On paleo mothers

image via ren-hang at flickr

Recently I have gone on a crusade of healthy eating, which is partially due to a desire for slim, tanned summer wholesomeness and partially due to the crippling guilt of a recent impromptu lunch of pizza and ice-cream. As a result, I have been joining in with my mother in smugly declining bread and cakes in favour of salads.

My mother has been Paleo for a few months now, and the rest of my family has somewhat got used to it. There was the initial shock, of course, of the banning of orange juice and cereal and puddings every day. Pasta became a high-risk substance, sugar in tea became the work of the devil and talk of sandwiches was met with dirty looks. Suddenly chocolate was something furtive to sneak into the house wrapped in a jumper or stuffed into a bag, like attempting to smuggle alcohol under the nose of my parents, only ridiculous. My mum spent days on end reading health articles and constantly updating us on what she'd eaten and how it made her feel and the state of her health. Every conversation was warped by her into a discussion on her eating habits. It was as if she had become devoted to religion overnight, obsessing constantly about cauliflower rice and the Omega 6 content of almonds, rapturously quoting food statistics like Bible passages. Instead of urging miserable people to find Jesus, she would proclaim that all their problems could be fixed with a Proper Food. We (my brothers and I, that is) were her reluctant converts, rebelliously chomping crisps and sausage rolls in the Tesco car park as a sort of sullen refusal to conform, our vanilla version of dyed hair and tattoos. Blasphemy was confined to two words, always spoken with a definite capital letter at the beginning and a slight impressive whisper: Grain, and Rancid Fats.

It is only now after the fervour of resistance that I am perhaps realising that food as a form of rebellion is not necessarily the best thing in terms of health. It is a trap that I have fallen into before. As a child, my mother, ever well-meaning, was determined to feed us the best things she possibly could. And she did. We ate organic vegetables and cooked breakfasts, home-made dinners and whole-fat milk. Cereal was strictly banned if the of which sugars section on the packet was over 10g, and Nestlé was exiled from the house after a political incident. She worked her fingers to the bone keeping us well-fed. Not a single ready meal passed my lips my whole childhood; she never stopped working even for a night. And now, of course, I am incredibly grateful for her efforts, even though as a child I was blind to them. I longed to fit in with the other children, you see, particularly in primary school. This combined with a natural sweet tooth made my daily packed lunch a nightmare. I would pull out my squashed hummus and carrot or cheese and onion brown-bread sandwiches out of my lunchbox with weary distaste, gazing longingly at my classmates slurping milkshakes and munching on chocolate bars. My small tupperware box of nuts and dried fruit would never quite compare to the crumpling of packets of Wotsits and Skips. My dream was to be able to open crisps at lunchtime by squeezing the ends of the packets - POP! - like those in the lunch hall with effortless cool, the sort I thought could be obtained by eating the right things for lunch and wearing the right hair accessories. More than once, I have been met with the cry of 'Urgh, what's that?' upon biting into a radish, which was hell for a self-conscious wallflower such as myself.

Luckily these days I am more likely to have an impressive lunch if it unfalteringly healthy rather than the other way round, and hummus sandwiches and radishes are more likely to evoke the envy of my crisp-crunching coke-sipping friends. And while I am still reluctant to completely give up Grain, Sugar and Rancid Fats, I respect my mother a great deal more for her efforts to get us to eat healthily.