The Secret Garden

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By Andrea Goto, “Mom 2.0”

I was a teenager the first time I ever tasted a carrot pulled straight from the ground in which it grew. It took me a minute to muster the courage since dirt was always the thing mom violently scrubbed from the bottom of my bare feet like it was a fungus. We were at my aunt and uncle’s home on sprawling county acres with a view of the snowy mountain peaks in the distance. They only lived a short 7-minute drive from our small corner lot in town, but it seemed like an adventure to go there, like we were stepping back into another time where men played in their woodshops and women assembled bouquets from the wildflowers that lined the property.

The carrots were delicious—like nothing I’d ever tasted. Compared to our store-bought carrots these were hairy and grew in odd shapes, like deeply arthritic fingers, but they tasted sweet and earthy. I walked along the tidy garden rows and pulled up one after another, my mouth a buzzsaw working against the crisp roots.

In the summer we bought corn from roadside stands and blueberries from u-pick farms, but most of our food was harvested from a fluorescent-lit, big-box grocery where high school kids bagged our food for us. They even offered a drive-through pick-up service. Clearly, I grew up in the golden era of TV dinners, powdered cheese, and microwaves—a time when convenience trumped quality every time.

The Family Tree

It took the birth of my daughter to change this worldview I had gleamed from a life of processed, prepackaged and pesticide-ridden vegetables. Suddenly, everywhere I turned, I was warned that plastic containers were leaching chemicals into her baby food, that I should peel all non-organic fruits, and that baby carrots are soaked in bleach to retain their “freshness.” According to the news, we should fear the presumably healthy foods as much as potato chips and glazed donuts.

But changing my worldview was much easier than changing my daughter’s mind about vegetables, who at age 3 declared she had a “food allergy” to all things fresh, green or leafy.“I’m allergic to salad,” she said in all seriousness. “But it will go away when I’m 5.”

At 7, my daughter was still afflicted by her allergy. In fact, it encompassed all vegetables with the exception of canned green beans, poison-laced baby carrots, and “brown beans” (better known ask pork-and-beans, which I’m told by her pediatrician, “doesn’t count”).

A Treasure Box

I tried introducing new foods to my daughter, but unless it was fried, steeped in sugar or altogether unrecognizable as food (hello, dinosaur-shaped nuggets), she wasn’t having it. Uninterested in having a food fight with my child, I did the best I could. I bought stock in the fruits she’d eat—inevitably only seasonal and expensive varieties like blackberries, raspberries and cherries—and kept challenging her (okay, bribing her) to at least try new foods.

Then a friend of mine started a farm box home delivery service called “Local Organic Moms,” or “LOMs” for short. I could choose which local organic produce would appear in a crate on my porch each week. It isn’t cheap, but as I get older, I’m realizing that none of the best things are. The first day our crate arrived, my daughter ran to it and tore off a piece of the living lettuce and stuffed it in her mouth. She didn’t gag. She didn’t die. In fact, she liked it.

After sampling a piece, I realized why: all this time I’ve been eating—and offering my child—the equivalent of green cellophane. We ate the tomatoes like apples. My daughter peeled three carrots and buzz-sawed them down with an enthusiasm she usually reserves for cheese puffs.

Now, each week the farm box appears on our door, my daughter unpacks the items, sampling and sorting. Some of the items were so unfamiliar to our limited palate we had to Google it. I discovered purple potatoes and about 10 varieties of sprouts. I rediscovered my love of carrots—real carrots, purple, white, yellow or otherwise, in all their crazy shapes and sizes.

Don’t get me wrong, my daughter hasn’t given up on pressed fruit and yellow #5. We aren’t about to build a container garden or launch a raw-food diet. But we are opening our lives to the natural beauty of a simpler, less processed way of living. We’re supporting our local farmers, our friend’s business and a healthier lifestyle. Perhaps like bike commuting, composting, and pressing coffee, we’re finally moving away from convenience and back from whence we came: a place of quality and simplicity. If so, it feels right—natural even.

Andrea Goto swore that she would not let her child watch SpongeBob, take ballet, or consume food with Red Dye #40. Of course, that all changed when her daughter was actually born. Five years later, Andrea blogs about her revised approach to childrearing, which she likes to call Real-World Parenting. Her “technique” is based on commonsense and topped with a big dose of humor. Andrea is a regular contributor to PaulaDeen.com.

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