Year of No Sugar (24 page)

Even if you're not convinced that sugar is a toxin, most parents do seem to get that consuming candy on Halloween-scale is not good. Maybe it's because of the unfortunate kid every year at the parade or the party who overdoes it and throws up, or maybe we just know, instinctively, that consuming a pillowcase full of
anything
, anything at
all
, can't be good.

Here's what we always used to do when I was a kid: after trick-or-treating till our lips turned blue from the late October air (“
But Mo-oooom
! If I wear my coat no one can see my
costume
!!”), we'd all congregate on the floor of someone's living room and pour our bags of cheap treats out to sort and count and trade. I always liked this part the best—we were like little pirates, or maybe bankers, gleefully portioning out the gold coins.

And now that I have kids, they do this too. On Halloween night of our Year of No Sugar, we
did
go trick-or-treating
as always, with a gaggle of kids racing ahead and the dutiful parents lagging behind. At the end, we all trooped back to Katrina's house where the kids immediately took over the living room by dumping several tons of high-fructose corn syrup in a variety of colorful wrappers onto the carpet. A frenzy of sorting and showing off and bartering began.

“I have NERDS!”

“Look! A
mint-flavored
Milky Way!”

“What are
these?
”

“
Who
gives out
barbecue chips
?”

“Oo! What do you want for your
Sour Patch Kids
?”

Meanwhile, Katrina's dog, Inky, was wasting no time. Ignoring the candy completely, he made like a Hoover vacuum when an entire baggie filled with popcorn ended up on the floor, deftly maneuvering around the Tootsie Rolls and tiny boxes of Junior Mints.
⁵⁷

I laughed when I saw that our friend Robin had brought homemade cupcakes along for everyone. It reminded me of the farmer's market the previous Saturday, where the vendors were plying my children with candy, pressing Starbursts and hard candies into our hands before we could say no.
⁵⁸

Despite this prophetic handwriting on the wall, I had been nonetheless astounded earlier that Halloween day to walk into Greta's sixth-grade classroom and find all the kids having a Halloween treat consisting of a sugar doughnut and
a large handful of assorted candy. My eyes got big. What? Did they not feel tonight was going to be sufficient? Did they have to be
primed
with sugar pre-event too?

If I had never noticed it before, I certainly noticed it now: people just can't seem to help themselves when it comes to the idea of making a child happy. And what easier way to make a child happy than with an inexpensive little bit of sugar? Of course, the problem is, it's
too
easy, so everyone,
everyone
, EVERYONE gets into the act. Robin's adorable homemade cupcakes aren't really the problem; it's all the junk that likely came before that—and will likely come after that too.

My sugar-distant vantage point was giving me a unique view of the holiday season, and I was shocked at what I saw. I realized that it had become
so
cheap and
so
easy to hand a child a treat that inflation had set in. No longer is it sufficient for the teacher to bring the kids each a doughnut—there has to be a pile of candy next to it. No longer is it sufficient for kids to get a single treat at each house; now many houses go to the trouble of packing little paper candy bags full of
several treats each
. No longer is it sufficient to have a treat or two (or fourteen) from the candy bag that night; we have to provide
dessert
on top of that. Because what else do you do? It's Halloween! Or Christmas! Or Valentine's Day! Or somebody's birthday! Or you're just feeling depressed! Or happy! You see what I'm getting at here.

When we met,
Sweet Poison
author David Gillespie told me that he's always interested to watch what happens to American kids after Halloween: they all start getting sick. Sure, you could blame it on the change of temperature, more time spent inside in closer quarters, yadda yadda, but what
if it's
not
just those things? Would we all be so quick to dole out those easy-to-come-by bits of happiness to children if we knew it was going to hinder their immune systems? Would we view it the way we view the WWII practice of handing out free cartons of cigarettes to soldiers now?

Then again, I can't help it; I still love Halloween. Every year, I spend much of the month of October getting ready for it, picking out costume patterns and fabric with my children, and then sewing like a madwoman. When the appointed night comes, we venture forth, armed with flashlights and reflective tote bags and cameras, not to mention the optional umbrellas or long underwear. We tromp around the village with our friends, often running into other friends and joining up like packs of amiable, gaudily dressed, and highly supervised wild animals.

Then this year, of all years, the most amazing thing happened. Early on, our group had effectively snowballed to an impressive size—perhaps thirty or more adults and kids found ourselves congregated in the parking lot of the fire department. And out of nowhere
something
was happening. Grown-ups were yelling, “Stop! Stop! Everybody come over here! Everybody join hands!”

As we all looked around blankly, trying to discern what exactly was going on, it became clear that my friend Sue was orchestrating something. All thirty or so of us, large and small, costumed and not, put down our flashlights and bags of candy and obediently joined hands.

Once we were all in an enormous circle, Sue had us let go hands at just one spot, so we formed a curved line. Then she began walking around the interior of our circle, making a spiral inward, inward. And because we had all joined hands,
we were all walking too, following her, passing each other, giggling and making faces and talking to one another animatedly.

Once she got to the middle-middle-middle and could go no further she turned one hundred eighty degrees and began to walk a spiral back out again. Have you ever done this game? It seems like something I must've done at camp or elementary school or something, but never, never had I done it on a moonlit night in the parking lot of the fire department with a group of parents and children I love so well. And never before with a group of tiny Mad Hatters and queens and monkeys and fairies and zombie monsters. As we spun around and around the wheel of our friends and children, it felt like we had joined the witches themselves to perform a rite of autumn. It felt positively pre-Christian.

Isn't it something like this—that is so much harder to achieve than that fleeting bit of happiness that comes in a plastic wrapper—that we really
want
from our holidays? A sense of connection, of community, of ritual, of transformation? I'm sympathetic with my friends who opt out, celebrating at home on Halloween. I understand it. But I really don't
want
to stay home, on Halloween or any other holiday for that matter, because that feels to me like hiding. I want to be able to go out and celebrate with my friends, with my kids' friends, with my community. Unfortunately, our culture doesn't seem to remember much about how you celebrate things without buying a bunch of unnecessary stuff and without consuming a bunch of unnecessary sugar.

I thought Sue's pagan circle was a brilliant way to remind us.

 

⁵⁴
And I'm not done, either: It's
still
the very best book out there by far for those who want a thorough layperson's explanation of what it is exactly that sugar does in your body and why. Also, he's hilarious.

⁵⁵
Turns out, my copy had been purchased from a reseller on Amazon. If you are looking for it, be careful not to confuse Gillespie's
Sweet Poison
(published by Penguin in Australia) with the American book of the same title by Dr. Janet Hull, which is on the dangers of aspartame.

⁵⁶
Those books are now out and titled
Big Fat Lies
and
Toxic Oil
, both published by Penguin Australia.

⁵⁷
So what happened to all that candy once we got home to
our
house? The kids each got to pick one candy to have that night with their friends, and the rest went to the very, very back of the tip-toppest shelf in our kitchen food cupboard. It is still there.

⁵⁸
Sometimes it's just easier to smile and say thank you. They went directly into the trash when we got home.

By November, I was starting to get the feeling that we were going back in time, cleaning our cast-iron pan, gathering the eggs from our chickens, buying our milk from the local farm in half-gallon mason jars, selecting apples out of wooden bins at the farmer's market, ordering bread from our local general store. Our freezer was full of meat: half a cow and half a pig locally raised and slaughtered. At a restaurant supply house, I was buying butter by the thirty-six-pound case and flour by the fifty-pound bag. One day, I realized I really needed something from the actual supermarket and I felt kind of…disappointed.

It wasn't entirely intentional; it just seemed to be the natural evolution of things when one tries to get away from processed foods (read: added-sugar foods). Want good bread? If you aren't prepared to make it in the quantity your family will consume, you order it from Jed in Rupert, who makes the area's best no-sugar bread with only four ingredients. Want organic meat? Unless you want to remortgage your house to buy it at the farmer's market, or pick over the sad, nonexistent selection at our local supermarkets (no Whole Foods
out here!), you find a guy who knows a cow and a reputable slaughterhouse. And so on.

As if to complete the effect, for a birthday present, my husband had arranged something I've
always
wanted to do: a hearth-cooking workshop. So early one Saturday morning I, and six friends, converged on the historic homestead of Sally Brillon in Hebron, New York.

As we walked up the path in the crisp morning air, I looked around at the ancient outbuildings—remnants of the many different jobs having a family farm used to entail. Standing on the flagstone step, we knocked on the saltbox door and entered another world.

I was in heaven. Immediately upon entering, we were warmed by waves emanating from the enormous slate hearth that dominated the room. Sally had started the fire two hours earlier, to get it up to the temperatures we'd be needing to cook our meal for the day: roast chicken, potatoes with parsley, mashed Hubbard squash, cranberries, bread, and apple pie for dessert. We seven students and Sally spent the next five hours accomplishing this task.

I will admit, I am a little obsessed with this time period. If PBS ever does
Frontier House
again, I will politely beat people out of the way with a large stick to volunteer.
⁵⁹
Why do I love this stuff so much? I wonder. After all, we are talking about the age when the average lifespan for a woman was, like, twelve or something. And of course, we must remember Sally was making the experience all quite painless for us;
we
didn't have to stoke the fire at 7 a.m.
We
didn't have to wash
the cast-iron pans and dishes for eight afterward in a tub of lukewarm water. She had a
real
bathroom for us, and none of us were in danger of dying from appendicitis, childbirth, or from an infected scab on the knee. We had it sooooo easy.

Instead, we got to do the fun part: we cooked two chickens in a reflecting oven before the fire, turning the spit every fifteen minutes. We boiled pots full of vegetables that hung from S hooks off a crane that swung into place over the flames. We started a soft wood fire in the bake oven and filled it with red coals until it was ready to bake our two loaves of bread. Lastly, after assembling a lovely apple pie, we laid it carefully in a cast-iron pot, placed it on a “burner” of hot coals directly on the hearth, and then shoveled coals on the lid—after a time, those coals would be removed and replaced with fresh. It was
really
starting to smell good in there.

And as you can imagine, when it was all done and we were seated around a table set with china and candles, it
tasted
good too. Not gourmet, not fancy-recipe good, but
good
. Wholesome. Filling. Real.

I loved that we used pot lid lifters and tin ladles and yellowware bowls. There was no Teflon, no plastic, no mixers or microwaves. In fact, there was only
one
modern toxin that I could see: sugar.

Of course, you must've already guessed there was sugar in the cranberries and in the apple pie. For good measure, Sally's recipe also had us drizzle maple syrup onto the top of the mashed squash. After some thought, I had decided ahead of time not to request any recipe changes—it was authenticity we were going for here, after all. The cranberries tasted almost painfully sweet to me, but the squash and the pie were very mildly sweet, even to my recently more sensitive tongue. Sally
later told me that one class she had actually left the sugar out of the pie by mistake and nobody even noticed—it was just as good.

Back in those days, sugar was a lot harder to come by and boiling your own maple syrup was a task that took up a considerable portion of one's spring energies. As we waited for the chicken and bread loaves to finish baking, Sally read to us snippets from the diaries of John Quincy Wilson, who lived in that very house in the late 1800s with his wife and three children. A few entries described the gargantuan undertaking of making maple syrup: sterilizing the sap buckets, soaking the wood barrels in the nearby stream to expand the wood to seal any cracks, gathering the sap bucket by bucket, and finally building the arch for the long evaporating process, not in a sap house like today, but actually out in the open air of the woods. If only sugar was that hard to come by nowadays.