WHEN I SAW my friend Patty in the grocery store, my hand was on a box of pre-packaged Rice Krispies Treats and I am not sure which of us was more embarrassed.
"The Twinkies are in the next aisle," she said, laughing.
I felt like a dieter caught with her head in the fridge at midnight.
"Didn't you see the Wall Street Journal," I said in an attempt to divert her. "Marshmallow desserts are all the rage at New York City's best restaurants this season."
My friend Patty, petite and thin, does not eat Rice Krispies Treats. Neither do I, and I am not petite and not thin.
The difference between us is that my friend Patty would not pack them in her kids' lunches, either.
My friend Patty does not drink soda and neither do her children. She has bottled water in her kitchen. She makes fruit shakes with protein powder for breakfast and cooks vegetarian meals, many of them from the fruits of her husband's organic garden. There is fresh fruit spilling over the counters of her kitchen.
"There is a food line I will not cross," said my friend Patty, no slave to haute cuisine. "And I think it is painted with marshmallow cream."
We pointed our grocery carts in different directions and parted. I was left to feel the full weight of the dietary capitulations I have made in the face of children who do not eat healthfully but who nag with the best of them.
I am one of those mothers who started out swearing to heaven in a moonlit nursery that she would never poison the perfect bodies of her children with sugar, salt, caffeine or unpronounceable preservatives.
I have waved those promises away like the smoke from frying bacon. If my kids will eat it, I will buy it. That is my new oath. All those hysterical rumors about microwave waves and NutraSweet are just a New Age plot.
Once, the food pyramid had a prominent place on my refrigerator door. Built on a base of breads, grains and pastas, it peaks with a tiny portion of sweets and is a model for healthy eating.
That propaganda went the way of the color-coded household chores chart. My children do not care what is on the fridge, only what is in it. And if it isn't full of sodium or doesn't have the shelf life of nuclear waste, they will not eat it.
I blinked first. Simple as that. I did not believe the pediatrician's admonition that kids will eat what is good for them if they are hungry enough. When mine began an informal hunger strike as young children, I panicked and went for the calories. Any calories.
I was certain they would waste away, so I fed them candy-colored cereal, brown-and-serve sausage, pastry pockets stuffed with who-knows-what and pizza topped with all forms of pig. The only criteria was that they eat it. I served root beer floats for calcium and buttered popcorn as a vegetable. Little Debbie moved into our house and brought her little cakes with her.
When I bought cheese curls -- from the dairy food group -- my son pumped his fist victoriously and hissed, "Yes!"
Now he returns home from school, after stopping at convenience store, sucking on 12 ounces of high-test caffeine and tearing at something called a "Slim Jim," which looks like a recycled shoe and smells like imitation barbecue smoke.
But I do not carp at him because this little snack stems his appetite until I can whip up some deep-fried cheese sticks or a bowl of Ramen noodles flavored with enough sodium to preserve a corpse.
You see, the food fight in my house has evolved from children too picky to eat to pre-teens too hungry to wait. My children are starving all of the time. They come home from school and start eating, and they don't stop until they sleep.
French bread pizzas, Hot Pockets, microwave dinners, waffles, bowls of cereal, cans of Spaghettios, hot dogs, microwave french fries, bags of chips, hot turkey sandwiches made from frozen bags of meat and gravy. All washed down with gallons of lemonade.
I make more trips to the grocery store now than I did to the bathroom when I was carrying them. All I do from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m. is load the dishwasher. If I tried to censure their food choices, I'd be bitten.
So the pre-packaged Rice Krispies Treats my friend Patty caught me with are not my diet-busting secret or my nod to New York chefs. They are just another shovel full of coal for the fire that burns inside my kids right now, a fire that has consumed all my resolve to make them healthy eaters.
I have only one card left and I play it every couple of days.
I give my children a handful of vitamins and tell them they are Skittles.
Since the cheese curls, they don't suspect a thing.
Pub Date: 1/07/97
