Confessions of a Former Dandelion Smoothie Drinker
Weird stuff I used to do in the name of "health"
I started buying broccoli in a bag sometime last year. This might seem like an odd confession. Buying broccoli or any food in a bag is a fairly benign and relatively ordinary behavior. In fact it might seem like a typical grocery store choice for many people but for me, not so much.
For many years I prided myself on being a person who ate mostly local and seasonal food. I created lots of content about this, including one of the more popular, non-yoga videos on my YouTube channel.
I was indoctrinated into this lifestyle choice through a few different avenues.
I read the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, which was my first introduction to the idea of eating seasonally, as well as what is available locally or what you can grow yourself. There are a lot of things to appreciate about the book, if you can set aside the ginormous amount of privilege required to CHOOSE to only eat the food that you can grow yourself or obtain from local growers.
Books like this are like cocaine for middle to upper class white women like me who are also interested in environmentalism. Instead of addressing the systemic problems within the food system, like factory farms or low wages for farm workers, we’re convinced that if we just go to farmer’s markets and make our own cheese, we can save the planet.
If I’m honest, I still want to believe this. Mostly because those issues are so large and overwhelming we can feel powerless in the wake of them. Buying local produce, making our own bread, and growing backyard veggies feels as though we are taking a small measure of that power back.
Then again, Kingsolver devotes a chapter to her belief that bananas and other exotic fruits are bad because they are “the Humvees of the food world.”
I read this book not too long after it was published in 2007. I was 26 at the time. I did not have kids. I taught yoga full time, which was around 12 - 14 classes a week. I didn’t have other obligations beyond that. The idea of growing my own food and eating both seasonally, as well as locally, felt relatively doable because I lived in a part of the world where I could get locally grown food pretty much year round with minimal supplementation.
I was also still battling with disordered eating, so this fit neatly into those rules and restrictions. When Kingsolver wrote about the bad news bananas, I stopped eating them for a long time.
I loved the ideas this book presented, about pushing back against the food system by radical acts of growing your own and supporting your local ecology, as well as economy. Plus, I’ve always been fairly DIY enthusiastic, so the idea of making foods instead of buying them sounded fun. Oh and being very type-A, I am motivated by challenge.
And while I wasn’t eating exactly like Barbara Kingsolver — I wasn’t making my own cheese or going to local grain mills for grain to make bread or even starting a backyard garden — most of the food I ate was grown locally and in season.
A few years later, I accidentally joined a wellness cult that built upon these ideas and expanded them. The foundation was rooted in Ayurveda (a holistic and traditional system of medicine native to India) but taught by a white woman who was interested in profiting off of the naivety and eagerness of health conscious young women in the yoga world.
When I first started working with this woman, I took courses about Ayurveda and seasonal living that taught me how to live a life more aligned with nature and more in tune with the rhythm of my body.
What it morphed into was seasonal liquid-only cleanses, rigid eating protocols, extreme intermittent fasting, and other practices that made living a lot more complicated and a lot less fun.
Much of what she suggested were things like foraging in your yard for dandelion greens and “eating from your patch” because eating locally was better for your digestion. It sounded like science to me, so I happily accepted her statements about nutrition as fact.
What she suggested about nutrition and health required so much discernment, so much labor, and so much energy. I think I loved the idea of this because in my twisted way of thinking it felt like if I was working this hard to feed myself and “be healthy” it had to be good, right? And by extension, I was good for doing this incredibly difficult but worthwhile work of being a healthy person.
Convenience was frowned upon and considered to be another word for “lazy”, which is something I didn’t want to be. So I dutifully added dandelion greens in my smoothies and salads, choking them down and pretending it was delicious because I didn’t just want to be healthy; I wanted my body to thrive.
The programs she offered (and continues to offer) sit at the intersection between diet culture and spirituality. And for a long time, this is the corner I hung out at often — when I was still deeply embedded in spiritual seeking and controlling my body.
I don’t exactly remember what it was that shook me loose and had me questioning her teachings, but around the time I was postpartum with my second kid, I started to pull back. I hung onto her teachings for a long time, still believing that I shouldn’t eat anything after 5pm or that starting my day with something green was better than starting my day with carbs.
In the meantime, she is now teaching her followers to drink their own pee and giving herself coffee enemas in her kitchen, live on Instagram (you can watch a reel of her doing the latter here, if you dare. Don’t say I didn’t warn you).
I think what drew me in to both of these things is a combination of 3 powerful forces: First, the deep desire to optimize health combined with the deep desire to be thin. Second, the desire to live more “naturally” or closer to nature. Third, the desire to protect the planet through small, personal actions.
That last one is the real hook for me when it comes to making my own food from scratch. It wasn’t some sort of trad wife fantasy where I wanted to make everything from scratch because I thought that would make me a better wife or mother or a more virtuous woman. It was that I thought these actions would help make the world, as a whole, cleaner and better. I wanted to believe that by making my own almond milk or hummus, I was reducing the amount of packaging I was purchasing and throwing away and in that way, doing my part to protect the planet.
Part of what fueled this is the 3rd thing that had me avoiding bagged broccoli and any other fruits or veggies sold in plastic packaging. The Zero Waste influencers on instagram would frequently post photos of their “trash jar,” a small glass jar filled with the things they could neither compost or recycle and I felt inspired by the idea of reducing waste by simply avoiding packaging. That seemed easy enough to do, not to mention impactful. There’s a great article on Wired about how the Zero Waste movement started, as well as why the movement went up in flames.
Because I lived in places with access to year round farmer’s markets and food co-ops with bulk foods, as well as a level of privilege giving me access to these things, I embraced buying dry goods in refillable glass jars. I stopped buying foods with excessive packaging. Or what I felt was excessive. Like cereal or any fresh vegetables encased in plastic. During this time I didn’t buy much “processed” food either.
It felt good to be doing something. And also, my diet was crazy restrictive.
During this time, I had 2 kids and became pregnant with another. We also moved away from the DC area and moved to San Antonio (TX), Alamogordo (NM), and Gulf Breeze (FL).
When we lived in San Antonio, I still managed a lot of this low-packaging, DIY food making. I went to 2 farmer’s markets every weekend. I shopped at multiple grocery stores so I could buy in bulk. I devoted an absurd amount of time making homemade hummus, granola, sauerkraut, vegetable stock, energy balls, peanut butter — much of which my picky 4 year old wouldn’t touch and my 1 year old wasn’t yet able to try.
Alamogordo was my first experience with what is known as a food desert — limited access to fresh foods or grocery stores. While there were grocery stores and a Walmart, the produce was often in bad shape, so every single Saturday I drove over an hour to the nearest farmer’s market and food coop. It was a 4hr round trip, most of the time. But my kids were younger and it was a chance to have a little space in the car, often solo, so I embraced it.
When we lived in Florida, I joined a food coop that allowed me to bring my own jars for dry goods. But it was also very expensive. I’d shop at 3 different stores every week just to try and get the best deals. I also went to the Saturday farmer’s market in downtown Pensacola, but the most of the vendors were artisans or craftspeople. Very few farmer’s sell produce there because as it turns out, there aren’t many farms in the Florida panhandle despite year round good growing weather. However, there were a few great Pick Your Own fruit farms, not to mention loads of fruit trees in my actual neighborhood, so I got really into canning and making homemade jam.
We were also in Florida when the pandemic hit. My husband was deployed. I had a 7 year old, 4 year old, and an infant. I was solo and still trying to hang onto the various threads of this lifestyle — local foods, eating from your patch, homemade everything to reduce packaging. When I wasn’t teaching yoga online, I was shopping or cooking and then trying to feed my kids homemade tortillas, which they hated.
By the time we moved to the Air Force Base in Eastern NM where we live now, I was over all of it. The diet culture based restrictions that had made food public enemy number 1 to my body. The zero waste rules and behaviors that felt increasingly like a prison I’d built for myself to make motherhood even harder.
Plus, we live in another food desert. The local farmer’s market only operates July through early October, with very limited produce, so that locavore lifestyle is not even possible.
My kids were pickier than ever, so I’d already branched out to more and more foods that I’d previously avoided in the hopes they might eat more. (Spoiler alert: the only foods they embraced were pretzels/chips, a specific type of granola bar, and Beyond Burgers). Cooking for my kids is already fairly demoralizing but I also no longer had the bandwidth to make all of the foods I used to make from scratch.
Now, I make sourdough once every 2 weeks or so, challah on Fridays, and peanut butter because it's stupid easy to make if you have a vitamix.
When I look back at all of the food-based labor I used to do, I feel exhausted and wonder how I ever actually managed it.
I feel a lot of compassion for the young woman I once was who desperately wanted to use her food choices to make a difference in the world. Part of the problem continues to be in how we weaponize individual responsibility, then cross-pollinate it with diet culture or sustainability or both.
There’s a fantastic episode of the Burnt Toast podcast with
that I stared listening to when I’d already written the bulk of this piece. What I’ve listened to so far dives deeper into this thread between diet culture, consumerism, and individual responsibility. I highly recommend listening:All of this is to say that I should have been buying broccoli in a bag years ago but I didn’t because I thought that I would be sacrificing my values if I did.
But who do those values really serve?
Eating local can be a powerful choice that benefits local farmers, which supports both the local economy as well as ecology. But when that choice prevents you from feeding your kids the foods they are actually willing to eat, it becomes a health issue and a disordered behavior. While I still might not eat cucumbers or tomatoes in the middle winter myself, my 4 year old who is newly obsessed with cucumbers, should be allowed to. And so she does.
Trying to reduce the amount of waste my family and I create is noble, but it doesn’t actually make the impact I want it to. It also doesn’t address the serious inequities when it comes to food availability or affordability.
And ultimately, making food from scratch isn’t an act of rebellion for me against a system that doesn’t value female labor, which is often domestic. In this season of my life, spending hours in the kitchen only serves to uphold those systems of oppression and prove them right — that my labor isn’t valuable. Untangling myself from the pressure of doing all of those things is an act of personal resistance against the idea of what it means to be a good mom.
Do I miss making homemade milk? No. Not really. I appreciate the convenience of being able to buy my oat milk at the store when I need it.
Will I someday go back to eating more local foods or having more DIY kitchen adventures? Maybe. But I don’t feel the same pressure to do it now, which is such a relief.
For now, I’m definitely still getting my broccoli in a bag and relying on the convenience foods I need because they work for me and my family. And I’m never going back to dandelion green smoothies.
I was turned off by the term "Zero Waste" the first time I saw it. Talk about taking a great idea (LESS waste) and making it so extreme as to be completely out of reach for almost anyone. We have a very hard time with nuance and moderation in our society and the way we look at food and waste (and our responsibilities within that system) reflect that.
That said, I *do* believe personal choices matter. Not because it's our responsibility or even within our abilities to change the system on our own, but because it orients us personally toward being more aware and more connected. That doesn't have to mean extremism, or doing All The Things, or making our own cheese if we don't want to, or if it doesn't fit in our season of life. But it's not such a bad idea to be aware that it's even possible that one COULD do many of the things we've outsourced to huge corporations, or what could be lost if said corporations "own" the majority of the food system.
And so much of it is relative, anyway. In many cultures, making your own cheese (to play out that example!) would definitely NOT be a sign of privilege, but here in the US, it's seen as upper-class and out of touch. On the other hand, there have been times in my own life when a bag of organic precut broccoli would have been way outside of what I could afford, and people in food deserts probably would be lucky find ANY broccoli, let alone fresh and organic. Or to have a knife to cut it up with, a pot to cook it in, or a range to cook it on...
I also read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle back in 2007 (at which time I had four small children) and it was instrumental in helping me look at the food system more critically, before that kind of critique was part of the mainstream conversation. Of course, at the time, I was up to my eyeballs in little kids and lived in a Midwestern city flat with a tiny backyard. I was most definitely not going to grow all or even a significant amount of my food, and when I did manage to get my hands on local produce, my kids were very likely to eat it alongside their favorite protein: Dino Nuggets. (One of the benefits of having lots of kids young is that I never had a chance to believe I could be perfect at anything. The idea was beaten out of me by the time I had multiple toddlers running around.) Still, I appreciated having more knowledge of how "the sausage is made" - literally and figuratively. The changes we made were small, but to me, at the time, they felt meaningful. (By the way, I re-read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last year and from what I recall, Kingsolver DOES address, in detail, the systemic problems within the food system. )
You're right that so much of it is about the season of life we're in. With little kids, I made little changes. Now that I'm in my mid-40s with mostly-grown kids, I'm entering my own "foraged dandelion root and homemade cheese" phase, because I have the luxury of time and a little more financial stability than I did a decade or two ago. It's fun and empowering for me, and creates a feeling of connection between the way I spend my time and the tangible result of nourishment.
Anyway, I think this is a both/and situation, not an either/or. And that it's really important not to conflate awareness with feeling as though we have to act, immediately and with perfect execution, on every idea we're exposed to.
“ Part of the problem continues to be in how we weaponize individual responsibility, then cross-pollinate it with diet culture or sustainability or both” THIS👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼