The Math of Food, which doesn't suck.

Today was an exceptionally good food day.

I started the morning by eating a couple dried figs.

Then, I made French toast for the kids using a recipe from The Working Parents Cookbook. I used four eggs and four pieces of bread (freshly stone ground wheat bread from Great Harvest Bread Company) and cut them into four strips. Even though I can't stand eggs, I ate two of the strips and rather enjoyed them drizzled with organic maple syrup.

The girls ate blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries as a mid-morning snack.

Lunch for the little ones was simple: a turkey roll (a rolled up piece of turkey deli meat with no hormones or antibiotics from The Turnip Truck).

Lunch for me and Tiffany was DELIGHTFUL: a spinach salad with mixed berries, sweet and spicy pecans (another recipe from The Working Parents Cookbook), and toasted pine nuts (I learned how to toast them from Lucy Rizzo during her fabulous cooking class).

Tiffany requested a smoothie as a mid-afternoon snack. I recreated the blackberry/mango/banana/peach/spinach smoothie from yesterday. She had it drunk by the time I got back downstairs from transitioning the laundry.

James brought home Lucayan salads from Calypso cafe for supper. The big ones at the salads while the little ones ate rotisserie chicken and sweet potatoes.

I felt energized and joyful all day long and managed to accomplish more in one day than I usually accomplish in a week. I attribute it all to eating a little nutritious something or another every few hours. For me, it's the best way to level out my emotions and maintain my energy levels.

Oh, and I even cleaned the upstairs bathroom last night. It's so clean and shiny that I ended up lingering with each trip just to admire the shine.

Today, I managed to do four loads of laundry (washed, dried, folded or hung, and put away) and two loads of dishes (one is put away; the other is still in the dishwasher). I wiped down nearly every surface in my house because with a 4-year-old and an 18-month-old, the messes abound (my life has become a series of cleaning up other people's messes--my grandfather says "Oh, so the tables have turned!"). I weeded the little garden area in front of my house. I listened in on two "Meet the Crew" calls. I spent time building my business. AND I read approximately 12 books to my kids. Judah and I read the first chapter of the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm excited that we've read so much, but I also don't want it to end.

Tiffany and I did a little math lesson in the kitchen while I was working on the pecans (quick commercial for Math Doesn't Suck, a book I recently discovered at Davis Kidd: it will change how your teenage girl thinks about math. It will make it relevant. It will make it easy. It will make it fun. I LOVE IT!). I needed to know how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon, so I had her look it up for me in a cookbook. (There are three teaspoons in a tablespoon, by the way). That got me to thinking about how there are approximately four grams in a teaspoon, which reminded me that there is a can of soda on top of my refrigerator that Tiffany brought home from a party a couple weeks ago. I took down the can of soda and showed her how many grams of sugar were in it.

39 grams of sugar per 12 oz. serving.

I asked her how many teaspoons that was. She gave me a blank stare. So I asked, "How many times will 4 go into 40?" She answered, "10." So then I asked again, "So how many teaspoons of sugar are in this can of soda?"

"4?"

"No. There are 39 grams of sugar. Let's round it up to 40 since 40 is easier to work with. Since there are four grams of sugar in every teaspoon and there are 40 grams of sugar in the can, how many teaspoons do you need in order to get 40 grams of sugar in this can?"

"4?"

"No. How many times will 4 go into 40?"

"10?"

"So how many teaspoons of sugar are in this can of soda?"

"I don't know."

I finally got out a sheet of paper and a pen. I drew 40 circles. I circled groups of four. I had 10 circles. She got it. Finally. She couldn't believe it. Then, we pretended to put 10 teaspoons of sugar in the can.

I proceeded to tell her that more people in our country are overweight today than any other time in the history of America. More children have Type-2 diabetes than ever before. Type-2 diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes, but it is no longer referred to as such because so many children are now diabetic. I said, "A lot of kids drink sodas and eat candy all day and think it's OK, that it's not hurting them, but if you're not burning off that sugar as soon as you put it in your body, it gets stored as fat." Her 18-year-old uncle is grossly obese and diabetic. I think she gets it.

Speaking of candy, Judah had more candy on the 4th of July than he's had in his entire life. Today he asked me if we could buy some candy the next time we go to the store. I said no. I told him that I didn't mind if he had some every now and then at someone's house, but that I don't buy it because it's really bad for our bodies.

I explained to Tiffany that the treats I like to offer my children are homemade. They're made from real ingredients. Stuff that I recognize and can pronounce. We talked about some homemade cookies that she helped to make one night with James and Judah. She still remembers how delicious they were. (She had never made cookies before!) I have a hard time passing up warm, chewy, homemade cookies. I have no trouble passing up anything that's mass-produced with a shelf-life of 10 years and filled with fake crap.

Mary Enig and Sally Fallon of The Weston A. Price foundation talk about the Diet Dictocrats who have fed us full of misinformation regarding health and nutrition. For example, a friend recently said he eats his oatmeal with soymilk every morning. Why not real milk? Marketing and advertising. He even said, "The shelf life on that stuff is amazing!" Nutritious food is not meant to sit on your shelf month after month. Real, nutritious food is meant to be consumed or decompose.

Another friend said he makes his French toast with egg substitute and sugar-free syrup. Why not the real thing? Marketing and advertising. Unfortunately, I have to explain to my 4-year-old that the people who sell all that garbage are more concerned about how much money they can make by selling it than how nutritious it is. Even more unfortunate is that people are consuming it in the name of good health.

The last time I tried to get a shovel full of compost, I was struck by how little was in my bin. I put a lot of waste in there. Do you know what happens? It shrinks. Do you know what happens to packaged food waste? It grows. Not only does it not decompose, but it also comes in plastic and paper and aluminum and styrofoam and . . .

Real food doesn't take up space in landfills. It becomes the earth. It replenishes the nutrients found in the earth. My friend Wendy calls it black gold. She's right. It's amazing.