The numerology of diets
Have a 3-2-4-4 day!
Salutations people who don’t allow cookies on their computers,
Just before she left for camp, I had a long conversation with LadyTeen (my daughter) about diets. My son is vegetarian and she’s enthralled and respectful of his choice. Me too.
The interesting thing is that I find myself battling an internal voice that I didn’t know I had.
It is a voice (possibly my Health teacher from….4th grade?) saying “Have a 3-2-4-4 day.”
A million years ago, the US Government decided we weren’t eating right and all schoolkids were taught about the “four major food groups” and how many servings of each group a healthy person needed to eat per day. In Texas, while we all knew the words protein and carbohydrate, the groups were called dairy, meat, fruit/veg, and bread/cereal.
Possibly this extended beyond Texas to other farming/ranching states.
Point is, even in relating this to my daughter, I realized that it was impossible to eat that kind of a diet. Two meats every day? I recall having to write out a typical daily menu using those numbers for class (it didn’t look anything like what we actually ate and resulted only in my pb&j lunch suddenly turning into baloney on white bread with mayo—“healthier”—we still had Lithuanian cheese dumplings with sour cream for dinner).
Here’s what’s interesting to me: I still have those numbers in my head. Even now, when the food pyramid looks like this:
I am enthralled and spend entirely too much time these days digging up these sorts of archaic ideas implanted when I was in middle school. Mostly in middle school, we were learning cutting-edge science, current events, and new sociology. My guess is that this hasn’t changed: middle schoolers are probably still being inundated with the newest ideas, only some of which may have historical legs.
I’m curious as to what you learned in middle school that turned out to be completely wrong.
In the meantime, this is what I’ve done this week:
Attended a great Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island. I put some photos on Facebook.
Posted a link to my Medium articles on my official author website.
Wrote 4/5 of a New York State-funded grant for Pen Parentis and prepped to start the NEA grant next. Yes, lots of coffee.
Connected some terrific writers to be featured on the Sensitive Rebel podcast. (here’s one of them; and here’s the episode where Steve interviewed me on “Curiosity, Mistakes, and How to Write a Book while being a Parent” - feel free to share this podcast around!)
Here’s something ridiculous: I spent too much time with my amazing Friday morning meetup crew discussing a new app. You point your phone’s camera at a pile of LEGOS and the app will suggest all the various things you can build with those bricks. It is called “Brickit” - but I am not giving you a link because while I agree this is a fantastically intriguing use of math and technology it is the very WORST use of LEGO that I have ever seen. And I have seen “Peter Pig the Cook.”
This app is like having your mom stand over you while you create informing you that you COULD also not have so many curse words and COULD make the story end happily. Sure, these 50 bricks can make a dog and a bunny and a halberd and a kitchen sink and a necklace and a tree, but you can also make an ugly monster and a planet no one has ever seen and a bird with four heads—no app will show you those creatures.
On an entirely different note: with the development of kits, LEGO has migrated from a blank slate toy that encourages utter creativity into a way to train your toddler to follow directions. This makes me sad (even though I think the Death Star is a cool LEGO kit, and the architecture line is absolute brilliance.) But still. I only think it is brilliant because someone invented it. It doesn’t get more impressive the third and tenth time that someone assembles the same Big Ben kit.
Use your creativity! Use your brain! Let apps organize your time if you need them, but please, leave space for blank creativity. Make your own LEGO creations without the manual. Not everything has to look like the Death Star. Exercise your curiosity.
Have an unprescribed day or two. Maybe it will be great. Might a 3244 day, might be a day entirely without numbers.
Imagine that - a day without numbers. Wow.
PS: Happy birthday to Marina Aris, my wonderful publisher! Buy my book through her website if you haven’t gotten it yet.