Eating Dirt
I have a confession to make. For the two days that I sat through the FTC’s workshop on how to curb childhood obesity, I kept craving Tater Tots. It was politically, dietetically and emotionally incorrect, but there it is.
Tater Tots are my No. 2 stress food, so I crave them on a regular basis. The thing that kept me from indulging right then, with this month’s kid’s marketing story swirling around my head, was the lovely basket of vegetables on my front porch.
My family belongs to a farm co-op. For 15 weeks in the summer and fall, we drive out to David and Laurie’s farm and pick up that week’s harvest — arugula and beet greens in June; potatoes and squash in October; melons, heirloom tomatoes, eggplant in between — most of it picked that day, some of it picked by us, all of it dusted with dirt.
There’s something viscerally satisfying about washing the dirt off your dinner before you cook it. At the end of the workday, I move from my computer and phone to the kitchen sink, and shift from thinking about account reviews and retail trends to rinsing kale and chasing caterpillars out of broccoli. It brings a serenity that even Tater Tots can’t conjure.
As I washed and chopped and sautéed on those two days, I felt so removed from the teeth gnashing over junk food, trans fats, school vending machines, sedentary lifestyles. The consumer watchdogs want the food companies to teach them the secret to marketing, so they can make spinach seem as yummy as potato chips. I think that calls for better spinach, not just better ads.
The thing about kids and food is, it’s all about context. Ad Council VP Heidi Arthur nailed it when she spoke before the FTC: “If your kid is playing soccer and the coach gives him an orange, he’ll eat it. If he’s playing videogames and you give him an orange, he looks at you like you have four arms.” Margo Wootan, a director at the Center of Science in the Public Interest, blames some of that on advertising: “Getting kids to eat a healthy diet would be much easier if parents didn’t have to contend with billions of dollars of marketing for food.…I can’t get Shrek to come to my house for dinner and encourage my daughter to eat her zucchini.”
That’s one good thing about the farm co-op: We try vegetables we’d never buy (or even find) in the supermarket — patty pan squash, Japanese eggplant, edamame on the vine. Last week we had kale three nights in a row — by request. Who knew? It lets me off the hook as the nagging mom foisting broccoli on my kids when they come to the table thinking, “Laurie and David grew this for us.”
Washing the dirt off dinner makes me feel removed from my own routine, too. Most of the year we eat salad from a bag and carrots that have been washed and whittled. Just slicing a melon feels like work. So I’m grateful for the 15 weeks that Mother Nature decides the menu and I engineer the whole meal from field to fork. It’s easier and harder at the same time. I can take for granted that we’ll have field-fresh veggies every night; I happily work a little harder to get them on the table.
My mom was a great proponent of the theory that eating a little dirt once in a while is good for your immune system. She never served dirt, exactly, but she was pretty casual in its presence. And we turned out mostly healthy, optimistic and able to weather adversity.
Maybe our own kids would do well with a little more dirt under their feet, under their fingernails, and on their plates.
It helps keep me off the Tater Tots, anyway.
