Food

My father-in-law, Roy Houston, died on July 10th this year. His death has made me think about many things, including the short-lived nature of a human life, the ways in which we deal with pain and our relationship with food, amongst other things.

Roy had a great love of food and drink, evidenced by his passion for cooking and his enjoyment and growing of food. He had an amazing recipe book collection, a tiny fraction of which, he gifted me with. I go to his Thai cookbooks, when I need inspiration for preparing chicken and seafood. Even the delicious creations which emerge from this inspiration, are nothing compared with the wonderful food which Roy made for us, every time we visited. I will miss you, Roy and I will miss your food.

Being a Taurean, I also have a great love of food. This passion has been the source of much joy, but also pain, which has resulted in necessary changes-of-eating-habits for me, over the years.

As a kid, I used to get allergic reactions to all kinds of substances, like fruit, medication, pollen, animal hair. I remember spending a miserable time at a party which my parents held at our house, after eating pineapple and soon afterward breaking out in a rash all over my chest. I had bronchial asthma for years, which my parents struggled to deal with, trying all kinds of treatments.

From my teenage years until today, I have had IBS. I never coped well with exams or the pressure of study and my guts bore the brunt of all that stress. I remember lying on a bed or the floor prone with gut pain on many occasions as a Uni student, but I never really got professional help, for dealing with stress, or the pain. I just put up with the constipation, diahorrea and pain, for years. I knew that the symptoms were being exacerbated by stress, but it didn't occur to me at that time, that there might be a connection between what I was eating and the pain I was experiencing.

As a child, my diet was typical of my generation. My parents were not big on fast food, so we ate mostly home-cooked food. Eating out was a rare treat. My parents had very little money for such extravagances and Brisbane in the 70s had very little to offer in the way of restaurants anyway, so the twice-yearly meal at a Chinese restaurant was a big deal. Breakfast usually consisted of packaged cereal and milk and lunch involved white bread with toppings like vegemite and jam. Our lunch boxes were also full of packaged foods like Uncle Toby's muesli bars and sweet biscuits.

Dad's family being butchers, mum was able to buy discounted meat, so we ate a lot of red meat. I wasn't too fond of the dry, tasteless beef patties, but I loved the corned beef she made in her pressure-cooker, pungent with garlic cloves pushed into it. I remember when mum went through a phase of cooking Chinese food, which was a nice change from the typical Australian fare of meat and three veg.

I think the adults in my family were largely ignorant of the role of food in health, at that time, so my parents never considered changing my diet, as a means of helping me cope with all the problems I was having. They were a bit more savvy by the time my sister came along. Being diagnosed as 'hyperactive', the catch-phrase of the day, they were informed enough, to make the decision to eliminate artificial colours and preservatives from our diet.

I think it had a considerable effect on alleviating her symptoms, so it's to their credit that they made change for the better. Unfortunately this kind of wisdom didn't carry through to my decision-making when i became responsible for my own eating habits, so that when I first moved out of home, at 21, I was eating all kinds of crap. Bananas and custard for dinner featured too many times to admit to. It's no wonder that my room-mate and I broke out in boils-big painful ones on our butts! If we weren't in so much pain, I think we would have taken a photo of ourselves, the day we both lay on the bed, with bread poultices on our butt cheeks. The bread didn't work. I got a major infection and then had an equally horrible reaction to the sulpha antibiotics I was given as a treatment.

It wasn't until I became a teacher and was having to deal with chronic diahorrea from IBS, that I sought to make changes toward better health.

I went through a pretty intense time at the beginning, giving up sugar, caffeine, alcohol and yeast all at once. The busy-ness of my job kept me preoccupied during the day, but at night, I went through typical cold turkey symptoms, with cold sweats, shaking and palpitations. I felt like a junkie on detox. After a few months, I was on my way to recovery. The diahorrea was virtually gone. Constant yeast infections and cravings were gone. I was a changed person. It was an empowering revelation, to realise that I could drastically alter my state of wellbeing, by monitoring what I put into my body. After a while, I gave up all meat, except for fish and noticed further improvement. I was eating a lot of fish, rice and salad. I surfed 3 times a week and looked and felt really good.

I ate like this for another 3 years, then I moved to Japan. I continued eating a lot of fish in Japan, but started drinking alcohol again. I put on weight. I think it was a combination of the alcohol and lots of white rice. I knew nobody who ate brown rice, except a good friend, who'd switched to genmai, after a friend of hers had died of bowel cancer. She was considered an oddity amongst her peers. I learnt to cook traditional Japanese meals from a couple of my students, all of whom were older women who really valued good health and traditional ways of eating. I still use their recipes to this day, for dashi, miso, teriyaki fish and chicken, eggplant and omelettes. My favourite recipes were gomoku gohan, okonomiyaki, oyako don and grilled fish.

I really loved eating in Japan-still do. Its combination of simple, healthy, beautifully presented and really tasty food makes it my favourite cuisine.

Japan is also my favourite place, because that's where I met Brian. We ate and drank our way around Osaka. It's the perfect setting to fall in love with a handsome American who also loves food.

Our honeymoon in Thailand saw us eating delicious, spicy and healthy food too. We walked everywhere, swam and sunbaked at beautiful beaches and ate lots of seafood and fruit. The food got spicier, the further inland and north we went. We still like to remember the night we ate at a little cafe in Nan, where the waitress, who was really a boy, was watching Brian with hungry eyes and the tom yum soup nearly blew our heads off.

When we went to L.A., we continued to enjoy eating Japanese food. Torrance has a very large Japanese population, so we felt right at home. It was a shock to encounter American portions for the first time, but since we mostly ate out at Japanese restaurants, where the portions were in line with Japan, our eating habits hardly changed. I continued eating a no-red meat diet throughout my pregnancy and was healthy and well, throughout the entire 9 months.

I first became aware of organic food when we moved to Bisbee, Arizona. I joined the local food co-op and volunteered time in the store, to receive my membership discount. Sophia was six months old when I started giving her solid foods and by then, we had converted to mostly organics. It just felt right, to be giving our new baby chemical and pesticide-free food.

I fed her a vegetarian diet until she was two and Brian bought me Laurel's Kitchen, to give me vegetarian recipe inspiration. Our favourite meals from that book were tamale pie, spanakopita, kale potato soup, golden broth and raisin bars. Across the road from us, was a wonderful cafe called the Hot Spot, which served Mexican-inspired healthy food. My favourite was the huevos rancheros, with eggs cooked like an omelette on top of the tortillas, brown rice and two kinds of salsa.

By the time we moved to Australia, we were eating about 80-90 % organic of our total diet and thankfully when we arrived, we were happy to see that the organic movement had taken off in Oz too. We've been able to access a local organic market everywhere we've lived. The one in Cairns was fantastic. There was a stall which made frozen fruit treats from mango and chocolate pudding fruit. Sophia loved those treats. A local Japanese farmer grew gobo, or burdock root, which I was so happy to be able to cook once more, since leaving Japan. Burdock root is lovely cooked with carrots in with the rice. Gomoku gohan is very healthy and tasty. You just need to take care with preparation of burdock. It contains a mild poison, so after peeling it, you cut it and rinse it in several changes of water. It's a strong blood cleansing food, so very good to eat on a regular basis. I have never seen it sold fresh, here in Brisbane.

While I was pregnant with Sage, I started eating red meat on a semi-regular basis. I'd been breastfeeding Sophia right up until I was a couple of months pregnant with him, so I was probably a bit low on all reserves. I was healthy again throughout the pregnancy and he was a big healthy baby at 11 pounds. The women I knew from the home-birth support group rallied together to help us after his birth, bringing meals to us for the first week or so. I'll never forget one of the first meals which came, a delicious lentil curry, which I really enjoyed. Unfortunately it wreaked havoc on Sage's system. It's hard to believe that a mother's food could affect a new-born so much, but that night, he had explosive bowel movements that looked exactly like the colour of the lentil curry I'd eaten. It didn't have a permanent effect on him, though, because Sage loves lentils and curries and eats them readily, whereas he'll often say no to the offer of a meat dish.

For a very brief period, we tried to do our own food stall at the organic market on the Gold Coast, but it was a lot of work for little profit and I didn't really know how to manage waste, so our own version of the Hot Spot was very short-lived. It was fun for a while.
Our menu was: bircher muesli, chai, fruit salad and yoghurt and smoothies. I soaked the bircher muesli in water over-night, so that the oats just melted in your mouth. I got the inspiration from another favourite cafe on the Gold Coast, called the Zuchii Bar. The Zuchii Bar also served the best Eggs Benedict on the Gold Coast.

I did an Indian vegetarian cooking class while living at the Coast and my favourite recipes were: pumpkin curry with amchur mango powder, ragda pattie, ghobi pakora and carrot halva. Brian had also bought me an Indian vegetarian cook book by Julie Sahni, which I used at this time. My favourite recipes from this book to this day are malai kofta and saag paneer.

Brisbane is a city of immigrants and we often find ourselves befriending newly-arrived people from various places. Maybe this is because we are often on the move, so being a newcomer to a place, we are drawn to other new-comers. In the last two years, through the children's school, we've made friends from Mexico and Korea. I took the opportunity while getting to know them, of also learning some of their recipes.

From our Mexican friend, I learnt how to make salsa using boiled tomatoes and fresh garlic and chilis. We've always loved pico de gallo, but the cooked version, especially served while the tomatoes are still warm , is absolutely unparalleled in flavour. Brian bought me a heavy mortar and pestle to make the job easier, although carrying that beast from one bench in the kitchen to another is a hazard for the wrists. We also made a delicious chicken mole, with rich dark sauce.

Most recently, from our Korean friend, I've learnt how to make kim chi and jab chae. I tried to make kim chi once before when I was living in Japan, after watching it done on a cooking show. I must have missed some essential instruction about which kind of baby shrimp to use, because after a day of preparation, I had a rancid, rotting concoction on my hands, that was only good for the trash. Jab chae is yummy with its sweet potato noodles, which turn clear after boiling.

I was recently chatting with a friend about the dilemma of school lunches. For many women I know, the dilemma rests in what to put in their children's lunch boxes, which the children will want to eat, as well as provide nutrition. This is not my friends, nor my dilemma. Our dilemma is that our children are sometimes ridiculed for their lunches, even though they are healthy and contain food which our children love.

They've been told that their bean and cheese quesadillas look like they have poo in them. They are asked questions by children with a screwed up nose like, "What's that?", over foods like gyoza and spanakopita slices. Pizza on flat bread also elicits unwanted comments, because it's floppy and doesn't look like real pizza. I've talked to them about what foods they're willing to forgo, so as to deter unwanted comments and the list is short. Instead, we discuss how the foods they eat are pretty common in other countries and it just shows what little exposure to the outside world, most of these children have. We also talk about how maybe deep down, there's jealousy behind those comments, because many of these children's mums are working full-time and don't have the time or energy to make a lunch like theirs.

Here are some typical lunch items that they take to school:

onigiri with shiso ume filling
scrambled egg and fried potato wraps
quiche slices
fritata slices
spinach and feta puff pastry
spanakopita
sushi
gyoza
zaru soba with fried egg slices and nori
jab chae
potato croquettes
tuna melt sandwiches
apple crumble
home made cookies
home made banana bread
french toast slices with maple syrup dipping sauce

They also get a couple of pieces of fruit. In summer there's usually a salad, which may be sometimes just a few slices of capsicum and a pickle, or something more elaborate with dressing in a separate container. Their lunch boxes also include more typical foods like crackers and packaged cookies, but these are not the main items, merely an add-on.

Having kids is a real experiment in choosing food for the family. Over the years, I've become aware of the effect of different food on them and tried to adjust our habits accordingly. It's not always easy, because their needs are not always compatible.
Sage loves legumes and beans, Sophia does not. She loves red meat, he does not. I've discovered that wheat is not good for either of them, so have switched to gluten free pasta, crackers and cookies and somewhat to a lesser degree, gluten-free bread where possible. Unfortunately, most gluten-free products are not also organic. Sage can't tolerate msg. It gives him terrible head aches and sometimes severe vomiting, so we're very careful about avoiding it, which makes eating out a little tricky.

I've always limited their dairy intake, since they first started eating food other than breast milk. One of the first lessons a naturopath will give you about nutrition, is that dairy is mucus-producing. I believe that this is true. I drank unlimited amounts of milk as a child and had bronchial asthma. Our kids don't drink milk and they have never had asthma. I notice that when I limit cheese and yogurt, their colds disappear faster. If I don't limit these foods when they have colds, the mucus hangs around.

I can't say that I've always done a good job with providing them with exactly the food that they want or need. I can often be too strict and this needs adjusting on my behalf, as the children get older. Sometimes it takes me a while to work out what's causing a problem for them, like the msg. Sage had severe head aches for over a year, before I worked out what the problem was. Sometimes I can't come up with something creative that keeps everyone happy.

What I do know, is that other than sex, food is one of the true pleasures in life. It's an intimate relationship with the ingredients which become our living self. We are what we eat. In something like six months, we have replaced every cell in our body, using the material which we have ingested. We have the ability to alter who and what we are, by what we put in our mouths. Our moods, our body shape, our behaviour and even our thought processes can be altered by what we eat. I really believe that we can love ourselves, our bodies and our relationship with food, all at the same time, if that's what we really want.