Food and Me, #4: On Corn and how it is in everything.

...And I needed to be ready to do anything in order to have the willpower to give up corn!

I was still feeling miserable when my mom came to visit me in August of last year.  In fact, I had lost a whole week out of a six week class and had to apply for extensions for my papers.  I didn't think of myself as sick, I just had headaches sometime, so it really got my attention when my health was holding me back from my school work.

When my mom told me that migraines are frequently caused by food allergies, I was interested, but unconvinced.  From what I've read about migraines (especially on nytimes.com) there is very little that doctors can do to treat migraines.  It seemed too easy to say they could be cured by avoiding a certain food.  Besides, I've always kind of resented picky eaters, and I was convinced that allergy sufferers were another kind of picky eater.  But after a little preliminary testing, Mom and I decided that I was probably allergic to corn, and I decided to try to eliminate corn from my diet. 

It seems easy, right?  I don't eat that much of the yellow stuff, maybe a couple corn-on-the-cobs a year and sometimes some frozen corn or corn bread.  I did eat a lot of popcorn, but I was pretty sure I could survive without it.  I knew to avoid corn starch and corn syrup (including the high fructose kind) and found that these were the foods that would immediately give me a headache if I had them.  But after a month of somewhat half-heartedly avoiding all these things, I still had headaches.  So I thought that maybe I should do some research about corn allergies online.

What I discovered was stunning.  There are so many more foods with corn than I ever dreamed!  Here is a picture of all the corn-laden products I had in my house at the time I checked the website:

Needless to say, I started to become a little overwhelmed.  My wheat flour was contaminated with corn (same milling machines), all canned goods (citric acid), any condiment made with white vinegar, things with "natural" sweetener xylitol (including most chewing gums), breads, even shampoo and conditioner!  For a complete list of trouble ingredients, check this website.  The documentary King Corn also discusses how corn is in many of the foods we eat today.

I have made long, slow progress against the allergy.  I was used to cooking for myself, but not to the extent that I now had to.  Everything had to be made from scratch with the corn-free substitute ingredients that I found.  There were no short cuts and there were very few restaurants where I could eat at with confidence.  I was also constantly finding new things that I was sensitive to, as I eliminated corn and became more sensitive.  So I found it really hard to enjoy food.  I was pretty hungry for a couple months.

But the good news is that I've gradually found foods I can eat with confidence and many of them are organic or local brands that perhaps I should have been eating in the first place.  But my supermarket-trained obsession with the getting the lowest price and the best deal had been holding me back (I'll explain this a little in the next post).  Clint and I aren't rich, but when we find healthy food that is nourishing, it's worth it to spend the extra little bit. 

And I've also found that it was worth it to spend the extra time that it took to make our food.  At first I found it very exhausting and frustrating.  Many of our favorite recipes from the past few years were no longer useful.  I felt I was starting over again from the beginning.  But the work researching groceries, trying new recipes, and plain old cooking and washing dishes has continued to have the effect of planting my feet on the ground.  I'm not just a mind who happens to have a body, but a whole person.  Taking care of myself, my body, is important work, and it teaches me about God.  And in the last month I've been convicted that it's just as important to eat slowly and enjoy my food.  Food is not just fuel for my machine, it is a good gift from God.  I have a new-found gratefulness for my daily bread.

Food and Me #3: Catching up

I should pick up where I left off.  I apologize for the delay.  I left you just at the point where I returned from my study abroad.  Up until that point in my life I think I had ascribed to a pretty common belief:  food is just fuel.  I didn't spend too much time preparing, thinking about, or eating my food.  Basically, I only ate because I had to in order to go and do the other things that I valued more like reading, studying, hanging out with friends, etc.  But after I had lived abroad, suddenly I began to realize how wonderful simple foods could taste.  So I tried to recreate a few of the recipes that my señora had cooked regularly, like that wonderful fresh salad, a saffron chicken dish, eating fruit for dessert, and so on.  I even began making my own baguettes (rather ambitious for a girl who mostly baked blueberry muffins from a box).  In my senior year of college, I found cooking and baking to be important work.  It kept my feet on the ground and gave me something physical to do while I worked on pretty abstract studies in English Literary Theory.

As I moved to New York, between my first years of teaching, my budding romance with Clint, and long commutes, I didn't have a lot of time for my food.  I began shopping regularly at Whole Foods, but often that just meant that I was buying Amy's Organic frozen dinners or pizzas.  McDonald's has a brilliant, but sinister plan in New York: they put their restaurants right by the subway stops.  Way too often I would stop by for a quick bite on my way home, when I was too tired to think much about food.  I went through various food fads/fasts, weaning myself off of coffee (which I had become addicted to in Spain), giving up refined sugars for Lent a few years.  I knew that I felt better when I avoided these things, and I began to notice how things like High Fructose Corn Syrup are in a lot of things that you wouldn't guess, like sandwich bread.  But ultimately my self control wouldn't last and I'd be back to eating these foods again.

Perhaps the biggest major change I made in these years was trying to cut out a lot of the "whites" in my diet (white rice, white flour, white potatoes, granulated sugar) and change them for "browns" (brown rice, whole wheat flour, sweet potatoes, raw sugars).  A friend had bravely emailed me that she noticed my skin was breaking out a lot (which it was), and she had the same problem years ago.  Through exercise, change in diet and visits to a dermatologist, she had improved her skin a lot.  I was game to try it.  But it isn't a change that happens overnight.  At first whole grain foods seem bulky and dry in comparison, but after a little while, you begin to crave them and the "white" foods seem pasty and unfilling.

This basic diet continued to grow as Clint and I got married and came here to Regent.  As a full time student, I was a different kind of busy, and I was able to spend more time on cooking and finding good recipes.  Both Clint and I were really happy with the progress we had made, but there was one catch.  After five years of progress toward a better diet, I was still having migraine headaches, and if anything they were getting worse.  They lasted longer and longer (up to four days, once or twice a month) and were more debilitating.  I was willing to do anything to get them to stop...

Food and Me #1: Cornography

My mom is a fairly good cook. Her mom was a fairly good cook who grew up on a farm and trained at the University of Wisconsin in Home Economics. Mom's cooking was simple and unadorned. Salt and pepper were basically the only spices she used regularly. She didn't like garlic, onions, tomatoes or mushrooms, so we didn't eat those very often. She had good skills and techniques in the kitchen and had a good repertoire of recipes. Some days we ate simply: a meat, vegetable, bread and salad. But other days the meals were more complex: beef stew or chili or beef and bean pie, shepherd's pie, chicken crepes (a favorite frequently requested on birthdays), roast chicken or turkey or pot roast, tacos or homemade pizza. No matter what, we always ate together at the table.

Mom didn't really make much from scratch, though it wasn't for lack of skill.  It was just easier to use the pre-prepared ingredients.  It saved time for her to spend with the three of us kids and made it easier for an Air-Force mom to get dinner on the table for a family meal every night. The ingredients were usually from the middle aisles of the grocery store. We used canned vegetables (or sometimes frozen), canned fruit cocktail, canned beans, frozen chicken cordon bleu or chicken kiev, canned sauces, bottled salad dressing, boxed cakes, frozen pie crusts, etc. Mom was a fairly avid couponer, so she would keep coupons in a little file box and save lots of money when we went big-time grocery shopping about once a month. We didn't spend much time in the produce section, since my little brother thought cherry tomatoes were bouncy balls. We did, however, eat a lot of carrot sticks and apple slices.

Of course, what we kids wanted when we went to the grocery store with Mom, were the brightly colored boxes. Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms and Count Chocula and Pop Tarts for breakfast, Lunchables deli meats, Kool-aid squeezits and fruit roll ups and gummy snacks for our lunches, and soda and ice cream desserts. But Mom held her line. We were not allowed sweet cereals, Mom would always check the sugar content, and we usually stuck with the cheerios or corn flakes (but by high school we never had time for breakfast anyway). Mom always made our lunches, I think she saw it as her responsibility and it was cheaper than buying school lunches. We got Lunchables once a year on a very special occasion, the rest of the year it was either Turkey or PB&J, always on wheat bread, carrot sticks, chips (usually tortilla chips, sometimes Doritos or Lays), and some kind of dessert. Mom had a soft spot for Little Debbies, but we often got the fruit roll ups or gummies too, or sometimes a few bite-sized candy bars. Mom had a healthy suspicion of red Kool-Aid, so we usually got Capri Sun juice or water instead. Soda (which we called Coke, no matter what it was, since we grew up in the South) and ice cream were for special occasions.

I don't think anything about this was abnormal for most families. We shopped at the grocery store and ate what was offered there and enjoyed it. It tasted good, it required less time working in the kitchen, and it allowed us more time to sit down together. If anything, we felt that we were on the healthy side of things. We ate regular portions of vegetables, limited our sugars and fats, and always stuck with wheat bread.

But the diet I grew up with is a far cry from the diet that I've transitioned to in the past few years. The main reason: everything on this menu (aside from the carrot sticks) has corn (and yes, I mean everything). I found out last August that I am allergic to corn.

Twilight and Me, Part 1: A Slightly Off-beat Feminist Critique of the Twilight Saga

 **Warning:  this post contains Twilight plot spoilers, frank talk about sexuality and it's more like a book than a post, but enjoy!**

It’s been a while since I last blogged. I’m sorry. A lot of my time and energy has been absorbed in the past four months or so with the discovery that I’m allergic to corn. ::sigh:: Corn is in everything, from store-bought bread, to anything with baking powder or powdered sugar, to just about anything that comes from a can. This has made life… well, a little hard. But it’s not that I’ve forgotten the blog. Not at all.

Over my reading break last week, I got a bad case of Twilight fever. My sister Katie is addicted to the books and bought advance tickets to the midnight showing of the movie. She showed me the first movie last Christmas when I visited, and I found it to be unbearably cheesy, if somewhat embarrassingly sexy. I flipped through the last book, which she happened to have sitting out, and heard her synopsis of the general story line. I was intrigued, but I dismissed it all as a bit crazy.

Until last week, that is, when I couldn’t get it out of my head. Along with millions of other women around the world, I was hooked. On Saturday night, I caught myself obsessively googling Twilight: New Moon, just to hear the latest news about this peculiar vampire tale. I decided that if I was spending so much time looking at silly Robsten pictures online and if I was a little too poor to go see the movie right away, I may as well see if Vancouver Public Library had the books available. I needed a break from academia anyway. I checked their online catalogue (several times) over the weekend, just to make sure. When the library finally opened on Tuesday, I was there within an hour to check out the first two books.

After running errands and taking care of responsibilities, I settled in. I lit a candle, curled up on my bed with the window open to the chilly gray air, the sound of rain on the eaves and the view of Pacific Northwestern evergreens out the window, and I devoured the first book within about twenty-four hours. The second was done in another 12 hours. I had resolved that I was only going to read two. I had other work to do, I am trying to plan and write a book for crying out loud and I was on the brink of “figuring out” what the book should be about. But I loved the first two books so much that I quickly snatched up the third and finished it over the weekend. Then, since the fourth book wasn’t on the shelf at the library, I read the author’s partial manuscript of Edward’s re-telling of the first book from his perspective, which is available online here. I was completely addicted.

I must admit that this went against all my better judgment as a lover of carefully crafted English prose and as a feminist. On the surface, the stories seemed to be such… well, brain candy. Titillating, but ultimately worthless from a literary perspective (the prose is very purple) and perhaps even misogynistic. But there was something compelling about them that pushed deeper than just their, um, weirdnesses. I took comfort, at very least, that I was only one of a huge number of women of many ages who were also addicted.

The basic plotline of the first book is that seventeen-year-old Bella Swan moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington to live with her dad, after living most of her life with her mother. She’s pretty sure that she’s going to be miserable. On her first day of school, she meets Edward Cullen, a strange boy who is exquisitely handsome but who appears to hate her for no reason. She’s a little hurt, since she’s shy and sensitive, but she moves on with life. One morning he saves her from a car accident with supernatural quickness and strength. Then, he ignores her for weeks, despite the fact they’re supposed to be Biology lab partners. She’s pretty sure he wishes she was dead. Suddenly, though, he starts talking to her again, offering to take her out. She’s suspicious, but curious about this weird guy with lots of secrets. As they start hanging out, it comes out that he’s a mind-reading vampire who has sworn off human blood but the scent of her blood is enough to make him want to break his vow. She decides that it doesn’t really scare her, and they fall in love. He’s a little old-fashioned (since he’s been undead since 1918) and afraid he’ll kill her if he loses control, so sex is out of the question, but they spend just about every waking hour together, and because of his handy vampire breaking and entering skillz, he also spends nights cuddling with her and watching her sleep. The complication comes when a non-“vegetarian” vampire decides he wants Bella’s blood and Edward has to save her life again. It’s a lot more tortured than that in novel form, but this is the gist. And that’s just the first book…

Having read Dracula in college, I was a little weirded out by the blatant eroticism of the storyline, especially in a book that claims to be about abstinence. Vampires are traditionally a symbol of sexual desire and transgression. Caitlin Brown provides a good feminist literary comparison of the two books here. To boil it down, she states that,

The vampire novel is suffused with desire…. The act of biting a victim, of transforming a human to a vampire, is inevitably linked to sex. […] The ability to turn someone into a vampire is usually the prerogative of the male, and so sexual power in the vampire novel tends to reside with men. The female heroine is often represented as yearning for the vampire to exercise his sexual power over her.

About Twilight she concludes,

whatever intentions Meyer may have had with regards to the abstinence storyline, desire in the context of the vamp novel is a means by which the female heroine can explore power and fantasy, and so the abstinence within Twilight signifies a denial of the power that comes with the fulfilment of sexual fantasy. Authority over both the sexual experience and access to power remain with Edward.

The odd thing about Twilight, though, is the nature of the desire that Edward has for Bella: he doesn’t want to eat her. Fighting against all his instincts, he protects her and falls in love with her.

Brown is not the only feminist to struggle with the books. Film critic Manola Darghis of the NYTimes critiques the movies harshly for gender stereotyping. Other feminist writers (here, here, and here) talk about the somewhat disturbing undertones of Edward’s violent strength, his patriarchal ideas of chivalry, his determination to protect the “fragile” Bella, his inexplicable presence in Bella’s bedroom at night (As in: how exactly is cuddling all night encouraging abstinence? Or even worse: STALKER), and Bella’s characterization as weak and clumsy, obsessed with a bad boy and always fainting and being carried around. I’m with them that generally, real human girls ought not seek out real human boyfriends who do these things. Bella is a far cry from the sassy, in control, Buffy. (Did you look at the hilarious video embedded in Brown’s article?)

But the truth is I’ve never really been a conventional feminist. There’s something missing from conventional feminism. It’s mostly, um, real men, who sometimes have less than desirable characteristics. And romantic struggle in general, which always comes with risk.

Whether it’s a stereotype or not, sex is, well, scary and shameful for most girls. Chalk it up to our nature, our nurture, whatever you want: sex is kinda dangerous. I’ll never forget the first time I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and found out that sex, at least the first time, is actually physically painful. That blood is involved in losing your virginity. That the woman though traditionally smaller is traditionally on the bottom. It was pretty scary.

But as if the pain isn’t enough, there’s also the shame that we’ve been educated into. Men have it easy. Their sex is on the outside, their arousal is easily visible. Ours is hidden, mysterious. And what is invisible is of questionable existence and validity in Western culture, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The Roman doctor Galen believed that emotional hysteria was caused by a wandering uterus that got loose inside the body. Where visual evidence was lacking, myth abounded. Women are made to feel shameful about their invisible sexuality.

What is striking to me about Bella in this context is that she is basically sexually fearless and shameless (And I mean that in a good way. Did you notice what negative connotations that word has for a woman?). Regarding fears, not only does Bella have to worry about regular male strength, but supernatural strength, strength that could not only hurt her, but crush her in an instant. Oh yeah, and he has a nearly uncontrollable urge to drink her blood either killing her or stealing her soul. And, as we find out in Breaking Dawn once chaste, married sex comes into the picture, bearing his half –vampire child is life-threatening as well. But for whatever reason, none of these things hold the power of fear over her. She is serenely confident that Edward’s love for her will protect her from his more dangerous side.

Bella’s character actually has an uncanny ability to cancel out Edward’s powers. Because of his love for her and sincere desire for the best for her, his physical strength and his power as a vampire (to grant death or eternal un-death) repulse him. They are curses to him because they hold him back from being close to her. His special power as a vampire is mind-reading, but he can’t read her mind. Ultimately, Bella holds enormous emotional power over Edward (even the power to choose to allow him to end his life, as we see in New Moon). Conventional feminism often ignores the idea that emotional power, while “invisible,” is significant, in Bella and Edward’s case, a matter of life and death. Their love relationship binds them together not because they hold the same powers over against one another, but because they hold opposite and equal powers.

It is also striking that their physical relationship throughout the books is basically in terms of feminine desire, focused on touch. They caress one another’s faces and hair, they kiss, they hold hands. But they basically have no bodies from the shoulders down, and absolutely never from the waist down. For all that cuddling in Edward’s cold, hard-as-marble embrace in bed at night, there is no telltale sign of male arousal to assault Bella (or the grateful readers). It is a vision of sexuality seen in completely feminine terms, without the phallic as the focal point of definition. Bella’s desire is evident in her blushes, her passionate kisses, her heavy breathing, her thumping heart. It is Edward’s sexual desire, his “thirst,” that is invisible and in question. The message is one of normalizing feminine sexual experience, removing it from the position of shame.

So here we have a male protagonist who is written entirely in feminine terms, and whose strengths have been subverted by this fragile, wide-eyed girl. It’s a subtly empowering picture. It turns the books into an affirmation of feminine desire, a sort of feminine re-education against the fear and shame that have previously been used to motivate feminine abstinence. The ultimate motivation for abstaining in the books, which Bella realizes for herself toward the end of Eclipse when Edward’s self-control grows weak, is respect: for her own sexuality, for his and for what she knows will protect him emotionally and even spiritually.

I don’t know if Meyer really thought all this through when she was writing the books, but I don’t really think she had to. It’s implicit in the story itself. But let me warn you, it’s one hell of a compelling story. You probably won’t be able to put it down either.

Yet to come (as if you still wanted to hear more!):  Twilight and Christianity