Guilt with a side of lisp...

So how many of you, dear readers, happened to catch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution? I did. I sat my ass down on the couch Friday night with a glass of wine, wearing my judges robes, ready for some holier-than-thou action, watching southerners feed their kids chicken fried steak served with a bucket of Coke.

To some degree, this show did not disappoint. One family, in particular, volunteered to be Jamie's guinea pigs, allowing him to entirely makeover their diets. An overweight mother opened the door to Jamie and introduced him to her three morbidly obese children who were sitting in a living room no bigger than a postage stamp, overshadowed by a giant flatscreen TV. Jamie and the mother left the kids to continue staring glassy-eyed at McDonald's commercials, drinking their Big Gulps, while they proceeded to the kitchen.

The mother had provided Jamie with a description of a typical week's meals and in, what I consider to be a colossal waste of food and time, they cooked all of it and piled it on the kitchen table in a festival of trans fats, refined carbohydrates and high fructose corn syrup. This woman literally used a deep fat fryer for every meal. A point that made their food intake horrifying enough without wasting hundreds of dollars on making perfectly good corn dogs and homemade chocolate dipped donuts that even the crew was, I'm sure, too embarrassed to eat after the shoot was done. (I, however, would love to go over there when I am hungover.)

So I sat there, feeling pretty good about the fact that pretty much none of my kid's food is cooked in hot grease, when Jamie visited the local elementary school where he was determined to makeover the food that, what appears to be, all the children consume daily. During his tour of the school's kitchen, he was aghast at the frequency with which pizza and chicken nuggets are served. And upon surveying the students, it seems 80% of them had some kind of breaded fried meat for dinner as well. This is when the gavel drops from my hand and a fog of guilt creeps over me as the vast majority of my children's protein comes in nugget form. I watched in horror as Jamie recreated the manor in which most companies make chicken nuggets, grinding up chicken skin and carcasses, adding flavorings and preservatives, and I couldn't ask myself how this happened because I know exactly how I got here.

To be clear, my kids drink milk three times a day, eat a variety of fruits, and eat broccoli every night if they reject the evening's vegetable (which they do more often than not), but on the meat front they reject nearly everything. So in order to get some kind of protein into them I have been reduced to serving baked chicken tenders, soy nuggets and fish sticks at least once a week. Giving credit where credit is due, #2 will eat almost anything, even meat not coated in breading, and Little Man will try it when pressed, but my oldest is practically a vegetarian, which I would support wholeheartedly, if she would eat cheese of any kind. Having a friend who is allergic to nuts has killed any lunchtime success I might have had with a peanut butter sandwich, so once agian, those damn nuggets rear their heads so she is not left to survive on Ritz crackers. And as annoying as all of this is, dear readers, I brought this on myself.

Like an idiot, I fed my kid, #1 being my only at the time, what she would eat just so she would eat when the usual two year-old protein strike began. Instead of sticking to my current, "this is dinner, eat or not" policy, having only one child, it didn't' seem too hard to cook a separate meal for her when I was eating with H later in the evening anyway*. But once #2 came along, the battle began. I had not time to be making two dinners and #2 has always been a good eater. The kid's favorite lunch is goat cheese on Triscuits with red pepper strips on the side, for Christ's sake.

Jamie Oliver actually made me think, when I could ignore his lisp, not just about what food I was feeding my kids, but also the preservatives in that food. While they do eat a good amount of fresh produce and dairy, their breakfast usually consists of Aunt Jemima frozen pancakes and Log Cabin syrup (I can hear you gasping, B) and most of their carbohydrates, while whole wheat, do have quite a few quadruple-syllable ingredients. Those pancakes stopped seeming so benign all of the sudden. They're not that bad with their claims of whole grain and no trans fats. But if I really want to be honest with myself, they're not that good either. We're all so busy, the Go-gurts, Lunchables and Goldfish all make sense. I bought into the "busy mother of three" excuse, and even if that wasn't forcing me to the drive thru every night, I wasn't exactly cooking a blue streak in the kitchen. Good enough suddenly didn't seem good enough.


So this week found me making whole wheat, banana pancakes from scratch, which has not happened on a weekday since before #2's conception (the morning sickness induced by her creation stopped all a.m. cooking, unless a whole loaf of buttered cinnamon toast counts) and breading my very own chicken nuggets. Which of course were not touched my my protein critics. Since I will not be making my own yogurt and I will still have to feed them some sort of orange-hued marine or mammalian life, I have decided to add to the grocery bill and do more of my shopping at those organic mega-marts. Although, I refuse to become one of those mothers who totes around all organic stuff for their own kid - including to birthday parties - there has to be some sort of balance, and an Oreo here and there. So my mission is to cook more of my own stuff, give Jemima and Frank Purdue a break and see if I can make or find replacements that won't keep me up at night with the certainty my kids are growing tumors as we all sleep.

*Yes, I am a bad mother, but a good wife, choosing to have salad with my kids at five thirty, then eat a reheated dinner with my husband.