Not the Kind of People

Last week, I was talking to a neighbor's mom about the newly opened deli in town and she said, "We're not restaurant people or fast food people. We eat at home." This honesty and clarity of this statement really struck me. She wasn't being granola-righteous about it, or judgmental about people who do eat out, or taking a stance on fast food, processed food, or the like. She was telling it like it was for her family: she and her husband are Italian immigrants who raised their family in the Bronx in the 1970s, just when jarred spaghetti sauce was hitting the shelves. I get the sense there wasn't much money, or any need (I just know she is a great cook), to eat out.

Of course, Mama and I are both restaurant and fast food people. In fact, we were trying to decide if, in the 11+ years we have been together, there has been a SINGLE week that has gone by that we haven't eaten out or taken in or stopped for a snack or picked up a bite or gotten some coffee. I don't think so. She can't remember either. I could give all sorts of rationales: we were both working and found cooking nightly meals or organizing sack lunches too challenging; restaurants are one of our major forms of entertainment (in the same breath, I would say that, in 11+ years, we've seen only 4 films in the theater together: Titanic, 2 Harry Potters, and the last LOTR); we travel a lot on weekends. But in the end, we know it's excessive, from a financial and health standpoint.

And so, we have a new goal--once my mom leaves, mind you--we're not going to eat out at all for one whole week: no lunches from the deli with the kids, no coffee from Starbucks, no restaurant meals on weekend outings. Then, maybe we can stretch it to two. Three weeks is a habit, they say. No, we're not trying to eliminate eating out completely--we still find great value in restaurant meals when they're good, interesting, different--but fast and convenient are no longer justifications for us, for the most part (bearing in mind, we still have one working mom and two preschoolers).

I'm not aiming to be my neighbor's quintessential Italian mama cooking three meals a day, but even a little of her approach to eating would go a long way. It's all part of our new eco-parenting, family-centric, pared down, tv-less, "simple" living. I'm just going to have to become a better cook.

Now, if we could survive on baked goods three times a day, we'd be set!