Catholic Mom Book Spotlight

Forbidden Fruits
by Susie Lloyd

Excerpted from Please Don't Drink the Holy Water! by Susie Lloyd with permission.

Read our Book Spotlight Interview with Susie Lloyd

I’ve always wondered why our Lord insisted that heaven is a banquet. Maybe it because he was talking to a bunch of men. Consider, for a moment, what men do on holidays — Kick back, eat, do a few deep knee bends, eat some more, see which team is winning, eat some more, drink, and eat. They don’t plan it, shop it, cook it, or clean it up. Very seldom do they feed it to the baby or pick it out of his hair. No wonder the banquet imagery got so many male converts.

The real reason Our Lord did not pick women apostles was because he knew that somewhere in the congregation a hand would have shot up — “Rabbi, I know that I am privileged to be a part of this. That hundreds of years from now people will wish they had been in my place, sitting here at Your feet, listening to You discuss the inexplicable joys that await those who love You. I just need a clarification here... who is throwing this party? Oh — the angels? I see. Well, that’s fine. Just wanted to make sure You had planners, shoppers, cooks, and dishwashers lined up, especially because this is going to be an eternal affair. And one more thing, I won’t have to feel guilty if I don’t pitch in, will I? Great. Which way to the River Jordan?”

A lot of women I know think of eating as a necessary evil. Keep in mind that these women are skirt-wearing, rosary-saying types, who thought Hillary Clinton’s remark about the little woman who baked cookies was demeaning. They, and this includes myself, would, under normal conditions, love to bake cookies. It is fun. It makes our families feel warm and fuzzy, and nothing beats the taste of raw batter. But if you introduce the demands of a large family, the hassles of eating far outweigh the benefits.

On the pro side it keeps you alive.

On the con side you have creative planning, shopping, preparation, and cleanup — all for an hour of pleasure. When you factor in the children, out goes the hour of pleasure. When I’m not force feeding a picky toddler I’m nagging my older kids to stop talking with their mouths open or stop eating with their mouths full. It doesn’t have to make sense because my mouth’s usually full when I say it.

Now I know as an American I am privileged to live in a country which takes great national pride in its variety of cuisines. Still, sometimes I look with envy back on simple cultures with simple diets. In primitive cultures, kids didn’t ask what was for dinner and then immediately complain about it. Why? Because the answer never varied. Nobody thought of saying, “Aw, roasted missionary again?!” It was understood that you ate whatever abundance God sent you.

Now, I do know a few women who like to cook. For them it’s a hobby, not a life sentence. When I was single I was in that category. I enjoyed leafing through domestic magazines looking for exotic recipes like kiwi almond casserole with a side of mint. Then, I would go to the store and select just the right ingredients. The most alluring recipes always wore a skimpy little getup like, “Preparation time: 20 minutes.” This is probably true if you don’t have to stop to look up the meaning of blanching, parboiling, poaching, frying, and baking, and how to turn the oven on. With the effort I put out one might expect to create something good enough to serve the entire staff of the White House. Yet after five hours it yielded only four servings and looked nothing like the picture. But it did taste just as revolting as the name suggested.

These sorts of projects continued into marriage because I so wanted to impress my husband. Our first stove was a hot plate with two burners, which necessitated a diet of boiled starch, fried meat and canned vegetables. The only fancy thing I ever tried was broccoli in spaghetti. Even though I now cook worth my salt, my husband still teases me about it to this day.

He also likes to razz me about the amounts of food I’d make back then. To feed both of us it seemed logical to cook double what I would normally eat. I weighed 102 pounds. Pretty soon my husband did too. Luckily, pregnancy solved the problem and my appetite grew to match his.

After we moved to a place with an oven my troubles were still not over. Food did not regenerate itself and we didn’t have a car. But I have always been a resourceful person. Once I ran so low that I threw a blanket on the living room floor and we had a picnic with raisins, peanuts, apples and beer. My husband went along with it cheerfully enough but I’ve never had the guts to try it again — especially when we’re out of beer.

If only I had realized that God never cut me out for high-tech domesticity I would have saved myself a lot of guilt. It was a relief when my mother told me she cooked nothing but hot dogs for the first year of her married life.

By the time I came along she had several meat and potato recipes capable of feeding a neighborhood. She also had five sons.

God has taken pity on me by giving me five daughters. Daughters don’t have the same needs as sons. They can live for days on hors d’oeuvres. You can present just about anything on a cute tray with teacups beside it and they will squeal with delight. With daughters it is also possible to ration milk. My brothers, on the other hand, thought they were helping their mother when they drank the last quart of milk right from the carton so as to avoid getting a glass dirty.

God gave me daughters, but he made my husband a boy.

For awhile I was counting my blessings because my husband is a pasta lover. Nothing is easier, faster, or cheaper. When he gets bored with that, there’s always rice or potatoes — preferably smothered in cream sauce or cheese. This is known as The Fatkins Diet.

Fatkins is a major part of a complete homeschool diet.

Then one day, one of my husband’s friends dropped the F. And with it went any chance of convincing his children that he was Santa Claus that year. Proteins were where it was at. Then another friend tried it, then another... As soon as they traded carbs for abs these guys got evangelistic. They were off pasta, bread, spuds, rice, and beer and claimed to feel great.

At the same time this was happening, some of my women friends started preaching a diet of their own. It was a no-dye, no-preservative, low-sugar diet guaranteed to end mood swings, counteract the alphabet syndrome in children, and prevent diseases induced by the quick fixes that make up the other half of the complete homeschool diet.

Suddenly I realized that I had been killing my family. I, who should have known better.

You see, when I was eleven my father suffered a heart attack. A year later my mother contracted cancer. Their response to these life-threatening diseases was a radical change of diet. They read every package carefully for mention of monosodium glutamate, nitrates, red dye number five, and hormones. This cut out all snacks that came wrapped in plastic. Ice cream, my mom’s favorite food, was unfortunately made with stuff that they (Real World types) put in paint thinner and could be fatal.

From then on we ate whole wheat spaghetti, and imitation meat loaf made with soy. Raw sugar or honey in the baking, and kelp to spice food. And for beverages, mom and pop juiced everything our garden produced — not just respectable apples or carrots but beats, alfalfa grass and watermelon rind. We kept a large freezer down in our cellar. In the good old days behind the frozen garden vegetables we kids could always find donuts or chocolate chip cookies hiding. No more. Once, in the middle of an adolescent growth spurt, after looking down the barrel of raw sugar I went down there in desperation and opened the freezer. Everything in there was a type of grain. My mom told the story years later of how I stormed up the stairs and revolted. “There is nothing in this house to eat but seeds!” After that she started putting Twinkies in my school lunch. But she kept them hidden so they would last. A little poison to quell a riot.

Now, with all this healthy conditioning it was high time I started saving my family’s life.

The only problem was none of them really wanted me to save their lives. They were perfectly content on the homeschool diet. But it didn’t matter. They were going to have long healthy lives even if it killed me.

Of course, all of this would be accomplished within the context of the Faith. We were not going the route of body beautiful seculars. There had to be a certain spirituality to the way we ate.

And so I come to my next food challenge. Catholicism has a diet all its own. In the Catholicism I grew up with this presented no more challenge than giving up meat on Fridays and Ash Wednesday and eating less a mere two days out of every year. “Two small meals that shall not total one full meal” is almost fun.
So of course, my husband switched to the Eastern Rite. Greek Catholic regulations forbid meat and dairy products on days which pop up often and unexpectedly throughout the liturgical year. Besides this, for the two Sundays preceding Lent -- which starts two days earlier than in the West -- they start warming you up with Meatfare and Cheesefare Sundays, in which you successively give up meat and cheese. They also throw a two-week fast at you right in midsummer before the Feast of the Assumption. Of course this doesn’t stop the neighbors from throwing steak on the grill.

These are the days we learn gratitude for the abundance in our supermarkets. These are the days that make feasting afterwards so sweet. These are the days in which we tell our children these things to keep them from killing us.

For me these days have a charm all their own. Nobody is allowed to get mad if the food doesn’t taste good.

Excerpted from Please Don't Drink the Holy Water! by Susie Lloyd with permission.

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