The Psychology of Change in Food, Starting With the Kids

Today, Roseanne Swaney from Eden Foods Organic Pastas handed me a box of her delicious organic "Vegeatable Alphabets" to serve to the grand kids. They're almost impossible to read when they're not cooked (pasta swells as you cook it). Hopefully I won't still need my glasses when it goes to the table.

It made me think about the delicate dance that I believe has been happening between organic growers and retailers and we consumers since someone first said "no more pesticides".

Are you opening yourself to change? Or are you waiting for the organic food market to change to something you like better?

I ask this of the consumer, the mom or dad who does the shopping and makes that split second decision between the scary brown box of whole grain spaghetti noodles ... and the tried and true can of Chef Boy Are You Mushy. Because it's something I'm realizing about myself. And I asked Roseanne, and she frankly couldn't tell me. Do I pick the Eden's Vegetable Alphabets pasta because it's organic? Or is it because it looks like the pasta that kids have eaten for decades and we're afraid to ask them to try something new?

I think we aren't giving them any credit if we're going it because of the latter. Kids are not just resiliant creatures when they fall from the highchair and land head first onto a marble floor. They're also not as tied to dogma and rote as we adults seem to be. That takes years of conditioning. A box of commerically distributed elbow noodles in three colors that immitates a vegetable pasta is as close as some of us ever come to actually buying a locally grown, organically tended pasta (using pasta as the hypothetical for all foods in general).

When the grand kids come to my house, I slide a steaming plate of full blown, unadulterated, whole grain linguini and veggies under their noses and the reaction is nothing like their mothers warn me it will be. They love it. And it's because they don't have all the pre-conceived notions about organics that some of us do from watching all the drama between Monsanto and Farmer John down through the years, stretching back 4 decades. They just smell and it smells good, they look, and it looks nice. They taste, and it doesn't even occur to them that people might have donned their flower wreathes and peace sign tee shirts and picketed a corporate farm stealing business from a suffocating little bedroom community trying to survive on its last bags of seed.

Kids don't care about any of that because they weren't around then. They grew up with X-box and YouTube. And healthy foods are a no-brainer to them. They don't need to be tricked into trying an organic food by shopping around for something that looks as close to a chain restaurant burrito as possible. We didn't love alphabets in our soup as kids because it was mass produced and sold as cheaply as possible. We loved it because "it spelled stuff."

My parents were just 2 generations removed from the Great Depression. And the lessons learned from that horrible era resonated all the way through the years in time and onto my plate.

"Your eyes are too big for your stomach"
"Waste not want not"
"If it's on your plate you don't leave until it's finished"

Those were attitudes, good attitudes, that caused us to look at food more like a commodity to be amassed in as many units for as little currency as possible, like we might need to haul it all down to the air raid shelter tomorrow. But those days are gone! Even if we do enter the next "Great Depression" and the whole thing crashes in front of our eyes, our farmers and local retailers are just standing by waiting to catch us when it happens. Even with things as bad as they are, we are still one of the best fed countries on the planet, with the most choices, the most diversity, and the most for the least.

So ask yourself: "Do I want this organic food because I really, truly think it's time to taste and nourish myself with food ... real food ... with nothing between me and the fork but some flour, eggs, oil and a few air particles keeping us apart? Or am I trying to preserve a tradition that began in a time when we were still terrified of running low? Yes, mom had some excellent recipes. But they were limited by what she could find on the shelves at the grocer. She may not have had the choice between beef patties and American fries twice a week, and occasionally making a nicoise salad out of things that were grown in a woods in Escanaba. We do.

But if you can't bring yourself to trying it for yourself, if you can't silence the ghosts of the past that insist on the same detergent, the same toothpaste, the same brand of milk for yourself because the ancient aunts and grammas might be insulted ... then try it for the kids. There's no sense in them carrying our ghosts around. They're too busy playing Xbox to think about such things.

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