[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Last week I walked up to a stand at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market selling about ten varieties of heirloom squash. I believe strongly in eating a diverse, seasonal diet – so I was interested in trying one of the varied varieties of squash that wasn’t the usual, commercially popular butternut and acorn varieties.
I asked the man working the farm stand how a squat, mottled green squash tasted. “Sweet,” he answered. The bright orange one that looked like a bumpy pumpkin? “Sweet,” he answered. Indeed, “Sweet,” was his answer to everything – except the spaghetti squash, which he pronounced was good with pasta sauce.
Every Sunday, I ask the same questions about the distinguishing features of varied produce, whether strawberries, oranges, or persimmons. As time has passed, I have come to learn that they almost always give me the same one-word answer. “The (peaches, pears, grapes or insert your favorite fruit or even vegetable) here are . . . (you guessed it) sweet.” Last week, a farmer surprised me by deviating, however slightly, by upping the ante with a placard advertising his strawberries and melons to be, “Super Sweet.”
The Question is Irrelevant
I’m not at the farmers’ market for sweets. I appreciate the idea that different produce will have different, and hopefully nuanced, flavors. But it’s hard to discover those when the sales pitch for everything is how much any given fruit, or vegetable, resembles sugar. There was even one lemon vendor who promised me that his produce wasn’t sour at all, and instead tasted like candy.
America’s sweet tooth has turned into a 24/7 obsession – with every retailer from farmers to school lunch directors trying to appease it.
When I was a child, sweets were generally forbidden. We could count on the diehard New York grandmothers (mine and others) to have those awful red and white striped mints or butterscotch candies gracing their coffee tables. If we were lucky, we were offered one — only one. Neither of those varieties was popular with me or my friends. So we seldom had any at all. Times have changed. We’ve gone from relative sweet austerity to sugar coma in less than forty years.
Sweets have even taken over the lunch tables at my favorite restaurants. In the last several years, I’ve enjoyed tea (the English, afternoon kind) at various hotels. Reminiscent of my college days, I love to eat (but not prepare) tiny crustless sandwiches filled with cucumber, watercress, cream cheese and salmon. Add a small scone with clotted cream for dessert and the result is divine. The last two teas I’ve attended, however, have turned that tried-and-true formula upside down. The tiered stands are now cluttered with desserts, but present few sandwiches. I still have the pastries from my last tea in the fridge. If I were to eat one a day it would take the better part of two weeks to get through them.
Out of Bounds
When I was younger, cake and other confections were only for your birthday. If I was lucky, I got to help bake a cake for my mother’s workplace holiday party. If she remembered, she’d bring me home a slice.
Now it’s acceptable to eat cake first thing in the morning – as long as you call it a muffin. Gone are the faintly sweet (and small in stature) breakfast pastries of my youth. They have been replaced by sugar-encrusted, oversized cakes and scones – each the diameter of a softball. Sold on almost every corner at “coffee” shops, they’re called breakfast – and often treated like that too.
Cereals with sugar as their first (or second) ingredient advertise themselves as healthy. We (and our children) literally eat that up. Our coffee is sweet. Children’s milk in school cafeterias is sweet. Soda machines crowd school hallways. Cupcakes are not merely popular storefronts, but the sweet of choice for children’s school parties. When schools try to rein in these sweets, moms have been known to battle to keep cupcakes in the classrooms. I’ve even witnessed sweets (in the form of granola and energy bars) proffered at children’s afternoon sports practices. Is there no meal or time free of sugar?
If you eat packaged foods, by no means is there a sugar-free meal to be had. Almost every food I’ve encountered at the supermarket, be it sweet or savory, has sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) as an ingredient. Just today, I was looking for bacon without sugar to no avail. (The many sugar substitutes are notable for being many multiples, even hundreds of times as sweet as real sugar.)
So great is our obsessions with sweets that nutritionists, state-sponsored programs and our own food pyramid actually equate vegetables and fruit — their benefits in our diets treated as theoretically interchangeable.
I guess now is the time to come clean. I don’t really like sweets. I’ve often wondered at the source of my dislike. I assume it’s not genetic. My parents loved sweets. More often than not, I think it’s due to that childhood prohibition and never developing a real sweet tooth. Unfortunately, I think America is going the other way. On a given day, it’s impossible to turn anywhere and not have sweets shoved in your face.
This is especially true during this time of year, when celebratory cakes and cookies abound. Every holiday, it seems, is commemorated with sweets. At Halloween, we stock up on pre-packaged candy — though I remember my family handing out pennies and small trinkets. Valentine’s Day? We also have candy. Easter? More candy. There’s even green-colored candy on St. Patrick’s Day – the most non-candy like holiday I can imagine. Workplace parties routinely dish out cake and cookies. The Girl Scouts and every school club imaginable sell cookies and candy.
I mention all this to emphasize the incredible irony that governmental and medical officials appear to be shocked at the diabetes epidemic overtaking our country. Internationally, the focus has been on India and China — their sheer number of diabetics. The statistics are always shocking for countries with populations over one billion. The greater alarm should be focused on the high proportion and growth rate of diabetics this country is producing. Now, we not only lead the world in military spending, but in this terrible disease of “civilization. I know, I know – the popular medical literature leaves the cause for diabetes as unknown. It may correlate with our sweet tooth, but no one is ready to climb out on the limb of causation, especially when things like genetics or other “associated factors” might be to blame. In my view, this is nonsense. There is plenty of evidence making it reasonable to think we’re killing our pancreases one cookie at a time.
Our sweet tooth is killing us. We have obese adults, fat children and a raft of “pre” diabetics. I’d like to think that our advanced country could pull back from the brink. But with billions spent on sweet foods and further billions spent on diet programs and medical care, I think it unlikely.
In our depressed economy, even the mention that we cut back on something, anything, no matter how unhealthy, is verboten.
Let them eat cake. We’ll suffer the consequences later.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
