Eating Anything

There has been a quiet revolution in the way our family eats, ever since my dad started dying.

Mom’s cuisine was always versatile and satisfying. Our range of dinners included spaghetti, tomato soup and grilled cheese, taco salad, jalapeño cornbread, fish sticks, and sloppy joes. Vegetables were recurring, though mostly canned or processed. Green beans were waxen and required a salt offering. Mom’s meals were balanced and straightforward, though heavy on the carbs, calories, and trans fats. She was a consumer cook whose portfolio was open to the wide range of easy, flexible meals provided by name brands at Kroger. At dinner, I poured Kikkoman and Worcestershire on every meat. I would tuck my peas furtively into the last remaining lump of mashed potatoes. We were required to sit down and eat together. Though sometimes we were allowed to have a show on, Andy Griffith or America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Dad’s dinner prayers often wound up as sermons in disguise, depending on the child behavior index. My brother Luke and I would accuse each other of opening our eyes. Per Dad’s rule, we could not leave until we ate at least half of everything, said thank you, and put our dishes away. When he was a kid, he often told us, he had once told his mother that her food sucked and his dad kicked him out of the house for a few days, which put an end to complaining. And so we learned to decline food politely.

Photograph by Mihail / Adobe Stock.

Throughout my childhood, back when kids ate for free, we frequented local hot spots and cheap chains like Shoney’s, Wendy’s, or Taco Bell. Dad would narrow it down to three choices, usually based on coupons. As a preteen I mostly stuck to fried appetizers, pasta, and quesadillas. Dad ordered the largest items on the menu. We dined, desserted, and snacked like typical American industrial eaters. Deep inside us, in a piece of our pancreas no larger than a walnut, an alarm sounded, triggering the release of insulin to clean up the sugar and carbs, carry it to our muscles, store it as fat, or send it to the liver.

After I turned ten, Dad was diagnosed with diabetes. Small plates, low fat meat, no white bread or pasta, no butter, cheese, or sauce. No more pouring salt on everything. Mom had to think of how to cook for us and him. Dad would look upon his plate, then ours, and sulk with hopelessness and envy. Bye-bye bacon. Sayonara steak fries and country fried steak. At Applebee’s, Dad ordered a double plate of just roasted potatoes and broccoli, gruffly explaining to the waiter that he was a diabetic with a large appetite. When the plate arrived, he sprinkled it with pepper and just a dash of salt. His eyes got wide.

“This is just like candy to me, y’all.”

I looked on in silent pity as I devoured my fried sampler platter. There were plenty of afternoons when I ate half a box of Cheez-Its and drank a tall glass of Dr. Pepper. I must have inherited my grandfather’s genes on my mother’s side, a body that could metabolize anything. A kid like me didn’t have to think about anything I ate.

My attitude changed in my senior year of high school when I watched Morgan Spurlock’s independent hit Super Size Me. I already hated McDonald’s. The yellow and red color scheme was gross, the clown annoying, the fries limp. And it was murder to put chopped onions on a lukewarm burger. That movie planted a sesame seed in my gut. My diet had to change, or I would become a diabetic too.

After gaining ten pounds of fat my freshman year of college, I made a list of alternative healthy living tips culled from what little advice I’d absorbed, half of it from a friend whose mother sold Young Living essential oils. I began “degreasing” my pizza by dabbing it with napkins, eating salad without dressing, snacking on trail mix, and drinking Sprite in place of dark sodas to avoid caffeine and phosphoric acid.

Seeing as how I could chug two energy drinks and still fall asleep, even after some weight gain my body felt like it could endure almost anything. My weak regimen dissolved into no regimen at all. Dumplings, lasagna, pancakes, Hi C, oatmeal cookies, peach yogurt, whole bags of Doritos Blaze, Fig Newtons “by the sleeve” (Brian Regan style), milk with bread and apple butter. I took a sip of pomegranate juice a day, convincing myself that its properties balanced out my gunky choices. All of these had a healthy connotation of not being fast food, candy, or a bucket of KFC.

Two years later my gall bladder was removed.

At least I didn’t have diabetes.

Dad would always refer to people on restricted diets and fitness routines as “real health nuts.” A doctor who chows on lettuce and legumes while roller skating seems like the looney one, until we find ourselves pinned to a hospital bed with tubes coming out of us because our hearts are clogged and our feet are about to be amputated. I often wanted to ask him, who is the real nutcase? Maybe it isn’t the granola cruncher, nor even the smoothie sucker or the zealous vegan, but the American industrial food addict who has gone nuts.

My appetite grew in grad school. I meditated with the transcendentalists, toured a Danish Hobbit village by watching a documentary, pretended I was going to go visit Wendell Berry or get interviewed by Michael Pollan. I performed my own experiments. I compared the unnatural hot dogs and local grass-fed beef jerky that were both sold at Claytor Lake State Park, processed a chicken with a farmer friend and ate it for dinner, consumed nothing but tuna for a week’s lunch, and tried to subsist for a day on fishing and catching crickets. I settled for dried crickets by the box.

Outside our duplex my wife Carrie and I picked up our spades and dug out a small garden the size of a grave (all the land a man really needs, according to Tolstoy). We planted peppers, tomatoes, peas, carrots. We bought organic seeds and soil and used wild mint and human hair to deter pests, whether or not it worked. Meanwhile, Dad discontinued the garden in the corner of his yard because the dog kept getting into it and devouring his tomatoes. He told me that charcoal ashes were good to put in a garden for fertilizer if I didn’t want to use the factory stuff. So I dumped the ashes from our grill into the garden, only to recall that they had been treated with additives like petroleum. I frantically scooped the ashes out of the garden till my body was gray. Despite using non-GMO burpee seeds, our grave-sized garden had become tainted by industry.

I sighed, knowing we would never escape the industrial food system. I had the conscience, but not the discipline or wherewithal. Here we were, complicit industrial consumers barely moonlighting as agricultural freedom fighters.

Whenever I’d share my knowledge of the food industry with Dad, he would nod and respond, “Inter’sting … Inter’sting … Wow.” And when I was finished, he’d say, “Well, I was talking with someone the other day who told me all that organic stuff they do at the grocery store is fake. It’s just a big fad.”

I’d try to explain, “But Dad, organic food and green tokenism are two different things. The movement is noble.”

“Well,” he’d say, “I saw an article saying pomegranates aren’t really good for you.”

“The thing is that they are,” I’d retort, “but the benefits of the juice were just exaggerated by the corporate makers of POM.”

It turns out that I’m a neophile, and he’s a neophobe. I like new fare, he likes the familiar. And when your kidney is as battered as his has become, you have to consider the nutrients, not how they got to your plate.

I’ve been striving to make food connections with Dad, but also to be more authentically myself. Have I become a food snob who turns his nose up at the food culture of my roots? Dad and I come to the table with different food prejudices, neither of them wholesome.

Despite our differences, both of us have come a long way from our old attitudes toward the body and the planet, which at times bordered on contempt. In high school I would tell my environmentalist friends that we could do whatever we wanted to the planet, since it would all burn up anyway. Fasting was never on our table as a spiritual discipline. Vegetarians were effeminate. And yet we claimed our bodies to be temples. At least, when it came to tattoos or sex or tobacco, never gluttony. Dad raised me as he had been raised, disconnected from many traditions of agricultural or dietary wisdom drawn out of the very scriptures that told us the earth was made for our dominion. But as time passed, Dad’s body manifested the cost of such a cavalier approach, and I got a Bible degree.

I hear it announced at a church service that Sister So-and-So is in the hospital with a congestion and swelling, and we pray for her healing. Then everyone eats a potluck of buttered, salted, fried, fatty casseroles followed by another plate with three pies on it. How many of those Sister So-and-So hospital trips could have been prevented by a little more discipline? In response to the accepted wisdom, “All things are lawful for me,” the apostle Paul also said, “not all things are helpful,” and “I will not be enslaved by anything.”

But it’s beginning to seem too late for Dad, who is now in stage four kidney failure.

In his later years Dad is passing on more nutritional wisdom than before, and I’m trying to pass it on to my children. With every bite of food, I’m hoping I can reverse what an entire industry has done to my dad. It is spiritual and personal, but I’m still learning how to sustain it, especially now that I’ve got kids to raise. As a child I never would have guessed that I’d take on such a passion for clean living from the field to the fork, but I know it is rooted in what I saw happen to my pop. In the midst of all the research and experimentation, it all came back to his wish, my wish, that he could have prevented this poisoning of his own flesh.

It might have also gone back to my determination to have a better body than him.

The problem of eating well is so much closer to a life-or-death matter for Dad since he found out he needed a kidney. We are part of a culture that treats itself merely for existing. The eyes write checks the body is unable to cash. We blame companies whose products we still purchase. Where does the change start?

I think of all that Dad and I have learned. With whatever remaining years he has, he can leave a legacy of behaviors that I can pass on to my kids, like the bravery to order a salad when everyone orders steak ’n taters. If we could return to the past and sow different seeds, how would we reap differently? I don’t have to ask my dad what he would do, because now he tells me what I should do. Cut the sweets. Cut the salt. Cut the potassium. Cut the phosphorus. All else will follow.

Today we sit in Dad’s kitchen together, looking out on the yard where I used to play, where once he had a tomato garden before he found out how much potassium they had and how much the dog loves them. Where once he had a pond until it started leaking and he filled it in. Where once he had tall pine trees but chopped them down to save the fence between him and his neighbor. Where he now rests on tree stumps like the old man in The Giving Tree.

Dad checks his Fitbit and asks me to hand him an apple from the bowl. I grab one for myself, and two for my boys. Three generations sink teeth into organic apples from a friend’s orchard.

Our nation is now on the agricultural equivalent of insulin shots, dialysis, and a cabinet of pills, largely ignoring the diet recommendations of experts who have seen the damage firsthand. Living sustainably. Functioning well. That’s what my dad’s fight is about, and what my plan to give him my kidney is about. What kind of work is it to sustain him? Sure, the industrial process of dialysis keeps him running, but my sacrifice, or another person’s sacrifice, would benefit him far more, in the here and now as well as in the long run. This low fat, natural, locally harvested, non-GMO, organic, cage free, fair trade, sustainable kidney of mine is a no-brainer.