by Holly Hughes
For the rest of the night, we returned to the question of whether a mother could ruin her baby’s current health and dietary future by savoring three spoonfuls of Häagen Dazs. Suddenly that hamburger last Tuesday and those enchiladas on Friday and the fact that my wife had eaten only one salad the day before seemed to her like inevitable precursors to baby’s insulin shots, EpiPens, and eventual appearance on The Biggest Loser. “My mother,” baby would sob, “ruined me before I was born.”
I hoped a few hours’ sleep would shake this worry from us, but the next morning my wife sent me a link to an article informing me that your baby “tastes what you taste—and research has shown that the foods you consume during this time help shape what your baby will enjoy eating, even years later.” Her subject heading was “Grilled Cheese Baby, Here We Come.”
Our baby was transforming from a belly full of joy into a meal you could buy at a gas station. Mildly concerned, I looked into the research. The upshot, once you click your way from the pregnancy websites to the newspaper reports to the scientific papers themselves, is what you’d expect: baby’s diet and health pretty much follows mom’s diet and health. Grilled Cheese Mom, Grilled Cheese Baby. Kale Mom, Kale Baby.
This simple dynamic results from a complex mix of biology and culture. We’re hardwired to want sugar, salt, and fat—foods once scarce in human existence and now abundant beyond our ability to process them. But how and how much of these foods we eat when we’re infants has to do with cultural factors, such as our ethnicity and economic status, factors that show up most immediately in our families’ behavior around food. Unsurprisingly, your chances of avoiding gestational diabetes are much better if you’re conceived by an educated and healthy mother who has access to wholesome foods and an income to afford them.
The surprise is the sheer power of what researchers call the “cafeteria” or “junk-food” diet to affect a fetus.
As my wife and I learned, if mom spikes her blood sugar with Häagen Dazs, baby will react, so much so that some babies overexposed to sugar in the womb are born “addicted” to it. In certain cases, doctors need to provide newborns with a glucose drip in order to reduce their dangerously high insulin levels. Babies also show a clear preference for bottles that have had their latex nipples dipped in a sugar solution, and sugar can even work as an analgesic on infants. A baby enjoying sugar will endure more pain. Those warnings we’re now hearing about the toxic effects of sugar apply all the more to developing babies, who have about as much chance to resisting it as any other addictive drug.
In our Age of the Big Gulp, the sugar baby is the new crack baby.
So, yes, baby liked the taste of sweet. And I soon found myself pausing in the freezer aisle. How much Häagen Dazs is too much Häagen Dazs? Do those little Dixie-cup-size containers really count? The questions nagged at me, but they took a larger toll on my wife.
“Eating anything processed now feels to me like drinking french-fry oil.”
“You’re doing fine,” I assured her. Ever since my wife had found out she was pregnant, our refrigerator had looked like an ad for Whole Foods.
“What if the baby needs magnesium this week, and I’m not tracking my milligrams of magnesium.” She spat out the magnesium as if it disgusted her. “And one day I’ll have to say, ‘Sorry, baby, I just didn’t care enough about you to track my magnesium! So you don’t get whatever you should get that’s made of magnesium!’”
I wondered aloud, to no one in particular, if it might be worth having an occasional glass of wine to relieve the stress of worrying about a prenatal diet.
“The pregnancy guide says that experts say that the prenatal research says that expecting mothers should be eating multiple meals a day. Not just three.” She was reading the guide, I should probably note, while eating a chocolate chip cookie.
“You have those snacks.”
“Maybe I should eat half of my lunch at lunch and then eat the other lunch later.”
“Maybe double every meal and eat all day?”
My wife looked up from the guide and released a long breath that began as a hiss and ended as a sigh.
Fortunately, the research out there offers more than information meltdown. The good news is that, if mom eats healthfully, she can not only create a healthier baby but also shape baby’s future eating habits for the better.
Take a vegetable like carrots. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center designed an experiment to find out whether pregnant women and new mothers who drink carrot juice would have babies who also liked it. One group of women was asked to drink carrot juice regularly during their last trimester. Another group was asked to drink it during their first three months of breast feeding. The final group didn’t drink it at all. When their babies were six months old, the women in all three groups “exposed” their babies to carrot juice by mixing it in cereal.
The results? Those babies whose mothers had drunk carrot juice, either while they were pregnant or while they were breast feeding, “exhibited fewer negative facial expressions” than the babies whose mothers hadn’t had any carrot juice. The flavor of the carrot, in the amniotic fluid and in the mother’s milk, had made a difference in the babies’ response. Some babies, I suppose, made yuck-yuck faces, while those babies more inclined to carrots made single-yuck faces. I can picture the mothers staring at their babies the way an insecure chef might scrutinize a restaurant critic: how much does this guy hate my dish?
So if, like me, you’re thinking that fewer negative facial expressions isn’t exactly a triumph when it comes to getting a baby to like certain foods, keep in mind that babies normally need to experience a new taste eight to ten times before they’ll start eating it. Everything gets spit on the feeding tray at first. Like fussy critics, getting babies to like certain foods takes time.
And yet the carrot juice shows us this process starts in the womb. Researchers have found that the flavors of fruit, vegetables, and spices show up in amniotic fluid a few hours after a pregnant woman has eaten them. Even perfume and cigarette smoke, when inhaled by mothers-to-be, make it into the womb.
“Dietary learning” is the phrase used by Julie Mennella, one of the researchers behind the carrot experiment, to describe this process. As a fetus, then as an infant, the tastes that we experience as our mothers eat prepare us for the tastes we’ll experience once we start eating by ourselves. We learn what our future diets will be like from our mothers and, to a large extent, from what our mothers like.
In light of this research, I devised a plan for baby’s dietary learning and, after days of preparation, shared it with my wife.
“Our goal,” I said, flashing the first slide of my PowerPoint presentation and displaying a close-up of her rounded belly, “is to take advantage of this moment when baby can finally taste. What we want is to give baby the widest possible range of tastes.”
She nodded cautiously.
Next slide: an image of brilliantly colored spices—rusty orange, midnight blue, berry red—piled in grainy heaps.
“The challenge,” I said, “is that only the strongest tastes are able to flavor the amniotic fluid.” I glanced at my wife. “Garlic, for example.”
“Yes,” she said, less intrigued than braced.
“So we’ll be using the most powerful spices occurring in nature.” Another look.
“We?”
Next slide: a map of the world, marked with six red dots. “Our other goal,” I continued, “is to ‘expose’ baby to as many global cuisines as possible.” I thought I sounded impressive using the scientific lingo.
“Ambitious,” my wife said.
“Think of it as baby’s first study-abroad program, in utero.”
I then clicked through a series of slides, highlighting the six meals that I would cook in the next six days, meals that would take us, culinarily, around the world. We would begin with the street vendors in Vietnam and, from there, travel to the hearths of Northern India. Then onward we’d go, finding our way to a table i
n Tunisia, and then we’d head north, into the icy Norwegian sea. From there, at last, we’d cross the Atlantic Ocean and land on the shores of the arid Yucatán Peninsula, all before arriving back home, in Ohio, on what would fortuitously be the Fourth of July.
Our travels would cover approximately 29,000 imaginary miles, more than the circumference of the earth. It would cost more real dollars than I’m going to admit. And it would dirty every dish we had in the house multiple times over. After we were done, I would never want to travel again, and I’d accomplish this culinary feat all without ever leaving the kitchen.
“Are you sure you want to do this? Seems like a lot of work.” To me, my wife’s words sounded more like code for “Please don’t feed me more amniotic fluid.”
“It’ll end with pie,” I promised. “Apple pie.”
“Have you ever made pie?”
No, I thought, but then I hadn’t made any of the dishes I’d planned, but I wasn’t going to let that fact deprive baby of an education. Besides, how hard could it be?
An International Prenatal Gastronomical Education in Six Meals (with Travel Notes)
Monday
Location: Vietnam
Meal: Coconut Lemongrass Chicken and Sweet Potato Shrimp Cakes
Major Spices: Lemongrass, ginger, garlic
Notes: The corn starch on the fried shrimp cakes doesn’t ring of health. “On my final bite,” says wife, “I suddenly ask myself: should a pregnant woman be eating shrimp?” Wife reports no response from baby.
Tuesday
Location: Northern India and Pakistan
Meal: Baked Beef Curry and Saag Paner with an Anise-Almond Lassi
Major Spices: Anise, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, ginger, cayenne
Notes: I cook for four and a half hours. Wife eats Cheez-Its a half an hour before meal. “Not having had to do the work,” says wife, “I can tell you this tastes amazing.” Wife reports no response from baby.
Wednesday
Location: Tunisia and Morocco
Meal: Lamb Meatballs in Saffron with Golden-Raisin Couscous
Major Spices: Saffron, turmeric, clove, cayenne, cinnamon, ginger, garlic, cumin
Notes: Tastes amazing, like the spice trade happening in your mouth. “Baby likes this dish so far,” says wife. “Are you feeling something?” I ask. “No, but I can tell by how happy my tummy is.” Wife reports no response from baby.
Thursday
Location: Norway
Meal: Baked Salmon with a Juniper Berry Rub, Anchovies and Potato Casserole, Sautéed Broccoli, and Bay Leaf and Fresh Berry Custard
Major Spices: Juniper berries, bay leaves
Notes: Norway is the big surprise. Its cuisine has a spiciness rivaling the previous meals, but wholly its own. Wife reports not liking Norway. Wife reports no response from baby.
Friday
Location: Southern Mexico
Meal: Yucatecan Slow-Roasted Pork, Cumin-Pickled Onions, Guacamole, and Hand-Made Tortillas
Major Spices: Habanero, clove, garlic, cumin
Notes: The habanero peppers give the pork the blazing color of a Mayan sunset. “In terms of pure chew experience,” says wife, “this one wins.” Wife reports no response from baby.
Saturday, the Fourth of July
Location: The Middle of Middle America
Meal: Cheeseburgers, Baked Beans, Coleslaw, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and Apple Pie
Major Spice: Mustard
Notes: I make mac and cheese from a box, predicting that, despite my efforts, it’s likely to be baby’s favorite. “All the sides are basically condiments,” says wife. “The baked beans are ketchup. The coleslaw is mayo. The mac and cheese is cheese.” Wife reports no response from baby.
On Sunday, we ordered pizza. We were both ready for something simple, and what’s better that a nice slice of fatty, starchy, sweetly saucy goodness served in a cardboard box?
Did baby respond to the pizza? you might be asking. Good question. I also wondered if that would happen. But no, baby didn’t go for pizza either. You might also be asking, as many of our friends did, whether I was disappointed that baby never responded to any of the meals I cooked, no, not to one single spice. Wasn’t that, wouldn’t you say, a little frustrating?
Sort of, but not really. Sure, I’ll freely admit that I would have liked it if baby had done its little cymbal dance when my wife sipped her lassi. And I’ll admit that, by the time I finished making the apple pie, I felt fried and self-pitying. After all that cooking and baby not responding to any of it, shouldn’t the band in the Fourth of July parade have played just for me?
In the end, though, baby’s radio silence clarified for me a few of my own expectations about becoming a father, which are, with a nod to Dickens, not all that great. I don’t mean I’m not looking forward to being a father. I am. I’m thrilled about it. What I mean is that my expectation is that baby, more often than not, will sidestep, thwart, or frustrate any particular expectations I might have as a father. Baby will probably not like, for example, the books I’d like for baby to like or baby will probably not like books at all. Baby will probably not like the foods I’d like for baby to like, nor will baby likely become the baby foodie I’d like baby to be. No, baby will probably like Elmo and eat paste. That, as a future father, is what I’m expecting.
And I think that’s okay. In fact, I think I’ll love the baby all the same, maybe all the more, for it. Expectations aren’t as great as surprises, and that, as every parent I know is now quick to stress, is what baby will bring to our table and our lives. Indeed, that’s what baby has already done.
Case in point: To celebrate the Fourth, my wife and I joined the crowd to watch the fireworks explode over the small river that skirts our town. Kids were running around crazily in the dark, as kids do, and fireflies were flaring up in the nearby trees. We waited with everyone else, looking up, my arms wrapped around my wife’s belly and her back pressed against my chest. Finally, the first tester shot launched into the sky with a streak of white light and exploded above us. As its boom echoed against the nearby hills, my wife turned to me and smiled.
“The baby’s kicking,” she said.
My Father, the YouTube Star
BY KEVIN PANG
From the New York Times Magazine
Food editor at The Onion’s entertainment website A.V. Club, Kevin Pang* is a former staff writer for the Chicago Tribune and a 2010 winner of the James Beard award. Imagine his surprise, then, to discover that he wasn’t the only member of his family with a following in the food world.
The first few emails were marked “Fwd: Jeffrey Pang sent you a video,” so I ignored them. Statistics were on my side: In the history of parental email forwards, roughly 0.001 percent have been worth opening.
Later he followed up by phone. I told him I hadn’t found time to watch whatever it was he sent. Several seconds of silence hung between us before my dad replied: “Oh.”
This is how it had gone for 30-some years—a father-son relationship kept cordial and indifferent through habit and physical distance. I live in Chicago; he’s in Seattle. Once a week, we’d talk on the phone for five minutes and exchange the least substantive of pleasantries: “How’s the weather?” “Plans this weekend?” Not a meaningful conversation so much as a scripted set of talking points.
Only when my mom nudged did I open the video Dad had sent.
Fade in: the company logo for Creative Production, with the E-A-T in “Creative” highlighted. Cue soft piano melody, the type of royalty-free soundtrack that sounds like the hold Muzak when you call your dermatologist. Dissolve to title screen: “Catherine Mom’s Shanghainese Green Onion Pancake,” with its translation in Chinese. And then a photo of my mother (Catherine) and my grandma. A shot of our white kitchen island, and my mother’s hands, her unmistakable wedding band, digging into and massaging wet dough. My virulently anti-technology Chinese parents were starring in their own internet cooking show.
As a child who immigrated from H
ong Kong, I was raised as an American during the day and Chinese after school. I brought home Western ideas that confounded my parents: sarcasm, irony, recalcitrance. My father and I argued all the time. The grievances were usually benign, but they would erupt into battles between two headstrong males, each standing his cultural ground. It didn’t help that I stubbornly refused to speak Cantonese at home. Or when, during college, I went home for Thanksgiving with newly bleached blond hair. My dad was apoplectic, screaming the moment he saw me in the driveway, accusing me of being ashamed of my Chinese heritage.
Our differences would burn hot, then smolder, then fizzle to a détente. Eventually we would acknowledge each other, and everything would stay cool until the next flare-up. Our relationship reached a plateau of cordial indifference: We lived 2,000 miles apart and talked on the phone once a week about nothing important at all.
But something changed in our relationship the day I switched jobs. I was working as a metro news reporter at The Chicago Tribune when I was offered a position on the paper’s food writing staff. I had zero experience, but I did have one advantage: I was Cantonese. We Cantonese have a love of eating that borders on mania. Our people eat every part of almost every animal; we were the original snout-to-tail diners, long before hipsters hijacked the term. Hong Kong, where I lived until age 6, is a place where instead of asking “How are you?” we greet one another with “Have you eaten yet?”
Food was my dad’s obsession. He had always been a marvelous cook. He dreamed of being one of those Iron Chefs in white toques who enter Kitchen Stadium through dramatic fog. Much of the joy of Chinese food for him seemed nostalgic: He always lamented his decision to leave his beloved Hong Kong, to come here, to a foreign land, for the sake of his children.
So when I became a food writer, my father and I shared, for the first time, a mutual interest. I would call to ask about recipes and cooking techniques. He would school me on the world of Cantonese cuisine. The first time he visited me in Chicago, I took him to a dim sum restaurant for brunch, and as we ate shrimp dumplings and barbecued pork buns, he explained—gesticulating with his arms like a conductor—how the shiu mai’s wrapper should caress its filling “like a dress on a woman, like petals of a flower, like prongs on a diamond ring.” I had never heard him speak with such enthusiasm or eloquence. My father never taught me to swim, or to ride a bike, but he did teach me how to tell a good dim sum restaurant from a great one.
