Goldfish Rule
Takoma Park has an unusually intense approach to food. There's people with all sorts of restrictions you never even thought of*. In our family, we both try to have healthy eating habits and an unrestrictive eating experience. So that you know, you can have all the food you want, as long as it fits my idea of healthy. But eating out in public with other people is tricky.
I just can't quite bring myself to be like my vegan friends that are telling their kids that they can't have any ice cream at the party. And my kids are healthy and like to try new things, am I going to be against trying new things? I who lived on PB&J for like 12 years? So after a few years of muddling through these dilemmas, I settled on what I called the Goldfish rule. If someone is offering goldfish (you know who you are) at the park, or M&Ms or whatever, my kids can have them. But we will never have Goldfish in our house. (We might have some expensive "natural" food that is in fact as unhealthy, but that's a different matter.)
We aren't going to be like those parents that are having to judge for their kids how evil each bite of different food is. We'll let them interact with the world and those funny other parents at the park. But at home I will fight like a dog to keep our habitual behavior something sort of like what one hopes for ones kids before having kids. Walking, whole foods, fresh vegetables from the farmer, that sort of thing. I thought the rule ideally allowed both autonomy of food choice in social settings and healthy habits in eating.
But that's not really the funny part. The funny part is that while I was out muddling this out, at the same time that my beloved life partner was finishing her dissertation, I was basically parenting solo. And after she finished her dissertation, various factors (post-dissertation stress recovery; pregnancy, that sort of thing) lead us to switching roles for a while. So I went back to working full time, and my wife took over hanging with the kid (while pregnant, note well).
So here I am, coming home from a hard day at the Savory, teaching myself some fancy new computer thingy, reading blogs, and telling off the crazy project managers from California, while my beloved is caring for my daughter while engaged with the sleepy task of growing a new baby, and what do I find in the house?
Goldfish!?!
I am incensed. The subsequent scenes of ungratefulness, of guilt invoking questions, of criticism of a pregnant partner, are now, several years later, best left sketchy.
But I never eat Goldfish now without a rueful laugh.
* I actually want to make up a new form of restricted eating called "Foraging." You can't eat anything that is cultivated or genetically altered (even by natural breeding) from the pre-human wild stock. So no apples. Crab apples, yes, but not the domesticated apples. And no crab apples from the crab apple mart, you have to pick them yourself. I'm not sure what I'd do with this form of eating, but I smile each time I think of it.