Monthly Archives: September 2011

Sep30

I’m 30! (30 things about a 30 year old on the 30th)

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I’m 30! (30 things about a 30 year old on the 30th)

So, today’s my “golden” birthday, the birthday upon which you turn the same number as your birthdate. I remember when my best friend had her golden birthday–when she turned ten–and thinking, “gee, I’ll be ancient before my golden birthday ever rolls around!” Well, here it is, and I just got carded last week buying some cooking wine.

The store owner (female, attractive, with a thick Eastern European accent): “you old enough for that, honey?”
Me (pulling out ID): “I’m turning 30 next week!”
The store owner (with a touch of surprise): “you look veeerrry goot, honey.”

Yeah, people still regularly tell me that I don’t look old enough to be the mother of my kids. I’m fairly sure that’s not true, but if it is, it certainly has mostly to do with genetics and may be exaggerated by the fact that I’m very short. (Don’t make fun of me. I have a genetic disorder!) My grandma was something under 4’10″ and looked very young indeed, and she smoked two packs of Benson & Hedges daily and subsisted on cottage cheese and melba toast. I don’t smoke and I eat heartily, but I never wear sunscreen and wash my face with plain ol’ soap.

To be honest, I’ve never worried about looking “old” partly because my obsession was always being thin. As in, I might visit a nursing home and be jealous of those little stick-limbs that some old ladies have. (Yeah, I know. Sick, right?)

But that right there–being able to see that as sick–is part of why I feel happy to be thirty. When I turned 20–right after the original 9/11–I was depressed, lonely, and thoroughly in the grip of my disorder. I counted the years of my obsession, realized they numbered nearly half my days, and felt like there was no end in sight. Today, by God’s grace and the help of many wise and good and loving people, I feel free.

And so without further ado, 30 (mostly silly) things about me on my 30th birthday on the 30th:

(or, My Life: A Series of Unfortunate Eyeglasses)

eg.:

1. My first real pets (after some lame fish) were two finches named Sylvester and Tweety.

2. When Tweety died, I was sad and wrote a poem about her, but I also was kind of excited because I’d always wanted to take a good look at her tongue.

Ack! Mom, why did you let me wear corporate insignia? And look at the bangs on both me and Dad!

3. Once, when I lived in Brooklyn, our house was broken into and our VCR was stolen, with my Winnie-the-Pooh tape inside. This was extremely distressing.

4. Another time, when I lived in Middle Village, our apartment was broken into and I could hear our German landlord, who lived downstairs, screaming, “I have a knife! I’m going to kill you!” Even more distressing.
5. I listened to Psalty’s Sleepytime Helpers every. single. night.

6. Until I was maybe 15. #cringe

7. I read Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye over and over because I was trying to comfort myself that the boy I wanted to date didn’t want to date me.
8. Moralizing was once my favorite mechanism for convincing myself I didn’t want what I really wanted. I’ve come to realize it’s a popular one.

9. I’ve worn corrective lenses (glasses or contacts) since third grade.

10. I’ve had purple ones, red ones, pink ones, and various other shades of hideousness.

Oy, the frilly collar. The loud floral. The purple carbon-fiber glasses.

11. I could get 20 or more bites out of an M&M as a toddler.

12. I’ve always had a thing for goats.

13. Once, when I was 5, I opened the toilet to find a rat swimming in the bowl and staring at me. Everyone still says I was scared, but, actually, I was kind of amused.

14. Although I must’ve been traumatized on some level since I still can’t sit on a toilet without looking for fear that something will be lurking there, ready to bite my rear.

15. The first time I ever said a “bad word” was when I was 17 and had major surgery and the hospital’s elevator door started closing on me right around my HUGE INCISION site. I said the “sh” word slowly and dramatically and my mom, whom I’d thought would be horrified, couldn’t stop laughing.

16. Turns out I sound just like my grandma when I say bad words, even though I never once heard her say one. Genetics are funny like that.

17. I didn’t lose a tooth until 3rd grade, by which time it seemed like most people had lost many of their teeth and the glamour had worn off.

18. I really, really, look forward to my coffee in the morning. As in, glare at the machine until it’s done if it’s not done by the time I come downstairs.

19. Even though I’ve always loved to write, I’ve always hated to journal.

20. I slept with my rag doll, Susan, every night (ahem. UNTIL COLLEGE) even though she was dirty and tattered looking. She even came with me to Israel when I was 7.

21. At the airport, I screamed when the security guard tried to put Susan through the X-ray machine–I thought she was going to be checked with the baggage.

22. So they let me go through without X-raying her.

23. That would never happen today. I’m still kinda surprised El Al let that one slip then.

24. My mom is Jewish. Which means I’m Jewish, according to the Talmud.

25. While I’ve always been a Christian, I’m startled by how well I conform to some Jewish stereotypes.

26. Especially when my mom and I are together. You know the Gilmore Girls? They’re so not wealthy white New Englanders. They are really Jewish New Yorkers. And they are my mom and me. (Minus all the unziemlich. My dad is Luke, the diner owner.)

27. I knew I wanted to marry my husband as soon as I met him.

28. But it was nearly 3 years between then and our first date.

29. 8 and 1/2 years of marriage and 2 boisterous children later, he’s still the light of my life and the one to whom I owe “the leaping delight that quickens my senses.“

30. I am one very, very blessed girl. (Am I still allowed to call myself a ‘girl’?)
Happy Friday to you, Happy Friday to you, Happy Friday, dear readers!
Happy Friday to you.

Sep29

Apples! And watermelon! And a distended belly! (and lots of adorable pictures)

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Apples! And watermelon! And a distended belly! (and lots of adorable pictures)

This is such a weird time of year. It’s technically autumn, but the leaves haven’t yet turned and it’s warm and muggy most days. Our watermelons finally became ripe and ready, and yet it’s apple picking time. I find myself wanting to wear wool and hoodies, yet I’m still getting mosquito bites regularly. In fact, I can hardly focus on writing this post because of the brand new bite on my left arm. I find myself mentally drafting letters like these:

“Dear Mosquito: you’re welcome to drink a bit of my blood. But why, oh why, do you have to inject poison, too? I’m happy to share, but when you hurt me in return, I feel sad because I’m needing itch-free skin. Let’s work this out. Best, Rachel”

Yesterday, my boys and I enjoyed a couple of lazy hours in the orchards of Wickham’s Fruit Farm, courtesy of our friend Amy. (Thank you, Amy!) What fun! My only regret was that we did not make it back from the orchards in time to sample the homemade donuts and hot apple cider. (The boys and I mourned this the whole 15 minute drive back home.)

Here are some pictures of the happy time:

The first apple, picked by an overjoyed Aidan.

 

we spent some time contemplating how this apple had become an ant-home. very cool.

and no outing is complete without the obligatory chase-and-tackle of Mom.

Tasting was encouraged, but Graeme took things overboard.

He lifted up his shirt to demonstrate how full his tummy was.

And we asked, “Graeme! How many apples did you eat?!” His proud reply?

“Three!”

(“The toilet is going to be aching tomorrow,” he said.)

I swear, I cannot make this stuff up.

And then, our grief over the Dearth of Donuts was assuaged by our very own watermelon:

And there you have it! A perfectly mixed-up seasonal day.

 

 

 

 

Sep28

The Death of a Great Woman

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The Death of a Great Woman

Have you ever heard of Wangari Maathai? She was a pretty awesome woman, and she died on Sunday night.

Wangari Maathai was born in a small village in Kenya and went on to become

“environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, rabble-rouser, [!] human rights advocate and head of the Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977.”

(New York Times)

Dr. Maathai paid people--mostly women--a few pennies per tree that they planted and that lived.

She was educated in the US at Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburg, and she earned a doctorate in veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi–the first woman in East or Central Africa to earn a doctorate.

She was also the very first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” (She knew that ecological crises are often at the root of conflicts and wars.)

She was an elected member of Kenyan Parliament and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources between January 2003 and November 2005.

And she also had personal and political problems like crazy.

Her husband thought she was too headstrong for a woman–and too difficult to control–and divorced her. She stood up to the corrupt Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, losing her university job in the process. She oversaw the planting of 30 million trees to fight creeping desertification. She was imprisoned and maligned for her activism. And yet she remained unbowed.

Wangari Maathai's memoir. Definitely worth reading.

She embodied a bold kind of beauty. She was brave and principled. She had a reverence for Creation:

“So these observations [of environmental degradation in her native Kenya] for me aroused an interest that there must be something that is happening that is bad, but it wasn’t the faith [that made me realize the ecological crisis.] And I wish it was, because it should have been. I should have been reading the book of Genesis a little more closely.“

And she will be missed. Thank you, Wangari, for the inspiration!

{You can listen to an interview with Wangari Maathai here. In it she talks about how she’s encouraged that faith-based groups are beginning to take conservation seriously, and how her own faith was shaped. Definitely worth a listen!}

Sep27

Grace and a Steak Dinner

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Grace and a Steak Dinner

Mr. S’s favorite food has always been steak. He’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of man. As in, pizza is, for him, “ethnic” food. His roots go down deep in New England-style cooking, and the rich influence of US immigration on American cuisine has done little to alter his palate.

He’s always been a great eater, Mr. S. And Mrs. S was, in her day, a great cook. After their retirement, they ate in restaurants a lot, because Mr. S wanted to give her a break from the endless multiple-course cooking that she did day in, day out for many decades.

When I was little, Mister and Misses (as we called them for short) used to have my family over for dinner, and, more commonly, would take us out for dinner. These dinners were, invariably, meat-and-potato affairs: steak and baked potato, hamburger platters, and the like. Mister always ate very slowly (“I don’t eat. I dine,” he would insist) but he ate quite a bit.

These days, though, Mister’s appetite isn’t very good. And although, these days, slabs of meat rarely feature in my cooking, I decided that I would suspend my own preferences and make an old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes dinner for Mister and Misses’ Saturday-night meal.

mushrooms dissolving in butter. um yum yum.

I consulted Fannie on the particulars, of course, and prepared, according to her wisdom, a broiled rib-eye with a mushroom cream sauce, roast potatoes, and green beans.

This here mushroom cream sauce? TOTALLY great on green beans.

And for dessert, a chocolate chiffon pie in a (gluten-free!) chocolate-coconut shell, all at Fannie’s direction.

what a mess! it actually turned into a good pie shell, though.

and the finished pie. yum! next time I want to make a mocha one.

(The first custard filling came out dreadfully. I washed it down the drain, and told Misses about it at dinner. “That happens sometimes, oh yes,” she said in her quiet, gracious way.)

curdled custard. gag me.

Mister still didn’t eat much, but he thanked me several times. “I don’t mean to belabor the point, but this is really special. The closest thing we get to steak here is a Salisbury steak that’s only 1/2″ thick.”

(Misses has never been much of a talker, but she cleaned her plates with relish.)

This meal got me thinking. On one hand, a meat-heavy diet is something I’ve got all kinds of concerns about. On the other, I see my friends, in their 90s, with very few comforts and pleasures in life. I might be happy with some vegetarian curry and brown rice–but a meal like that would do nothing for them. And so I can’t help but think that a steak dinner is the best I can do for them.

So I did it. And, oh, they may thank me, but honestly, for how glad I am to cook for them, and watch them enjoy some comfort food, I should be thanking them.

And maybe that joy is just a taste of the reward Jesus says we’ll get when we invite those who can’t repay to our banquet. (Or, you know, bring the banquet to them.) Maybe this meal is unsustainable on a global scale. Probably it is. (The veggies were from the garden, though.) Some people say old folks don’t even have sensitive taste buds any more. Maybe they don’t.

But maybe pouring expensive perfume on the feet of a man who’s about to die is an extravagant waste, too.

And then again, maybe not.

Sep26

The Last Last Meal

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The Last Last Meal

Why abolishing the last meal is graceless.

Robert Dale Conklin's Bacon Wrapped Filet Mignon

Last week, following the execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer, Texas State Senator John Whitmire (D) contacted the head of the state prison agency to demand that the practice of allowing a prisoner to choose a last meal be ended immediately.

Ted Bundy's Steak and Eggs

Texas executes more people than any other state, and their death row process has been under scrutiny. For example, in 2004, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the murder by arson of his three daughters, which he almost certainly did not commit. Yet Governor Rick Perry, among others, have done their best to write off this wrongful execution as “business as usual” even though the Texas Fire Commission had ruled that the original evidence collected against Willingham was deeply flawed.

John Wayne Gacy had KFC

So why abolish the last meal? Well, part of the reason is that Brewer kind of made a mockery of the age-old tradition of the last meal–ordering

two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeños; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers.

and then not eating any of it, saying he wasn’t hungry. Plus, Brewer was totally unrepentant for his heinous crime, telling the local news: “as far as any regrets, no, I have no regrets. No, I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.” Perhaps his unrepentance was part of what irked Sen. Whitmire; perhaps, as Anne Emanuel says, it was a “diversionary” tactic to deflect attention from the sloppiness that seems to characterize Texas death row process.

Timothy McVeigh's Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

But why abolish the last meal altogether? Florida, for example, grants its condemned a last meal of their choice, but ingredients must be purchased locally and cost no more than $40. Abolishing the last meal, to me, seems graceless.

I should come out and say that I think the death penalty itself needs to be abolished. The execution of Troy Davis on the same night as Brewer was a case in which an enormous amount of evidence pointed to Davis’ innocence, not unlike the Willingham case. But the truth is, I don’t think that Brewer–though unrepentant and guilty–should’ve been put to death either. There are a lot of reasons why I deplore execution, which I won’t go into here, but the simplest are these: I don’t believe anyone has the right to take what only God can give, and I believe that putting people to death–even guilty people–destroys the souls of those who do it. (It must be noted that the family of Brewer’s victim held a vigil for Brewer and opposed his execution to the end.)

So, obviously, for me, the last meal is a small issue beside the huge one of a consistent life ethic. But I find myself really bothered by the fact that Texas has chosen to end this ancient tradition because it strikes me as needlessly graceless. The last meal is, traditionally, an act of grace–often given along with the Sacraments, in fact. It’s an act of grace because, obviously, the last meal is gratuitous–the condemned having no “need” of nutrition in his or her final hours. And it is an act of grace because accepting food is a sign of trust and peace. (In Louisiana, the prison warden traditionally eats the last meal with the condemned. I can’t seem to contemplate this without tears in my eyes.)

Philip Workman declined a last meal for himself, asking instead for a vegetarian pizza to be given on his behalf to a homeless person. Prison officials denied his request, but it was carried out by others across the country.

The last meals that prisoners choose seem to say so much about them. A number of artists have even made projects of artfully portraying last meals. It seems to me that after years on death row with no dignity or chance to choose anything, the offer of a final meal of one’s choice is a glimmer of grace.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the Texas death row process could seem any more callous and graceless than it already does. But they’ve done it.

{For more about the death penalty, or to join the effort to end it, visit the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty website. For a moving account of a man sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit, I highly recommend The Thin Blue Line–the Errol Morris film that led to Randall Dale Adams’ exoneration. The book that convinced me that the death penalty needs to die is Dead Man Walking.}

Sep25

How We Make Pizza Dough

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How We Make Pizza Dough

We love our NY pizzeria pizza, but homemade pizza makes all kinds of sense. First, it’s inexpensive. Second, you can top it just the way you like it. Third, it’s fun.

I’ve used various recipes for pizza doughs over the years, and many have worked well, but my favorite way to make pizza is with the recipe for pita bread from the Moosewood Cookbook.

This is how to make it:

Dissolve in 1 cup warm (about 110 degrees F) water:

1 and 1/2 teaspoons yeast

1 Tablespoon honey

Sift together separately:

1 teaspoon salt

about 3 1/2 cups of flour (or 3 and 1/4 c. flour + 1/4 c. vital wheat gluten)

Gradually add flour mixture to the wet mixture, and knead well until very smooth. (I let this ancient MixMaster fitted with kneading hooks do the work, but, sadly, it died shortly after.)

{Don’t be fooled by the bottle of olive oil in the background. This recipe doesn’t call for oil.}

Divide the well-kneaded and smooth dough into two smooth balls, cover bowl with a damp cloth or with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled.

When the dough has nearly doubled, preheat your oven as high as it goes. (Mine goes to 500F.) Put a baking stone on the lowest oven rack to preheat as well.

Cut each half into three roughly equal pieces (6 pieces total) and roll each piece gently into a ball. Cover gently with a wet cloth and let rest 10 minutes.

Gently, working with one ball at a time, roll each into an approximate 10″ round, using additional flour if necessary to keep dough from sticking. Place on a flat smooth surface well-dusted with cornmeal or flour–you’re going to slip it off THAT surface onto the hot baking stone. (Yes, it’s a pain in the neck, but it’s doable.)

Top however you like; and slip onto hot stone. Bake 7-10 minutes–or until it looks done, and allow to cool a bit on a wire rack. Repeat with each dough ball. (You can freeze some of the dough for another time.)

Dollops of fresh pesto, fresh ricotta, and halved cherry tomatoes with a bit of mozzarella (no sauce). Yum! Done right (and I do not always do it right, alas) this is THE closest a homemade pizza comes to tasting like a real NY slice.

Enjoy the weekend!

Sep24

A Good and Perfect Gift

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A Good and Perfect Gift

My fellow Her.meneutics blogger Amy Julia Becker has a new book, A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny. It’s a beautiful book, a powerful and important book, a book to read, ponder, and discuss. At birth, Amy Julia’s daughter, Penny, was diagnosed with Down syndrome. The hopes and plans she and her husband, Peter, had for the baby suddenly changed, and Amy Julia found herself wrestling with big questions–why was Penny born with an extra 21st chromosome? Was it because of sin? Was because Amy Julia and Peter needed to learn some kind of lesson?

The book follows Amy Julia’s journey in the months following Penny’s birth as she gets to know her daughter in all her beautiful particularity and struggles against feelings she wished that she would never have: falling in love with her adorable newborn and yet crying over her. “I don’t want to cry over the birth of my daughter,” her journal from that time reads. As an outstanding student, Amy Julia had always placed a high value on the life of the mind. But loving Penny began to shatter her “idols”:

“I realized that I had always assumed it was very sad to have a child with mental retardation, or, for that matter, to be a person with mental retardation. But why? Why was that sad? [...] I realized that my real question had to do with goodness [...] in a God-created universe, what was good and not good in her? And was it any different from that which was good and not good in the rest of us?”

(Photo Credit Javier Delgado Esteban, CC license)

In time, wrestling with theological questions amid day-to-day life with her baby, Amy Julia makes some important realizations, among them, that her own achievements–like being a stellar student at Princeton–were not merely due to her own hard work. “My life wasn’t something I deserved,” she writes. “It was a gift.” Penny, too, is a gift, all of her, including that extra 21st chromosome (which, in time, Amy Julia and Peter come to recognize as fully a part of Penny, and something they wouldn’t change if they could). In time, the uniqueness of Penny herself–”delightful, charming, smart, wonderful Penny” erased Amy Julia’s lingering doubts and fears, making way for their family, together, to “learn what it meant to be human, what it meant to be whole.”

(CC license)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14:

“He said also to the man who had invited him, ‘When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”

Jesus was happy to link arms with disabled people–people that others of his day feared as perhaps being under some kind of curse because of sin–and call them his own. He was happy to touch them and eat with them. But he doesn’t say do the same because they need it. No (though they probably do). Rather, he says do this and you will be blessed.

Maybe, weakness, disability, and other forms of brokenness frighten us because they make us aware of the parts within us that are not quite whole. What I take away from Amy Julia’s book is that we can’t become whole without embracing difference and brokenness (including our own brokenness) not just intellectually, but around the table, sharing bread; living and loving and receiving one another–even and especially those among us who are different–as the good and perfect gifts we are.

Because “the more we receive Penny, the more we welcome her, exactly as she is, the more we welcome God’s work in our lives.”

(photo credit: Faso Productions--CC license)

{I’m delighted to be posting this as a part of the Patheos Book Club!}

Sep23

goat farm

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goat farm

No, they aren’t worshiping the goats. They are letting the babies nibble their hair.

Nothin’ like getting nuzzled by baby goat lips!

My guys. They love the goat dairy. I do too.

(And goat cheese! My goodness–it was delicious!)

Sep22

Who Would Jesus Feed?

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Who Would Jesus Feed?

A recent study from the US Department of Agriculture noted that more than one in five children in the United States lives in a household that struggles to put enough food on the table. Among Latino children, says the organization Bread for the World, it’s more than one child in three that’s at risk for hunger. Ivone Guillen, immigration policy fellow at Bread for the World Institute, noted that while many immigrant families might qualify for programs such as SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), they are often afraid to apply, fearing that they might be at risk for deportation if they do. As a result, just 44% of eligible Latino children receive SNAP benefits.

What’s more, current laws limit access to safety-net programs. Undocumented immigrants–AND legal immigrants who’ve been here for less than 5 years–can’t receive SNAP.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think that most Christians would argue that Jesus would ask someone’s immigration status and only feed those who entered the country legally. And yet, I’ve encountered Christians who doubt whether we have an obligation to neighbors in need who may be undocumented or “undeserving” in some other way. But extending fellowship and help in the form of food is so basic to Jesus’ ministry–and so basic to what he called his followers to do–that I can’t help but feel certain that it’s these very people–the most at-risk and the least secure economically and socially–that we are especially obligated to serve in Jesus’ name.

It says "Jesus es mi amigo mejor" (Jesus is my best friend.)

“Well,” one might counter, “that’s fine if you want to have a food pantry, or otherwise privately conduct handouts, but the government has no obligation to feed people that have broken the law by coming here.”

It’s true: government might not have any particular obligation to people who’ve entered the country illegally, and so if Congress chooses to cut SNAP even from the eligible recipients, my obligation to my neighbors–all of them–remains the same. My primary allegiance is to Jesus’ values, not Uncle Sam’s. But that doesn’t mean I can’t support my government in measures that I believe are right and just, and protecting the safety net that keeps our most vulnerable members from falling seems to me to be right and just and in harmony with the values of Jesus.

I know that negotiating the relationship between faith and politics is sometimes less than clear. I’ve found that while Christians are often anxious that government doesn’t make legal things we find immoral, we are sometimes less concerned with doing our civic bit to protect those whose rights Jesus would have us defend but whose rights the government does not recognize.

But 20%+ of all children, and 30%+ of Latino children, going hungry, here, in the USA, where we spend almost as much money on weight loss as on SNAP? Where we routinely throw away THIS MUCH food per month?

(Meanwhile, the Justice Department spent $4,700 on 250 muffins for ONE event–that’s almost 7 times the amount given by SNAP to a family of four for a MONTH’s worth of food.)

how much muffin can $4,700 buy?

So I can’t help but wonder: whose benefits would Jesus cut?

Sep21

Fake Gluten-Free Girl

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Fake Gluten-Free Girl

Are food preferences ever a way of putting disordered eating into more socially acceptable forms?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my dad has Celiac disease, and in him, it was the really dramatic kind of Celiac, with massive weight loss, terrible anemia, mouth ulcers, and a host of extremely unpleasant gastrointestinal problems. When he was diagnosed in the mid-80s, it was after several years of invasive testing, during which it was thought by some that he must have something like late-stage cancer or full-blown AIDS. “You’re so anemic, you shouldn’t be able to get out of bed,” one doctor said.

Happily, all it took was a month of gluten-free before he regained a good 20 pounds (and his life.) But whereas today you can purchase gluten-free bread, pasta, beer, muffins, crackers, cookies, and more, back then, going gluten-free was a different story.

We ate A LOT of rice (which was a good thing. I love rice.)

And peanut-butter and jam on rice cakes (which were less good, but not bad.)

And, just once, we tried corn pasta (which was a Very Bad Thing.)

And I became very aware that my dad couldn’t eat lots of yummy things like pizza or birthday cake–not because he didn’t want to, but because he would waste away if he did.

While I was still young enough to have a healthy attitude about food and my body, I felt bad for my dad. I didn’t like it that he couldn’t enjoy the same foods as my mom and I could.

But as I got older, I saw the possibilities of going gluten-free: I could easily banish from my diet all sorts of “fattening” foods and no one could criticize me for doing so.

(Now, it sure SEEMED like each time I ate something with gluten, I got a stomachache. But that the discomfort was making its way from my head to my gut was not so clear.)

And so, I began 7 years of gluten-free. It didn’t make me lose weight. In fact, I think it may have contributed to weight gain in some ways. For one thing, the gluten-free foods that were available by then tended to be very dense in calories. And for another, the constant deprivation I subjected myself to (by not providing myself with adequate gluten-free substitutes, say, in my college cafeteria) led to craving and overeating later. Plus, my eating was always out of synch with the eating of those around me. I was all out of touch with my hunger and with the social nature of eating.

{And I STILL got a lot of stomachaches. Go figure!}

Periodically I would wonder if the gluten thing was “in my head.” But the anxiety over opening up the whole range of gluten-containing foods was too great. I thought I would gain huge amounts of weight and eat uncontrollably. It seemed safer to keep bread, pastry, pasta, cake, cookies, and tons of other things off limits.

nowadays, of course, "gluten free" doesn't hafta mean "cake free." But try THIS gluten free cake first. It's delicious!

After giving birth to my first child, though, I found that I no longer feared food.  I felt brave enough to introduce oatmeal into my life. (I know; how daring of me, right!?) From there I moved on to include bread, pasta; well, everything, really.

And my stomach felt fine; if anything, it felt better.

So what’s the point of this story? “Eat gluten?” No, not exactly.

one gluten free celebrity (Gwyneth Paltrow)

It’s just this: I’ve noticed that more and more people are going gluten-free (including some celebrities) and while I absolutely, positively DO know that some people–with or without “official” diagnoses–can’t tolerate gluten and feel tons better without it (like my dad–see above!–and the lovely Gluten-Free Girl, and some very dear friends) But I’m still kind of wondering if, for some people, this grain-rejection may just be like mine–on some level, yet another way of restricting food and/or masking an eating disorder.

another gluten-free celebrity (Zooey Deschanel)

What do YOU think?

Can food preferences–not just gluten-free, not just Paleo–be a way of couching disordered eating in more socially acceptable forms?

Do you worry when friends suddenly foreswear whole food groups?

(By the way, in case it wasn’t clear in the above: I went gluten free–consciously or not, mostly NOT–to mask an eating disorder. So before someone messages me to say that I’m insensitive or judgmental or don’t understand the reasons for going gluten-free, please, please, please understand that I understand. And I’m not judging.)