The Avocado Sundae

When you sit down to write a new blog and you end up just gnawing at your fingernails for an hour in the hope that your fingertips will become too bruised and tender to actually type anything, you realise you may be trying to suppress certain childhood memories. This blog post is a good example, since it has taken me a full hour to write this single paragraph.

By now you are probably thinking that something truly horrific happened to me, something so mentally scarring that I need to share it with the world in order to gain proper closure. Well, I’m afraid that after building it up so much, the story itself (which happened when I was seven-years-old) is going to feel a little anticlimactic … but since I’ve wasted so much time already, I’d like to persist.

I was sitting at the kitchen table one night, putting forward a carefully constructed argument (basically just whining, with a lot of mumbling mixed in) about why I didn’t want to eat my avocado, when my father suddenly stood up and removed the offending fruit from my plate.

It was uncharacteristic of my dad to concede defeat so early into the night and I was further shocked when he then turned to my brothers and I and cheerfully asked if we all wanted dessert. Did he just have a memory lapse or something?

Either way, I was very pleased with myself - that was until he handed me my dessert bowl.

Me: “Hey, what’s this?”

Dad (very causally): “That’s ice cream.”

Me: “No, it’s got green stuff in it.”

Dad: “Oh that, well, you don’t like avocado but you do like ice cream, and so I thought that if I mixed the two together you might start liking avocado.”

Me (a bit whiny again): “But I don’t want to eat the avocado bit.”

Dad: “Well it is mixed through, so if you want your ice cream, you have to eat the avocado bit.”

By this point, Dad and the boys were already halfway through their snow white uncontaminated desserts, whilst mine was slowly melting into a green lumpy river.

Now, rather than go into the gory details, I’d just like to say that there is a reason that ‘the avocado sundae’ has never been invented, or if it has, it’s never been a mainstream hit, and that’s because it’s seriously disgusting!

But I have to thank my father too, because he actually did me a favour that night. And it wasn’t just cleaning up my sick. My dad planted a seed in my head (maybe it was an avocado one) that slowly grew and evolved in my mind.

It’s very simple really: if you want to encourage children to embrace their fruit and vegetables, it’s important to be creative.

So I guess being traumatised by the avocado sundae was a good thing, because it pushed me to find other ways to make fruit and vegetables fun for children.

Now, after years of testing my own recipes with preschool children, I am releasing a story-based cookbook with edible food characters called Kindy Kitchen.

And I can almost hear my seven-year-old self sigh with relief.

 

Text © Jessica Rosman

 

 

 

Grade A Idiot

It’s a wonder I have any teeth at all, considering I snacked my way through primary school. You might be wondering how I was able to do this, considering there were thirty or more children just waiting to snitch on me in class.

The answer is pockets, lots and lots of pockets.

It’s no coincidence that most candy bars and lolly bags are the exact size of a child’s pocket. It would have only taken one marketing executive with the brain the size of an M&M to work out that the most profitable product placement for any confectionary item was inside a child’s school uniform.

I may sound cynical now but trust me, as a child, I was blissfully unaware that by storing half-melted treats in my pocket, I was buying into one of the oldest confectionary scams in the book.

I crunched and crackled my way through every class, thinking I must be extra bright to have tricked my teachers for so long. I assumed they just thought I was the quiet, contemplative type; little did they know that I was unable to speak due to the fact I was harbouring a small platoon of chocolate soldiers inside my mouth.

Perhaps it was because I was only six-years-old at the time, or perhaps the sugar had already eroded large chunks of my brain, whatever the case, I had somehow convinced myself of this completely unfounded fact: if my mouth was closed when I was crunching lollies, no one would be able to hear me eating.

In any case, my little candy-munching scheme was brought to an end one afternoon when the teacher put down her book and said, “Could Miss Jessica Thompson please spit out whatever she is eating so that we might have a chance at hearing the words in this book.”

I’d been caught out and completely humiliated in front of the whole class! My cheeks, stuffed to the flaps with sugary cough drops, burned with shame.

I don’t remember snacking on so much candy during class after that, which is probably the reason I don’t have dentures now.

Anyway, it’s just another reason why being a sugar fiend can ruin your life, or at the very least, your dignity.


Text © Jessica Rosman 2015



Divorcing Junk Food

You want the ugly truth? I wasn’t always the model of health that I am today. I didn’t fly out of my mother’s womb wearing a giant fruit hat and a pink and green apron. I never pranced around my living room as an over-active four-year-old shouting that every child should eat more fruit and vegetables. I’m sure that even as a teenager I couldn’t name many types of apples.

The simple fact is that when I was about eight, my parents divorced and my two brothers and I took to drowning our sorrows in junk food. It was the early nineties and the ‘all you can eat’ buffet was a booming business for most family restaurants. Every weekend and some weeknights, my dad would scoop us up like we were a couple of wet rags left on the carpet, and take us to a colourful restaurant that had loud music and an endless supply of soft serve ice cream. This was how I got through the huge anxiety associated with a family break-up. The sugar was there for me and I was there for it.

Little did I know that I was creating a nasty addiction that would only lead to suffering and ill-health. But it gave me comfort at an extremely vulnerable period in my life. The creepiest part is that I began to associate junk food with healing.

The problem with emotional food binging is that it gives you a very short-lived high. You feel really good for a very short time and then you feel really crappy. Whenever I felt the urge to tear my hair out in life, I immediately binged on the bad food.

Here are some of those tearing-hair-out moments:

  • Parents sit me down and tell me that we will no longer all be living in the same house.
  • Dad announces he is moving to the other side of the country and I can choose to live with either him or mum (the distance being around 4,000 kilometres).
  • Both parents re-marry. 

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I had experienced a lot more tearing-hair-out moments and it’s safe to say I didn’t cope well with them. As a result, I had done a lot of binging and I was an emotional wreck. I was also a little overweight and constantly tired because my poor little adrenals were burnt out.

Instead of continuing the cycle, I starting doing something that I love to do: I started to read. I read day and night about health, squeezing as much information into my head as possible. One of the books that changed my life was The Optimum Nutrition Bible by Patrick Holford. Reading this book made me realise that a healthy diet coupled with a good amount of exercise, equips you with the tools you need for all those tearing-hair-out moments. You may even end up with more hair.

So I gave my pantry an overhaul, banishing biscuits, lollies and sugared snacks from my home as if they were troublemakers looking to start a fight.

Within a matter of weeks I was waking up with so much clarity and focus that people wondered if I had undergone a brain transplant.

My only regret is that I didn’t binge on healthy eating books sooner.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015