Year of No Sugar (27 page)

Turns out, there
is
a special pectin you can order or find at the health food store that contains
no
sugar, called Pomona's Universal Pectin. (Instead of being activated by sugar, it is instead activated by calcium.) Even Pomona's, however,
doesn't list recipes entirely omitting sugar—honey, artificial sweetener, and juice concentrate are all listed, but no sign of the No Added Sugar recipe I'd been searching for.

Incidentally, I realized, language is very important here: it helps not to call it
jelly
or
jam
.
Fruit spread
seems to be the term of choice for No-Sugar variants of this process. Recipes are available online for fruit spread that look promising, although the ones I found don't allow for canning. Rather, they produce a batch that lives in the refrigerator or freezer, which is functional if not quite so beautiful—also probably retaining more nutrients. That might be worth a try.

But still, I wondered, was there some magical reason sugar was absolutely essential to canned jam and jelly? Was I going to kill my family with my homemade grape sauce? Why was the answer so strangely, incredibly elusive? Fortunately, a few credible resources do exist online to help those of us who wish to cross over to the dark side of messing with/understanding our canning recipes: both Oregon State and Colorado State Universities have good extension websites that finally helped explain what I wanted to know: that, yes, sugar acts not only as a flavoring agent, but
also
acts as a preservative.
And
it activates the pectin to activate the set.

Silly me, this meant I was adding pectin to my grapes without the required mountain-load of sugar present to
activate
it. Did putting it in my jelly do virtually nothing? Or would dextrose do the same job but just require different amounts? It seemed likely that my grape sauce would likely have a shorter shelf life than the average estimate of a year for canned items. I could live with that.

Wow. You'd think they'd cover all this in
Canning & Preserving for Dummies
, right? But they don't. Just shut up
and follow the recipe, people. And anyway, what kind of crazy person would ever want to make grape jelly
without
sugar?

We were now getting beyond the tip of the iceberg as to what avoiding this one lousy ingredient really entailed. At the risk of repeating myself here (say it with me!), we
are
talking about a substance which our body has no need for and which we only began consuming in earnest in the short space of the last few decades, right? You have to ask yourself: should avoiding sugar
really
be this hard?

 

⁵⁹
Did you ever see this show? In 2002, three families had to establish homesteads and live as if it were the year 1883. Now that's
my
kind of reality television.

⁶⁰
You can see how I get into trouble.

⁶¹
Joel Salatin, Correspondance,
The Sun
, January, 2013.

It was the end of November. Our family had gotten through a
lot
together: countless birthdays, Halloween, school picnics, Thanksgiving. It felt like we were coming into the home stretch and I think I was getting almost a little…complacent. I had managed to get through eleven months of blogging about my family, what we'd been eating—and not eating—and pretty much everything else incidental or important that had happened along the way. Consequently, I think I may have assumed there was nothing left that could surprise me. But you know what one big, huge, enormously large issue
hadn't
come up yet? Religion.

Religion and food have one quintessential thing in common: they are both topics one's philosophy can become so ensconced in that they dramatically affect everything else in your life. Which is to say, some people treat religion like their food, and some people treat their food like a religion. Perhaps the two were bound to meet—I just didn't expect that meeting to come in the form of a plastic bag of flyers hanging on my front door.

Inside this bag was a bunch of information about a local
church, just a few miles down the road from us, and an invitation to their services and Christmas play, as well as a DVD titled
The Case for Christ
. “Enjoy meaningful worship and music,” it read in part. Well, that sounds good. It went on to detail community service, celebrating recovery…all positive things.

Then I got to the coupon for McDonald's. Stapled to it was a card that read “Come visit us on Sunday…Then go for a Sundae!” and quoted the Psalms “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” I kid you not.

Is McDonald's proof that God exists? Apparently, some people think so.

I was speechless. The church endorsing fast food? Using junk food desserts as a reward for attending services? When I was a kid we survived the droning sermons and fourteen off-key verses of “Oh Thou Who Art Mine Antidisestablishmentarianism” by doodling on the offering envelopes and looking forward to the “fellowship hour” that followed. There, we knew, we could snag more refreshments than we were reasonably allowed while the grown-ups gabbed and drank coffee. That was crap food too, of course: butter cookies from supermarket tins and Kool-Aid. So then, was it
really
so different?

I would argue that it was different. What was different was that it was still
in
the church, designed to get members of the congregation to begin talking to one another, become friends, maybe even form a close-knit community that would support one another, all thanks to some free caffeine. Turning the local McDonald's into the honorary vestibule, to me, isn't quite the same.

Instead, this came off more as a cheap bribe. I wondered
about the technicalities: if you use the coupon without going to church, will you go to Hell? And if you go collect all your neighbors' coupons from their doorknobs before they get home, are you
definitely
going to Hell?

Back in Jesus's day, food was a simpler matter: some loaves, some fishes. Sugar as we know it had yet to be invented, likewise McDonald's. Honey is mentioned often in the Bible, usually as an indication of plentitude, as in “milk and honey.” Back then the food symbol of ultimate sin? An apple.

Apples have since come a long way: a symbol in today's society of purity, wholesomeness, and nutrition, Snow White's experience notwithstanding. It does make me wonder though, if the Bible were written today, would Eve have offered Adam a sip of her McFlurry?

_______

By way of avoiding that ever-present temptation represented by The World and Everything in It, we had become a little bit like Food Monks. And now, more than ever, the key to me seemed to be investing a
lot
of time making food. Pretty much, I was dividing my time between making food and writing about food…and if there was any time leftover, I did trivial stuff like pay bills, shower, brush teeth. At times it felt like I was emerging from being under the surface of a lake full of cultural assumptions about food. My head just above the surface of that water, I was only now opening my eyes and beginning to look around—it was amazing to me to begin to realize how very much time real food can take, and how good and satisfying that could feel.
⁶²

For example, one night I was making spaghetti and meatballs, which sounds like a pretty simple thing. Once upon a time, I would've bought meatballs and sauce at the supermarket, and such a dinner would've taken about half an hour, tops. This time, however, it took up a not-insignificant portion of my day: in the morning I made bread—not only for our toast and sandwiches, but also as a meatball ingredient. I poured boiling water over oatmeal and let it sit an hour, then added more ingredients before kneading the dough and setting it in a bowl to rise. An hour later I came back to it, divided it into two loaf pans and let it rise some more. Half an hour after that I put them in the oven, and half an hour after that the bread emerged from the oven smelling like God.

Later in the day, after picking the kids up from school, it was time to make the sauce. After putting cans of diced and crushed tomatoes to stew in a pot with oil and garlic, I got out meatball ingredients—defrosted beef, grated Parmesan, measured spices—then mixed them all together with a paste made from the cut-up bread slices and water. After the sauce was finished reducing, it was time to form the mixture into meatballs and gently place them into the hot oil for frying. Each batch cooks in about ten minutes, and I fuss over them like a mother hen, trying to ensure they don't burn on one side or undercook on another—and most of all that they stay in one piece. Meanwhile, I put the water on to heat up for the spaghetti.

All this time Ilsa was “helping” by making a fruit concoction composed of cut-up clementines and bananas. She had a name for it—I can't recall it exactly, but something like “Super Happy Loveliness”—and after an extremely long process of peeling and squeezing and sampling and mixing,
she was inordinately proud of the end result she put on the dinner table.

I knew exactly how she felt.

I wondered: is it crazy to feel this way about food? Not eating sugar was a tremendous part of it—it was the reason for making my own bread and sauce after all—but that wasn't
all
of it. It was more than that.

Right around this time, I was reading
Into the Wild
, the true story of Chris McCandless (who went by the name Alexander Supertramp) and his journey to Alaska to attempt to be free from the trappings of society and live off the land, and his eventual death by starvation. Why was I reading
this
, I wondered, when I still have a stack of “homework” books to read dealing with sugar and nutrition? What did this have to do with A Year of No Sugar? Probably nothing.

But the answer came on page 167. Author Jon Krakauer relates that Alex had underlined a passage in Thoreau's
Walden
concerning “the morality of eating.” I sat up and with wide eyes read what Alex had read:

Whoa. I stopped cold when I got to the “extra condiment” part. It jumped off the page at me as if it were printed in neon ink. Sure, he may be speaking metaphorically about that
extra condiment being poison…but still. Didn't that
kind of
sound like he was talking about sugar? I was as fascinated by this passage as Alex was—Alex had written in the margins of his copy: “YES. Consciousness of food. Eat and cook with concentration…Holy Food.”

As if this weren't enough, sometime after this, I was reading a magazine interview with spiritual philosopher Jacob Needleman,
⁶³
who talked about the practice of “self-remembering” and “Conscious, willful attention to oneself…” So much of what we concern ourselves with in life is meaningless, he argues, whereas what most cultures describe as “God” has to do with what he calls “deep feeling.” I wondered, was Alex looking for that “deep feeling” in the Alaskan wilderness? Is it possible—or am I just crazy here—to relate our search for God or “deep feeling” or whatever you want to call it to the practice of meaningful sustenance, what Alex called “Holy Food”?

Maybe I was way, way, waaaay out on a limb here, but we were within spitting distance of meeting our goal of a Year of No Sugar, and I was feeling philosophical. It somehow made sense to me to draw big, sweeping analogies between the modern-day cultural avoidance of real social contact in favor of reasonable facsimiles thereof—Facebook, Twitter, interactive video games—and our modern-day cultural avoidance of real, fulfilling nourishment in favor of reasonable facsimiles thereof—fast food, processed food, convenience food.

Is modern society based on our collective desire to run away from consciousness/deep feeling/God? Is it possible that a
practice of what Alex called “Holy Food” could represent the fledgling beginnings of a way back to…what? Spirituality?

“…the imagination…I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table.”

Yes, folks, it had been nearly a year into this journey and perhaps I had finally cracked: I had discovered the meaning of life in a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.

 

⁶²
And exhausting. Did I mention exhausting?

⁶³
D. Patrick Miller, “Beyond Belief: Jacob Needleman on God without Religion,”
The Sun
, December 2011, issue 432.

Let me tell you—the whole Christmas in a No Sugar household business? It is
not
for the faint of heart.

The holidays were coming—and I mean this in the most ominous way possible. Sometimes it felt like we'd been in training for the month of December the entire year. Christmas, the mother of all sugar holidays, the most fructose-laden of them all—more than Thanksgiving (which is a limited, one-day-only gluttony); more than Halloween (which focuses almost exclusively on the kids); more than birthdays and Easter and Valentine's Day
combined
. As the dozens of mail-order catalogs arriving at our house every day clearly confirmed, Christmas, for many of us, is about celebrating the birth of Jesus through a month-long marathon of sweets, treats, cookies, and cake.

But that's not what bothered me. What bothered me was the dread that my children were expressing at the prospect of facing a sweet-restricted Christmas. Sure, we had discussed that Christmas itself would be the day we had our “special dessert” for the month, and that otherwise we would use dextrose to make versions of our favorite traditional treats…
but on this account my daughter Greta refused any and all attempts at consolation.