We’ve finished Deborah MacNamara’s amazing book Nourished: Connection, Food, and Caring for Our Kids (and everyone else we love)! Those of you who’ve been reading along have been emailed the official day and time for our Zoom call with the author next week!
(Let me know if you can’t make it but have things you’d like to ask her about. I’ll record it and send out!)
I was posting chapter-by-chapter recaps for most of the book, but summer just got too busy for me to keep up with that. (I’m feeling out how I want to do book clubs here, so it’s always changing, too!) I quoted the book at length in this post about how we are lacking ritual as a culture, and in this one, today, I want to wrap up conversation about Nourished.
My takeaways
For me, these are the biggest takeaways/integrations from the experience of reading this book:
People feel loved—connected, seen, cared about—when you provide food for them. (This is basically the main point of the book: that we can’t separate food and connection.) I’ve really shifted my attitude toward feeding my kids after learning this. What used to feel like a monumental and very annoying task I have to do three times each day now feels… still monumental but very much not annoying. I now see it as just another way I’m connecting with them and intentionally building our relationship, and relationship is the foundation of parenting for me.1
What I’m serving them is less important than the attitude with which I’m serving them. For many years in my mothering I was focused on feeding them super healthy food. The irony is that I was so focused on making sure that happened that I ended up making/serving food with a resentful, stressed out attitude. Of course the ideal would be serving good food and not being resentful or stressed about it—and I am working toward that—but for now I’m focused on preparing and serving food with a calm and loving and accepting energy.
I’m bringing them into food preparation more, because I want them to feel confident and at ease in the kitchen for their futures. I also think I’m doing this more simply because they are older and more competent at tasks, but I’m trying to have Rosie (3) help more, too! I also want to send the message to them that getting food ready isn’t a burden but a joy.
With an increased awareness around food while reading this, I realized I get easily overstimulated/dysregulated around mealtimes. This is the time of highest stress for me as a parent—as I’m preparing, as we’re eating, and somewhat immediately after. I think this has to do with being a highly sensitive person. I’m hungry and the kids are too, so we’re all somewhat dysregulated to begin with. I have a hard time focusing on anything when there’s a lot of other stimuli, and food prep always comes with details to manage and mess even without kids around! Then once we begin eating there are Big Feelings about what people do and do not want to eat, request after request, etc. ALL WHILE I AM STILL HUNGRY AND REALLY NEED TO EAT. Lol. It’s no wonder I spent many years just making food for them and eating myself later. I truly find mealtimes to be stressful as a sensitive person, and I’m looking forward to talking to Deborah about this!
“There’s nothing more important”
In the inaugural post of this book club I talked about how, when I was younger, I sort of saw food preparation as something I wasn’t that interested in. Something I felt I was… too good for? (Ugh, very humbling to admit that.2) So it was wild to be listening to a podcast just last week where the female guest was talking about this very thing. She said:
“We need to get back to having a sense of pride and responsibility in our households to cook food. One of the unintentional downsides of the feminist movement is that we somehow made people feel that food preparation was, like, a less-than activity. I bought into this for my entire early professional life, that it was somehow beneath me, that I was like a slave in the kitchen if I was cooking for husband or family.”
This isn’t something I’ve ever heard anyone else admit to, so there was a relief in hearing this! The work of cooking for our families is truly so essential for both our physical health and our emotional health, and it’s a shame that—like so much work of the home—it’s been denigrated as it has.
The podcast was about health and our food system, so as she continued to talk she addressed the health of the food we make:
“There is no more important thing we can be doing than feeding our children and our families healthy food. Less than 30% of American families are eating together once per week. We need to be sitting down at the dinner table together and eating real, unprocessed food, cooked with love, at home. I cook every single meal for my partner and I. And when I have children in the next few years, I am so deeply excited to cook every meal for them from scratch. Because there’s nothing more important.”
I loved to hear her speak on this; I was nodding so hard in agreement. I also chuckled a little to myself as she may be a liiiittle idealistic if she thinks that once she has kids she will continue to go to the farmer’s market to get all their food and cook from scratch every night! Ha. But good for her for knowing what matters and for her radical passion. I love it.
State of the table
For self-accountability purposes, and in case it helps someone else, here are some ways I’ve improved the practices around food in my household and/or things I’d like to work toward:
For breakfast, I get up before the kids and I have my coffee and breakfast in peace. This really enables a good start to my day. After I make and serve them breakfast I either sit and talk with them or read a chapter out of a book of saints (and I have my second cup of coffee). It’s a lovely, peaceful way to start the day.3
As I said above, a big lesson has been serving whatever I’m able to serve with love and not stressing making sure it’s optimally healthy. Related: reacting with acceptance and peace when there’s “pickiness” or attitudes around food. Letting it BE and not turning it into a battle. I’ve gotten better in both of these areas, and I’m still working on it. It’s so hard to make food and have your kids scoff at it!
Continue the dinner routine of 2/3 kids going away from the kitchen to play while the other helps me prepare dinner. This is something that works really well and that I really need (see above re: overstimulation). I am sort of tapped out at this time of day and really can’t have a lot of noise, people running through the kitchen etc etc etc.
Getting organized and starting to order staples from Azure Standard. Do you know about Azure? Our town has a drop location, and when we first moved here I ordered a few times. But I never got into the habit, and as we got busy I let it go. But I’d really like to get into a routine of ordering from them. We live in a town of about 15,000 and while we have several grocery stores and a Walmart, we don’t have a Whole Foods or a co-op. Azure is great and I need to take advantage of it!
Making sourdough again! My starter has sat in the fridge all summer. My family loves it, and it’s cheaper and healthier than buying it.4
I’ve really worked on doing dishes right away—something that really helps me not feel as overwhelmed when the next mealtime/snacktime comes. One thing I really want to work on is decluttering my kitchen, so that it’s easier to keep neat and clean. I’m by nature a cluttery kind of person (I felt like I found the descriptor for my style when I learned the term maximalism) but I also hate clutter and it makes me feel mentally crazy? (Good times.)
I think I’d like to start going grocery shopping every few days instead of once for the whole week. I was saying this to my sister-in-law, and she said when she lived in Denmark that people got food from the market every day for that night’s dinner. This really resonates for me as making more sense. I find it annoying and stressful to try to plan a week’s worth of meals at once. I would rather plan a few meals and just go to the store more often (thankfully, my kids love going grocery shopping and generally helpful and well-behaved). This makes more sense too if one is attempting to eat better (buying fresh food more often and eating it more quickly).
You?
I’d love to hear from you—whether you read Nourished or not—about where you’re at with food preparation. How does your family manage this sacred-but-relentless work? How are you doing well / how would you like to improve? What resources do you use or need?
Thanks for reading and I’ll hopefully see some of you on Zoom next week! And in case you’d like to peruse the past book club posts for Nourished, here they are: announcement/overview, intro and chapter 1, chapter 2, chapters 3 and 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, and the post on ritual where I quoted the book at length.
Also, I think I have our next book club read picked out. It’s a book that a mentor of mine handed me a copy of about 15 years ago and that I’ve never actually read in full. It’s not an easy or quick read, but I think that fact makes it a perfect book to chew on and digest (no pun intended!) in community. Stay tuned!
See our first book club read, Hold On to Your Kids, my very favorite “parenting” book.
I also have started a new routine for homeschooling, which is that they make their beds and get dressed and ready (mainly brush hair) for the day before they come to the kitchen for breakfast. This is working really well for us.
Much gratitude to my sister-in-law and my friend for teaching me how!
Amber, I haven’t yet pulled out my laptop to comment on this post & the rest of the book, but your remarks about sensory overwhelm in meal preparation landed close to home & I wanted to share a few things that have really helped me (I used to be a raging bear in the kitchen).
1) I try to do meal prep like veggie chopping, broth making, dough making or meat marinating ahead of time (the previous night or earlier in the day). Whatever I can do before the official dinner prep time eases overstimulation greatly for me.
2) The crockpot is my favorite kitchen assistant & whenever I can I make our evening meal the evening before, pop it into the crockpot in the fridge, and then take it out and turn it on in the morning.
3) I make big batches of lunch foods like egg/tuna/chicken salad, sandwich meats & veggies, salad toppings, cold rice, & deviled eggs and then store them in the fridge for easy midday meals throughout the week. Big batches of muffins and sheet cakes also make great midday desserts or tea time snacks.
4) If I am hungry when it comes time to cook, I begin meal prep by first preparing myself a snack or a nutrient rich drink & then sitting down for 5-10 minutes and having that. Sometimes I share with the kiddos, sometimes I do that alone, but it changes the whole dynamic in the kitchen and then at the table.
I don't like cooking and did little of it as a single woman. Marrying into a Vietnamese-American family has shifted my view of food as I have experienced so much love, care and welcome via food from my husband's family. I'm working on shifting my own perspective as a mom and cultivate the ability to give that gift of connection through food to my kids.