Year of No Sugar (29 page)

Ilsa, by comparison, was easy. She asked, “Can I have this?” and when the inevitable answer was no, she shrugged and ran off to go play. It may be that Greta just has a bigger sweet tooth, but I think the more likely possibility is that she has a preteenager's burgeoning need for independence and to make her feelings known by all in the immediate vicinity. She, unlike Ilsa, spent a good portion of her Christmas Eve pouting and making meaningful, tragic faces in my direction.

Dinner wasn't much easier. As she has other years, Aunt Carol had lovingly and graciously provided a buffet for all of us, and, ungrateful wretches that we were, we couldn't eat most of it. There was store-bought pulled pork and chicken, white and whole-wheat buns, baked beans, applesauce…Of course, sugar, to one degree or another, was in
all
of it. I don't know if it was intended for our benefit, but I was extremely, deeply grateful for the one large tray of mac and cheese that evening. If not for that, we would've been stuck eating olives for dinner, and I'm pretty sure Greta would've gotten enough mileage out of that to extend her extreme pout fest well into her thirties.

None of the relatives said much about the Sugar Project, probably because they think I'm loopier than the Cocoa Puffs bird for talking my family into it in the first place. But they all were as nice as ever, asking us all about the drive and Vermont and exclaiming about how the kids have grown, so I figured they still liked me anyway.

And then, thankfully, the present opening began. Greta and Ilsa were fully diverted for the remainder of the evening opening gifts, trying things on, helping the babies and toddlers, and creating a Bionicle masterpiece with cousin Donovan. That sour, Grinchy frown disappeared from Greta's face, and it was replaced by the happiness of being a kid at Christmas. Thank God.

Granted, having Greta's dining seat right next to a plate of forbidden chocolates and cookies on Christmas Eve wasn't ideal. But it was, I think, the biggest challenge we had had all year, and we survived it. I was proud of that—and proud of my family. And profoundly grateful for them. A good way to feel on Christmas, I think.

So what did
I
bring as gifts this year? Sweet things from my kitchen, of course! Over the prior few weeks I had been experimenting with quick breads of all kinds—banana, apple, pumpkin pecan, all made with no fructose, just fruit and good old dextrose—all tied up with a pretty little bow.

_______

When the big day finally came and all the Christmas presents had been opened and scattered everywhere, it was time to caravan over to Sharon's fiancé's house for the kind of buffet meal that I think is so much fun on holidays: everyone is milling around—children, toddlers, grown-ups—picking at
the vegetable plate and spilling juice and exclaiming about the quality of the roast beef. There's always a football game or an Indiana Jones movie on the television, and someone always leans back in the recliner and looks as if they may just fall asleep amid all the celebratory hubbub and everything.

It was amid this pleasant disorder that I snuck over to Sharon's Christmas Cookie plate, displayed next to a rainbow of store pies on the sideboard. It felt odd, because throughout the year we'd always had our monthly desserts as a family, as in “all for one and one for all!” But by the very nature of this particular event, that kind of solidarity wasn't happening—my family was happily spread all over the house. Nonetheless, I wasn't going to miss our final treat, our twelfth official added-fructose-containing item of the last 365 days, and I
sure
wasn't going to wait until all Sharon's famous cookies had been eaten. I carefully picked up a particularly thick-looking Santa cookie and considered it. I brought it to my mouth and then bit it.

Yes
, I thought,
there it is
. That buttery, almost cakey cookie topped with thin, cool frosting and that hint of crunchy sprinkles almost an afterthought. There it is.

Do you remember the end of
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
, when the Grinch pauses and is amazed to realize that Christmas has still come to the Whos, even though he has stolen all their presents? Sure, my one and only Christmas cookie was good. So good. But, we must ask ourselves, how good can a Christmas cookie be? Good enough to
be
Christmas?

I was as amazed as the Grinch to realize, just at that particular moment, that Christmas had come…
without
any fructose at all. It came!

Somehow or other it came, just the same.

 

⁶⁴
Susan Reid, “Baking Across America,”
The Baking Sheet
, vol. XXII No. 6 Holiday 2011, page 12-13.

Ilsa is young enough that she still uses a handful of words she hasn't realized yet that she herself made up. One of them is
gladfully
, which she uses to mean “thank goodness,” as in: “We arrived just in time for the movie,
gladfully
.”

There's something inspiring about that to me, about the fact that she assembled that word one day, out of necessity to express a particular emotion and drawing from all her previous experiences. And it worked, so here she is still using it. When we're kids, we're much more used to figuring stuff out, to winging it. By necessity, kids are improvising all the time. As Indiana Jones once famously said, in the middle of some superhuman feat or other, “I don't know! I'm making this up as I go.”

This year, we were making it up as we went too. As we approached New Year's Eve, I was quite stunned to realize that we were truly on the precipice of being through with our entire yearlong project. I felt as if I had been pedaling a fourteen-wheeled bicycle that had required my complete and total concentration for miles and miles, only to suddenly look up and realize I was within three feet of the finish line.

_______

_______

Looking back to the very beginning of our year, I was impressed by how awfully clueless we had been about what A Year of No Sugar would entail: we had yet to fully understand what fructose was, its many, many aliases, and what the deal was with omnipresent “no sugar” ingredients like sugar substitutes and sugar alcohols. I had yet to go through my banana, date, coconut, oligofructose, and “what do you
mean
I can't have carob?” phases. I had yet to read David Gillespie's
Sweet Poison
and through it to discover dextrose as a non-fructose sweetener. All I knew was that Dr. Robert Lustig's YouTube lecture had convinced me: sugar was a toxin. Poison.

Now, as we sat on the verge of being done with our No-Sugar Year, I felt a crazy mix of emotions: relief, delight, surprise, apprehension. Even though New Year's is traditionally
associated with new beginnings, in this case it was also a definitive ending. I wondered: What would happen next? What was it all for? Had we changed our lifestyle for the better, or had we merely stubbornly proved a point? I took offense when a friend termed our project an “intellectual exercise,” as if that characterization somehow minimized our effort—but
did
it? And was it? Perhaps the answers to those questions would be slowly revealed to us as we progressed forward into our next year: the Year of Figuring Out What To Do Now.

In preparation for the official end of our year's project, we'd had a whole series of family conversations about this what-happens-next business, and a lot of talk had centered around looking forward to things we hadn't been able to enjoy this year. One morning, I took a breakfast table poll and found out that Greta missed BLTs as much as anything, and that Steve missed restaurant condiments even more than dessert: ketchup on his French fries, salad dressing on his salad, mayo on his sandwiches. After careful consideration, Ilsa decided that, in addition to maple syrup, she was looking forward to having Jell-O (which is kind of funny since we
never
make Jell-O).

Me? I missed a good chocolate chip cookie, for which we never did find a suitable fructose-free replacement. If we ever make it back to Italy, even if it's in February, I intend to have more than one gelato. I was looking forward to being able to eat out without giving our waitress the Spanish Inquisition.

It's safe to say that Steve was especially excited about the end of our No-Sugar Year. I knew this because, during our Christmas travels, he bought a handful of Dutch chocolate bars and a sixty-four-piece Lebanese pastry sampler for us to enjoy “after the first.” I was trying not to be alarmed about this
mild case of gourmet sugar hoarding—after all, how many husbands would've been supportive of a family project like this one? Then, one night when I expressed a lack of interest in a sugared dessert, Steve made the comment, “
Hey
—I want my wife back.” I must admit, this kind of freaked me out. Back? Had I gone somewhere? Was I no longer the person who loved a good Reese's Peanut Butter Cup? Had I become a permanent killjoy?

I didn't think so—at least I hoped not. The way I saw it, it was quite the opposite: my appreciation for food and where it comes from, what it's made of, and what is required for its preparation had gone up manifold. More than anything, our no-sugar year had taught me how much I
love
food, how important it is, and how little attention our culture collectively pays to it. Food is the stuff of life—we are what we eat—feeding yourself well is caring for yourself—choose your favorite adage. It's all truer than we could ever fully realize.

This year had taught me that, just like anything toxic—alcohol, nicotine—we need as a society to start handling sugar (fructose) with care, as potentially addictive, potentially dangerous. I wondered, Can we even
do
that? Do we have the self-possession to realize that “moderation” does not mean “whatever the amount
I
eat is”?

I had come to understand that sugar, while fun, is nutritionally expensive. Why would I want to waste my allotment of it on vending machine cookies or breakfast cereal? Why not save it for that something truly special? Americans instead simply decide to have it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and then are tragically surprised when health ramifications ensue. No one ever told them sugar could be really, truly harmful.

But what
would
happen after January first? I disliked the chaos of not knowing. After a year of rules, I was desperately groping for guidelines. Consequently, as we approached New Year's Eve, my new year's proposal to my family was to have dessert with actual sugar in it once per week. After this year, that sounded to me like a whole lot, but then again, after our adventures at Christmas visiting relatives and friends, being reminded how much sugar is involved in the average American's everyday life, I thought it was a reasonable compromise.

Likewise, in the new year we planned to return to eating bacon and ketchup without fear. We'd buy Hellman's Mayonnaise again for our tuna fish sandwiches. I wouldn't blanch at restaurant bread that had a teaspoon of sugar in the ingredients. Heck, I might even stop taking cell phone pictures of my food.

No promises though.

Some things, however, would stay permanently changed. Juice would remain off the table; soda always was.
⁶⁵
I almost never bought box cookies or other store-bought desserts before; moving forward, those would be promoted to the “never ever” list. I would continue to check my crackers and other products, avoiding anything with sugar as a filler ingredient. Fast food restaurants were still entirely out. Chain restaurants would be in the category of “in case of extreme and most desperate emergency.” Instead of them, we'd stubbornly continue to seek out good restaurants, local restaurants, places where they actually
make
the food they serve. At home, I would continue to make my own pizza, tortillas, yeasted
breads, and quick breads. Perhaps most significantly, I would continue to use dextrose for everyday baking and cooking.

Was I worried about going forward with the rules changing in this fashion? Nervous we'd go overboard like an alcoholic who thinks he's got his act together and can handle it? I was. But Steve likened our No-Sugar Year to what he experienced in the Marines. “You go through an experience that changes you,” he says, “and you get out and you say, ‘Now what?' But still, you really aren't the same. That conditioning is always there. That's how I feel.”

I honestly didn't expect us to plow through those Lebanese pastries in the same fashion as we would've a year ago. Rather, I imagined we'd have a bite or two—as we each did with our allotment of sugar cookies on Christmas Day—and then say, “That's good. And
sweet
!” And it would be enough.

And so, at midnight, as we watched Lady Gaga blather on the TV about how magical New Year's is in New York City, we each ate our personally selected treat for the evening (Ilsa: a cookie, Steve and Greta: a Lebanese pastry, me: a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup). A lot of friends and family had focused on this New Year's Eve moment as if it were absolutely pivotal: the freeing of the taste buds from bondage! It was inevitably a little anticlimactic. For me, the next morning was the real question mark. What would the legacy of our year
really
be?