GranolaBox

People who go through successful 12 Step programs for drug and alcohol addiction usually complete a moral inventory, which details all the terrible things they’ve done throughout their life and then figure out how to make amends to the people they wronged. As I go through the process of changing my nutritional habits, I prefer not to think of the years of terrible things I’ve eaten. However there is one person I do need to make nutritional amends to.. my ex brother-in-law Dave.

Dave, his wife, my ex-wife and I all lived together. It was a way to save money while Dave and I were in grad school and our spouses were supporting us. In an attempt to cut costs, I suggested that we all go shopping together at BJ’s Wholesale Club.

If you’ve never been to a wholesale club, they were and probably still are havens for the nutritionally challenged. When we shopped there fifteen years, there was almost nothing healthy, and so I was able to shop there in complete money-saving bulk-buying bliss.

Dave and his wife, as it turns out, were my harbingers of good nutrition. They ate mostly all natural foods. I thought most of their food was gross, flavorless and far too expensive for our meager incomes. The peanut butter epitomized all that was bad about natural food. It was chunky goo on the bottom of the jar with a slimy layer followed by a layer of peanut oil. I wanted no part of it.

After I’d bugged for a sufficiently long time, Dave agreed to go to BJ’s with me. Now I realize what a painful experience it was for him and how much he sacrificed to humor me on that one failed endeavor.

I went right for the middle aisles and began loading the cart with my usual reckless abandon until Dave, terrified that he might be held financially responsible for what went into our collective cart, began intercepting the contents before final placement. He read every label for what seemed like hours. With every label, he would find some degree of fault with the product; too much salt, too many preservatives, too many suspect chemical combinations. It seemed like nothing I put in the cart passed his careful inspection.

The frustration began to mount in both camps. If only Dave didn’t read the labels I thought, his trips to the grocery store could go as quickly, efficiently and as economically on mine. God only knows what he was thinking at the time.

I put our shopping relationship to what I mentally noted would be the final test - oranges. Surely Dave wouldn’t be able to find fault in the oranges. If he did it would be a sure sign that he was from another planet. Confident that we were both from the same planet I happily placed the eight pound bag of luscious all-natural oranges in the cart.

“They’re not from Brazil are they?” he asked, no doubt confident that they were. I felt my cheeks flush with anger and frustration. What difference would it make where the @#%#ing oranges came from? You peel them anyway! As it happened, oranges that year from Brazil had been sprayed with a particularly heinous pesticide that escaped the watchful eye of the FDA. I didn’t care though. I held my tongue but resolved never to shop with Dave again. He no doubt had made the same mental commitment.

I look back on the incident now with reverence and not resentment. If only I’d listened to Dave I could have saved my liver many years of attempting to process things it was never meant to process. I also could have learned a lot about good nutrition.

However, I don’t know if I need to make amends to Dave… that’s up to him. However, he does have his come-uppance in the form of his niece. Now whenever I take my daughter shopping, she plays my part and although I play Dave’s part, I’m far less tactful about it than he was.

As we work our way through what my daughter calls “the hippie food” aisles she looks in horror as I put the organic mac and cheese in the cart. If I do set foot in the middle aisles, the suggestions she makes are always met with a careful inspection of the ingredients, and usually placing the items back on the shelf.

Each trip reminds me of that fateful day at the wholesale club. However, in the name of progress rather than perfection, I still can’t stomach natural peanut butter.

Technorati Tags: 12 Step programs, drug and alcohol addiction, nutritional habits, Wholesale Club, nutrition, natural food, preservatives, FDA, natural peanut butter

Filed under: Food, Recovery on April 1st, 2007