Bad Mom Turned Food Detective

I had the special opportunity to listen in on best-selling authors Michael Pollan and Dr. David Kessler in San Francisco last Wednesday. To say this influenced me is an understatement. The dialogue opened my eyes so wide that this Southern California girl has fully embraced the Bay Area Foodie World.

Upon joining Brown-Miller Communications six years ago, I was immersed in what was the beginning of the childhood obesity transformation. This week, I witnessed how the seeds have become a movement to look at food and how it affects us and, more importantly, our future generations. Thank you, first lady Michelle Obama for expanding this dialogue.

As a mother of two, it occurred to me that the guilt I often felt when it came to feeding the right things to my children wasn’t completely in my control. I constantly had to fight the marketing messages that surround all of us as we wake up. Answering my children’s questions “why can’t we have soda?” or “what’s wrong with the turkey, cheese and crackers in the cute box?” became an annoying routine while shopping. Through our work with the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, I get the issues, and I know how advertising messages can be deceiving. But my children don’t, and I am often left feeling like the “bad mom” who deprives my children of sweets or the experience of “being just a kid.”

This week, however, I felt I had gained some armor of strength from Pollan and Kessler’s discussion of how our culture of overindulgence and over-processed industry policies is eating us from the inside out. We have so much more work to do to reverse the bad policies and habits that have taken decades to establish, and the challenge has only begun.

Inspired by the conversation, it moved me to have a dialogue of my own with my family. I pulled out my signed copy of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Young Reader’s Edition, and invited the kids to become food detectives with me. It’s time to change the dialogue of food, and it starts at home. I invite you to do the same.

~ Muriel

photo credit: wellnessgossip.com