oh," she said, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth, "how delicious this roasted eggplant with basil and sea salt is!" "Yes, and what a lovely beef roast," he replied as the carving knife glinted in his hand. Recognizable, like that.

For a long time, long before Chloe, I've watched in amazement as people loaded up their shopping carts with food that comes in boxes of various shapes and sizes, or crinkly packages. I mean, LOADED--boxes and packages mounded over the top of the cart. The shoppers are usually leaning over the front bent at the hips, strolling along as if they'd had to allot their entire day to meander the grocery store for boxes and packages and their feet hurt; bowed as if crushed under the weight of all that mystery.

The crazy thing is that there are pictures all over the boxes telling you what is inside, food elements broken down, chopped, burnt, stirred, processed and MESSED WITH until they are long past their original form. "This box has oval-shaped brown things inside, I think," she mused--and how many possibilities can you think of that fit that description?? Even with the pictures, you still can't tell what the food is really MADE of. And reading the ingredients doesn't help, either.

I saw, when we got the lists for Chloe's restricted diet, that I was going to have to learn some new words, "code words" that really meant "milk" or "eggs" or "wheat" or "peanuts" which equal life-threatening distress for my child.

I can't imagine the amount of time it would tack on to a shopping trip if you had to read the long lists on each box and package of processed foods of what the stuff is actually made of. Was it Michael Pollan who uses the term "food-like substances" in his new book? Ok, reluctant disclaimer: I admit to eating food-like substances such as Cheez-its occasionally because I'm dumb and human and sometimes stressed, but I would never serve that to my family for supper or pretend to consider it a logical source of nutrition.

I digress, I see that my original topic was "food boxes" so I'd better get back to it. Recognizable. When you go to the produce section of the grocery store, you see oblong orange things and you immediately know they are carrots. Raw, unprocessed, un-messed-with. You see a crinkly purple spherical object and you know it's red cabbage as naked as the day it was born. And so on. No guesswork, no reading ingredients lists. A red pepper is a red pepper is a red pepper.

I love looking at a dish simmering on the stove and be able to pick out each and every ingredient I used: chicken, check. Potatoes, check. Corn, check. Tomatoes, check. In the bowl on the table: baby spinach leaves, check.

It is a Good Thing to know what one is eating, and an Even Better Thing to know that what one is feeding one's small, innocent, trusting child will not damage or kill her.

How Much Better, then, to have a box full of Recognizable Food show up at your doorstep every other Tuesday? And earn airline miles to boot???

If I could make Chloe understand that organic mangoes (and about seventeen other things) will show up on our doorstep tomorrow afternoon, without any effort on my part at all (besides calling with the payment info and directions to the house [a mile east]), I'd be thrilled because I know she'd be thrilled.

Chloe's food list

This is by no means a complete list of the safe foods Chloe can eat, but it is meant to be user friendly. At the bottom is a list of foods she absolutely cannot have, and to make it easier I've listed some of the common things milk, eggs, wheat and peanuts are found in. This list is meant to be care-giver-friendly!

Note: Chloe has not been exposed to fish or shellfish, nor has she been tested for them. So for now we are going to assume she IS allergic to them, and avoid a reaction, rather than go through the whole explanation.

CHLOE IS HIGHLY ALLERGIC TO MILK, EGGS, WHEAT, NUTS, and FISH
Giving her even small amounts of these foods can cause a life-threatening reaction.
She will get hives if she comes into contact with dog, cat, or horse saliva or hair.

Foods/Drinks Chloe CAN eat:

Rice Dream rice drink (blue box)
Plain juice like apple or apple/grape (and water, of course)

Plain baked (not mashed) potato or yam, seasoned with salt
Other roasted veggies such as eggplant, red pepper, etc. with oil/salt
Plain white/brown rice
Plain cooked or canned beans (like green beans, pinto beans, etc.)
Rice noodles
Any plain cooked meat (cooked in oil, not butter) such as roasted chicken, roast beef or pork with no sauce cut up into tiny bites (the size of a pencil eraser), or ground beef, cooked with just herbs or salt/pepper
Plain fresh, canned, or frozen fruits or vegetables— with no creams or sauces such as canned peaches, pears or pineapple, canned corn, fresh mango, frozen berries, applesauce, bananas, black olives
Oatmeal cooked with water, seasoned with sugar and salt
Gluten, dairy and egg-free pancakes which I have made and labeled “Chloe-safe”
Tamales labeled “Chloe-safe”, corn tortillas
Rice chex, corn chex, corn flakes, Crispix cereals
Plain jams/preserves (check ingredients for just “fruit” and “sugar”)
Sunbutter sunflower seed spread
Any dish/recipe I have made and labeled “Chloe-safe”
Approved allergen-free products
Plain corn or potato chips (check ingredients for just corn or potato, vegetable oil, salt)
Plain lunch meat ham or turkey (check ingredients for fillers; we prefer nitrite-free processed lunch meats)
Plain rice cakes, depending on ingredients (some have hidden lactose)
Juice popsicles

Ingredients to 100% AVOID when cooking for Chloe:
DAIRY: Milk, cheese, cream, “creamed” anything, Parmesan cheese, butter, mayonnaise, casein, lactose, ice cream, yogurt, margarine, whey
EGGS: Eggs, egg whites, egg yolks, albumen, scrambled eggs
WHEAT/gluten-containing flours: wheat, barley, regular pasta noodles, flour, rye, bread
NUTS OR SEEDS except approved products like the sunbutter
FISH or anything with Omega 3 (you never know)
COMMERCIAL BAKED GOODS, like crackers, cereal, granola bars, pasta, pop tarts, cookies
Peanut oil and sesame oil
Mysterious or not so mysterious sauces such as Chinese sauces, bottled salad dressings
Processed meats such as hot dogs (they often have wheat fillers)

WalMart!?!

I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I Love to Hate our local WalMart. I would suspect that WalMart conjures up similar feelings in many people. And if you live in a rural area like we do, your dependence on WalMart is a little greater than if you lived in the city where you'd have access to, oh, such jewels as Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Target, and, um, I forget, it's been almost six years since I lived in a city.

Anyway, so every time I go to WalMart I usually end up saying disgustedly as I walk out the door, "I hate WalMart!"

There are a multitude of reasons why I love to hate our local WalMart that are too numerous to mention, and besides, they are irrelevant to this blog post.

I am grudgingly rather excited about this reason to actually LIKE WalMart, and that is that they have a section--it's about two feet wide but it's a WHOLE SECTION--of gluten-free and allergen-free food products from such good labels as Enjoy Life, Pamela's Products, and Tinkyada.

I was already pleasantly surprised that in their regular pasta section WalMart carried DeBole's rice penne, which we buy on a regular basis since rice noodles are one of Chloe's food groups.

But a WHOLE SECTION of products, including a rather respectable allergen-free bread!

It made me want to put pressure on our local City Market to have a similar section. I'd much rather do grocery shopping at City Market, because they don't have a yarn section or a fabric section, and my circuit through WalMart usually includes these areas, and I have a whole room full of fabric and yarn at home. I don't need any more. (Daniel's circuit includes the garden area and the hardware.) Plus, City Market has really good produce and the staff is really nice and the kids can get stickers. But I digress.

So I carefully selected two things that I had been wishing for for Chloe: a loaf of bread and a box of snack bars from Enjoy Life foods. The snack bars will go into my gigantic mommy bag/purse to use for emergency snacks for Chloe, if we're out somewhere or at a restaurant and there's nothing she can eat. The tapioca loaf I broke out right away. Andrew loves to eat jelly sandwiches, and he could eat one for every meal and be perfectly happy and see nothing wrong with a diet consisting of exclusively bread and jam. So I was thrilled to be able to make one for Chloe, also, and she loved it. I will add some sunbutter (which we still cannot get locally) to her sandwich next time.

Next time I buy some things and they turn out to be crappy, or I have to wait so long for a fabric cutter or a paint-mixer that my hair has grown an inch, or something on sale turns out to be not, I'll hate WalMart again.

But for the moment, my gauge of feeling toward our local WalMart is on the high end. Now, I have to go make Chloe a jelly sandwich.