Year of No Sugar (7 page)

But, in the interest of family harmony and not being the subject of a future exposé on what subhumanly crappy parents we were, we would have some exceptions too, number one being: as a family, we would pick
one dessert per month
to have which contained sugar. If it was your birthday that month, you got to pick the dessert. We had all kinds of fun with this one, and it was especially interesting to watch how our attitude toward this “once per month” treat evolved over time…but more on that later.

Secondly, and inspired by Barbara Kingsolver's book
Animal Vegetable Miracle
in which her family ate locally for one year, we used her family's “one exception per person” rule. This would apply to a particular food, not a type of sugar or a category of food. For example, “powdered sugar” or “cookies” would
not
be possible exceptions; “ketchup” or “mayonnaise” would be.

We chose our personal exceptions with little hesitation.
I knew that wine contained a comparatively tiny amount of fructose,
²⁰
but to be completely on the up-and-up, and not have to forgo wine for an entire year, I officially made it my exception. I was interested to get as far away from sugar as I could, so I figured it would be good not to have a truly “sweet” exception. I also figured there would be days in the year ahead when a glass of wine would be sorely needed.

As for Steve, as long as I have known him he's been a bit of a coffee and soda addict—at any given moment, if he wasn't drinking one, he likely was having the other. Diet Dr Pepper was his sweet beverage of choice—and consequently this became his exception. (Although Diet Dr Pepper doesn't actually contain sugar, artificial sweeteners were also off the table for our Year—see footnote above.)

I encouraged (strong-armed?) the girls into choosing jam as their joint exception. Amazingly, they didn't complain. Maybe they bought my argument that we'd get a lot of mileage out of this: school-lunch peanut butter sandwiches and breakfast toast, etc., or maybe they were just resigned to Mommy's new role as dietary dictator. At home, this meant the girls got Polaner All Fruit Jam, which is sweetened with fruit juice. Compared to most jams, it is not terribly sweet.

The third exception dealt specifically with the kids. Because the kids bring their lunches to school, I am in charge of a good ninety percent of what the kids get in terms of food on a regular basis. However, I realized very quickly that when the kids were out in the world—at school
besides
lunchtime, at
birthday parties and playdates—that they would be making their own decisions about what they would and would not put in their own mouths. Rather than giving them reason to sneak behind Mom and Dad's back—and encouraging a distrust dynamic that I was loathe to consider—I decided to welcome and incorporate this aspect of individuality into the project. Each kid would have autonomy outside the house, when parents were not there, to make their own decisions about what to eat. I liked to call this the “Birthday Party Rule”: if she were at a birthday party, she could decide whether or not to have a piece of cake. If she were at school and they served hot chocolate, she could decide whether or not to have the hot chocolate. The only condition was they had to
tell
me about it—no guilt, no repercussions.

Instead of hiding treats, therefore, our daughters were encouraged to tell us about them as part of our broader family conversation about sugar—it became almost a contest to see who of the four of us could come home with the most outrageous sugar story. This worked extremely well to the point that I became startlingly more aware of just how
many
sugary treats kids are offered on a daily basis from a wide variety of sources: from local businesses and other parents to teachers, the school, and after-school programs. I was also surprised that
sometimes
the kids voluntarily chose to stick with our No Sugar program, even when it was completely up to them. Will wonders never cease?

Likewise, I encouraged Greta, who was old enough to do so, to keep a journal of her experiences. I assured her the journal was
entirely
up to her. She could choose to share it with others or not; she could write in it what she wished. I hoped this would not only give me a different window into
her personal experience of the project (if she chose to share it with me) but also give her an outlet for difficult feelings the project was sure to inspire: guilt, frustration, anger, feeling weird and left out. She was, after all, on the verge of teenager-hood—these feelings were bound to be cropping up sooner or later anyway, with or without Mommy's crazy sugar project.

_______

_______

Originally, and out of desperation, I attempted to add a fourth exception to the list, to wit: “Fruit juice may be an ingredient
if actual fruit is
also
an ingredient,” which would've enabled me to buy things as varied as health-food-store gummy bears and apple sausages. Steve called me on that one pretty quick though, and I knew he was right—fruit juice
was
fruit juice, and exception number four was a bridge too far. I, being the rational, logical person that I am, dissolved into tears while accusing him of “not caring” about the project (
sniff
). I mean, I
wanted
those things, dammit! And shopping was suddenly and irrevocably getting, you know,
difficult
! I felt like Sisyphus rolling a giant powdered-sugar doughnut up a hill.

Secretly though, I
was
impressed: He cared! He was holding
me
to a higher standard! Wow. For the first time, I realized we really
were
in it all together…This crazy year would actually happen.

What had I done?

_______

In the beginning, delivering us from temptation involved a three-pronged approach: unopened items with sugar went to the local food bank, opened items got eaten up (Quick! Eat this!) or thrown away, and items we couldn't possibly bear to part with (for example, the kids' Christmas candy) went into the freezer for the year.

_______

_______

Considering the rate at which I was getting rid of food at our house, I needed to start replenishing in a big way. I made plans for a trip to BJ's Wholesale Club. Because the closest BJ's is about an hour away from our house, getting there, shopping, returning home, and unpacking usually takes the better part of a day, so going there is kind of like an expedition to Everest, with coupons. In the early weeks of the project, I was fast learning to buy no-sugar items in quantity, because we went through them quickly, and they could be hard to find again. Consequently, I no longer bought one box of no-sugar crackers; I bought four. I no longer bought one jar of no-sugar peanut butter or tomato sauce; I bought six. So a warehouse-store specializing in bulk was clearly a good option—but BJ's only has what it has, so would I really find a no-sugar version of everything I wanted?

Happily, I did manage to fill my cart, but not without spending exactly
twice
as much time shopping as I used to, and so much intense label reading that, rightfully, I should've earned a degree of some kind. Over and over, I picked up a package that listed sugar as the umpteenth ingredient (gotcha!) only to go back to the drawing board and find another brand of the same sort of item that (hooray!) did not. Two seemingly identical bags of pistachios revealed their true nature when flipped over: one had sugar listed among three dozen other ingredients; the other listed pistachios and sea salt.

See, now was that so
hard
?
I thought.
Is it so hard to just put
food
in our food?

Clearly, I was tired and cranky from all that small type, not to mention realizing that morning that I had to throw my favorite breakfast cereal out due to the presence of sugar. (Crispy Hexagons, how could you?) Sure,
some
sugar items are pretty blinking obvious—Nutella, hello?—but even a few weeks in, I continued to be blindsided by so many others, i.e., the number of “healthy” items that I was now forced to take an honest, unflinching look at. I began to think of it as the Evaporated Cane Syrup Brigade.
What? You mean I
can't have
Peanut Butter Clif Bars anymore? Wait, nobody told me that!

Meanwhile, at dinner one night, Ilsa started describing the kind of little thingies-with-the-something-inside she would like for dessert, and I gently reminded her about the family project. She was sad for a moment but quickly rebounded, much to my surprise. Despite our preconceptions about the love affair between children and sugar, I started to wonder if the family project might actually end up being harder on Mom and Dad. After all, we had been around a lot longer; we'd had a lot longer to get hooked.

Nevertheless, I realized, it was time to start finding out if dessert was possible in a world of no sugar. We had given up sugar after all, not sweet. Ladies, start your Cuisinarts. The experiments were about to begin.

 

¹⁹
I include in this category not just aspartame (NutraSweet), saccharine (Sweet'N Low), and sucralose (Splenda) but also (eventually) all sugar alcohols (xylitol, Maltitol) and Stevia (Truvia). Although these are all sweeteners that do not contain fructose—and Stevia is even “natural,” derived from the Stevia plant—they all are suspected of having side effects of greater or lesser severity, ranging from cancer and stroke to headaches and diarrhea. Fun! I decided: thanks, but no thanks.

²⁰
According to the United States Department of Agriculture's National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (
http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/4116
), an average five-ounce glass of red wine contains 0.91 grams of total sugars. It is not broken down further into glucose and fructose.

²¹
Although Subway does a good job marketing itself as the “healthy fast food,” even prior to the No Sugar year, I have never been convinced. This suspicion would be confirmed for me as we came to learn how much hidden sugar can be in sandwiches: in the bread, in the glazes the meats are cooked in, in the condiments and dressings.

Pretty soon, we found ourselves missing the myriad little things that sweeten up one's day—that little spark in your cereal, that spoonful of something in your afternoon tea, that bit of chocolate you might have after dinner for no particular reason. I couldn't shake that feeling after a meal that something was…missing. It was as if I'd just seen three quarters of a play when suddenly, the curtain goes down and everyone goes home. It had been so thoroughly ingrained in me to expect not only a sweet finale at the end of a meal but
especially
at the end of a labor-intensive home-cooked meal or a rare evening-out meal, that I found myself experiencing a sort of Phantom Dessert Syndrome. “What, no fireworks? No crème brûlée or tiramisu? Not so much as a
mint
?” my brain chemistry complained.

This deprived, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling reminded me a lot of being pregnant. Both times I found out I was pregnant, I commenced the time-honored tradition of beginning to mildly lose my mind. Immediately, I swore off alcohol and caffeine. Also jaywalking, swimming within twenty-four hours of eating, and reading celebrity gossip.
Both times, it was the
beginning
that was hardest, trying to get used to the idea that something I regularly consumed and enjoyed was—whoops!—off the table. “Why, yes, I'd
love
a glass/cup of…of…I mean, uh, no. Thank you.”

And as any woman who has ever been pregnant can tell you, one experiences hunger as if it is a brand-new sensation. After my fourteenth snack of the day, I'd go to bed and have vivid dreams about food in which I'm pretty sure I salivated and chewed in my sleep. Although I never dreamed I was eating a marshmallow and woke up to find my pillow gone, it was probably close.

I craved sweets, chocolate in particular. The catch was, every time I took a bite of anything chocolaty, the most peculiar thing happened: it would turn to dust in my mouth. Literally, it tasted as appetizing as wallpaper paste. So
other
desserts became, of course, quintessentially important.

Thus, one of my most memorable pregnant moments occurred at my cousin Gretchen's surprise fortieth birthday party for her husband. I was feeling large and uncomfortable, and the two-and-a-half-hour drive to get there seemed
much
longer. I recall floating my blimp-like self down to the ladies' room for what was my ninth or tenth visit when I was offered a beautiful slice of pastry—a Napoleon—by a passing waiter. Since I thought it perhaps in questionable taste to bring my dessert into the bathroom with me to pee, I demurred; I'd wait till I was back at my table.

Big mistake.
Huge
. By the time I returned to my table, there were
no
beautiful, fluffy, shiny little slices of Napoleon left. All gone. The alternative? Chocolate cake—for me, dust cake. Wallpaper-paste cake.