Like so many others, I was lulled into a
false sense of security and the importance of adopting the herd mentality. More than any- thing I wanted the junky, sugary cereals my friends had, not the granola or grape nuts at our house. I wanted baloney sandwiches on white bread, not the homemade wheat bread my dad made, with dry, homemade peanut butter that ripped the bread apart when you tried to spread it. I wanted to use Mr. Bubble in the bath, not Ivory soap. Unscented Arm & Hammer laundry detergent was NOT respon- sible for creating soap operas and was never advertised during game shows! And who the hell, in their wildest dreams, thought carob could ever be a replacement for real choco- late?!
there were all the brands I grew up with and way more. Really helpful modern hippies shopped and worked there, and had health food card catalogs in their heads. If the boys were sick, I could go in, tell the nice hippie person their symptoms and walk out with some natural cough medicine and safe pain reliever. That was a huge comfort for me. Often I would laugh, remembering being a silly little kid, watching some “weird,” grown- up hippie friend of my parents that I thought was kookie. And there I was, enjoying the irony of following in their wise footsteps. Guess what? My kids wanted the com-
Little did I know, my parents knew
what was up. I only cared about fitting in and having what I thought was the “good stuff.” When we visited our parents’ friends they often had even weirder stuff than we did. Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap, Bob’s Red Mill Ama- ranth, bundles of sage, eggplant “lasagna?” No thanks! I still don’t like eggplant and have not yet “smudged” any spirits away. But I did use Dr. Bronner’s when my boys were little, and you’ll see some of Bob’s stuff in my pantry today. Dr. Bronner’s was still one of the few pure, liquid, inexpensive soaps you could get when my boys were little. I wanted to give them the best of both worlds, like a fun, but healthy, attempt at a bubble bath. When I started visiting the same co-op my dad used to take me to when I was little,
mercial crap too! I tried to straddle the two worlds, so they wouldn’t end up throwing their homemade-bread lunch away and buy- ing the stuff in the lunch line, like I did. I knew how much I hated being the kid with the weird lunch I brought to school in the plain brown bag, so I got them a cool lunch box and made their bread out of “white wheat” flour. As a kid, I felt pretty certain my friends weren’t eating homemade stir-fry for dinner and Malt-O-Meal for breakfast. But when I had my kids, I was plagued by a little voice that was no longer satisfied with my eating whatever junk food I wanted. I was now responsible for two little beings, and that voice told me I had better change my ways and get back to my roots or else! I like to think it was my dad’s way of getting the last laugh from “the grave.” Instead of Kellogg’s Froot Loops, with their artificial colors and flavors, there were Fruity O’s, flavored with fruit juice and colored by beets and stuff. In- stead of Chef Boyardee SpaghettiO’s and Ravioli and bright, fake-orange Kraft Mac & Cheese, there were brands that used organic ingredients, whole wheat pasta and weren’t the color of a safety cone. Now even the regu- lar Kraft Mac & Cheese gets its color from the natural spice annatto instead of orange dye number whatever. We tried almost all the brands to find ones that wouldn’t just end up in the trash or make us sad, like carob did.
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