Guest Post: My Sibling Rivalry with Food

Please welcome our guest, Hallie Sawyer, freelance writer and blogger (Write For Me).

* photo credit: kate hiscock on flickr.com

I grew up with food as another member of my family. He was a self-centered bastard, too. Our days seemed to revolve around him, especially Sundays. After church, we either went to brunch with him or we had a special crockpot meal prepared. I spent my days after school concocting funky snacks with him, one of my favorites was saltine crackers topped with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

Yes, I just wrote that.

My family was obsessed with food. We went out to dinner a LOT; there wasn't a new restaurant we didn't try. Chinese, Mexican, Italian, you name it, we ate it. And no dinner was complete without at least a couple of appetizers. If you asked my father...actually, you didn't have to ask him. He loudly proclaimed this after every restaurant meal, "That was THE best [fill in the blank] I have ever had." It became the running joke in the family which was one he never seemed to get. He still says it to this day.

Food was our connector. It was an easy conversation at the table, a way to keep things on the surface. Because we sure as hell didn't want to look at what was lurking below. A obnoxiously-stocked fridge, a packed cooler for the boat, a brand new restaurant to try, they were all just part of the family. A very dysfunctional one.

The lightbulb started to illuminate when I was a junior in high school and I was no longer hipless. Well, I still didn't really have hips as much as I had thighs. I was flabby and I still had my baby face. When my cheeks started rivaling my hair in size, I knew I was in trouble. I started to take my tennis seriously that year when my high school team started training with a tennis pro at a local athletic club. Our trainer had played tennis in college and his passed along his athletic training on to us. The club had a weight room and my mom allowed me to join. It changed my life.

I researched and purchased weight-lifting books and became a vegetarian. Visible fat completely grossed me out, therefore I boycotted eating meat altogether.Grizzle was the enemy. This drove my father absolutely crazy. My stubborn streak is wide and long and he eventually stopped harassing me about it. I got in better shape but something was still off.

In college, I continued my vegetarian diet but I didn't figure out that my biggest culprit to my continuing battle with my body was my love affair with carbs. As a vegetarian, carbs had become my new best friend. My thighs were stubborn,too. I started taking the first unofficial weight loss pill: aspirin, caffeine, and ephedrine. (A guy friend obsessed with his body image passed that little heart attack laden piece of advice onto me.) I lost weight but then I also lost muscle; I looked sick. Again, self-sabotage. Along with my stubborn streak, I also have a thick skull.

Now, at almost forty years old, my light bulb is burning bright. I have finally figured out what food is supposed to be. Fuel. That's it. Nothing more. Don't get me wrong. I still love food but I'm not obsessed with it. It has to be exactlywhat it was meant to be. Sustenance. My German genetics and a fourth of my life spent eating horrible are stacked against me but did I mention I was stubborn?

If I want to have a healthy body, inside and out, I need to have protein with every meal and every snack. Carbs are a bare necessity and veggies are my new bestfriends. If I had known then what I know now, I might have had a whole different view on life. I might have been a much more confident person growing up.

Food wouldn't have been my evil twin as much as it would have been my biggest fan.

Hallie Sawyer is a freelance and historical fiction writer, with publishing credits in KC Parent magazine. She grew up in northeast Nebraska but now lives in Kansas City with her husband and three children. As a health and fitness enthusiast, she now looks at her relationship with food as a partnership and no longer as a high school crush.

 

Bonus to the Giveaway: A Guest Post by Sandra Beasley

On Tuesday, I gave you a sneak peek at Sandra Beasley's memoir, Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. Today, I have something even better: a guest post by Sandra herself, in which she gives us a taste of her poetry, more of her memoir, and a glimpse into her life on the road.

THE VAGABOND DIET

photo credit: Matthew Wordman

I love to eat. And I love to cook. Please trust me on those two things before I tell you the rest: I have severe and lifelong allergies to to milk, goat's milk, egg, soy, beef, shrimp, mango, cucumber, some tree nuts, mustard, some melons, and swordfish. So while yes, I love to eat--and yes, I love to cook--my palate and my recipe book might be a little different from yours.

Since spring 2010, I have been on an endless if exhilarating book tour. Anyone who travels will tell you how merciless it can be on the belly. But when you're traveling with food allergies, the risk goes beyond the realm of gaining five pounds. Whether in New York City (this week), or Madison, Wisconsin (last week), or Miami, Florida (the week before that), I am constantly talking business over lunch or joining hosts for a dinner before a bookstore reading. There is often pressure to try a local specialty or share a plate. In these moments I live in fear of being reduced to a hivey, wheezing, anaphylactic mass. Where will the nearest hospital be? Will my health insurance cover me there?

In "Allergy Girl," a sequence that appeared in my first poetry collection, Theories of Falling, I describe the helplessness my parents felt in trying to feed a newborn while on the road:

My parents agree on one rule: Don't break the baby.
They pour quarters into the arcade game of adulthood,
working the mechanical claw right, left, right, back,
aiming for the stuffed bear, missing. A clutch

of cheesecake. A buttermilk biscuit. Each time
my lips swelling, breath skipping. They pace the E.R.
Did we break the baby? My mother dissects labels:
casein, protein, lactylate. Easier to cook from scratch.

Later, revisiting the incident in Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, I filled in the narrative details:

Take the Biscuit Incident: On a trip through Nashville, after hours of
driving with a squalling, hungry three-year-old, they checked into Opryland
and tried to figure out how to quell my growling stomach. My
father’s plate came with a plain-looking biscuit on the side.

“You barely had a crumb,” my mom said, still defensive after all these
years. “We didn’t know it was buttermilk.” I began wheezing and hiving,
spluttering at the liquid Benadryl they tried to ease down my throat. They
waited, watching closely, unsure what to do. After an hour, I calmed
down—probably as much from exhaustion as recovery—and fell asleep.

The next day my father was tied up in a conference, and my mother
would not drive in an unfamiliar city. “The worst part was going back to
that same hotel restaurant the next morning,” she admitted, “and having to
try again. We didn’t know where else to take you.”

Over the years I've developed my collection of short cuts for eating meal after meal after meal on the road. Make sure the server knows "tree nuts" includes pine nuts and pestos. When in doubt, order the french fries. Don't even step into a pizza joint. I've accepted that my cravings might have to yield to my common sense, and I've gotten used to paying full price for an entree stripped of the chi-chi garnishes that justified the $5 upcharge in the first place.

I've spent the last four days in New York. On one level, my index of the trip's adventures reads...

-Food Allergy Initiative's ball at the Waldorf Astoria;

-Meeting with my editor at Crown;

-Date on Cornelia Street;

-Meeting with my assistant editor at W. W. Norton;

-Meeting with my literary agent;

-Interview for TRIP CITY, an online Brooklyn-curated arts salon.

On another level, my mind indexes...

-safe halibut, fancy dessert fruit plate (picked around the cantaloupe);

-hijiki and salmon maki (success!);

-pasta with mussels (convinced the kitchen to switch out an egg-y pasta for linguine);

-quinoa salad (sent back for de-cucumber-ing);

-fried plantains (the Cuban equivalent of my standby, french fries);

-hummus & carrot sticks (good but for $11, I wish I'd been able to eat the pita).

Soon I'll be home, this time for a month. That is an eternity in the vagabond's world. I can't wait to fill my refrigerator with arugula, peppers, avocados, roasted chicken, wild rice. Breakfast? Almonds, bananas, orange juice. Every day: the simple and the Sandra-friendly.

My favorite meal of the last month on the road was not in New York at all. It was actually a bowl of potato-leek soup at Mother Fool's Coffeehouse in Madison, Wisconsin. Not because it was exotic or rich; it was rustic and, if anything, it could have used a little salt. But before ordering I got to look at the hand-lettered index card where the vegan chef had written down the handful of ingredients. I felt taken care of with each hearty, safe spoonful.

Sometimes, your appetite is not for what's exotic or rich. Sometimes, it's the comfort food you need--the comfort that, wherever else the day takes you, it won't be to the emergency room.

~

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl was a finalist in the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards: Best Food & Cooking, and Publisher's Weekly calls it an "intelligent and witty memoir." Sandra Beasley is an award-winning poet and the 2011 Writer-In-Residence Howard County's Poetry and Literature Society. Check out her website here, follow her on Twitter, or like her page on Facebook. 

And, for you Readers...We're still giving away a copy of this excellent book, but you don't have to go clicking around town to enter. To make it easy, leave a comment here if you haven't already dropped your name in the comment section on Tuesday's post. We'll draw for the winner on Monday, December 12th.

How's that for hospitality?