I grew up as a child of a Type I diabetic.
We ate very simple well balanced meals.
We ate three times a day on a regular schedule.
We had very few sweets.
No alcohol.
Food-wise, these facts have been formative.
My father became aware of being a diabetic when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. He was on his way to boot camp when the MP’s stopped the bus and took him back to the testing facility to check again. Obviously, he never went overseas. He met and married my mother instead.
At that point in medical history there was no simple way for diabetics to test their own sugar levels. So a regulated diet was your best bet of maintaining a good balance and living a longer life. My mother kept our family menu reduced to its essential parts to help my father keep better track of what he was eating.
A typical meal would be:
Broiled chicken (legs and thighs)
Steamed Broccoli
Baked Potato
Homemade Canned Fruit with Extra Light Syrup
Seasoning: Salt, Pepper, Garlic Powder
Dessert would come on festive occasions, or occasionally a pack of cookies or a quart of ice cream would be purchased which I regret to say my family could down in one or two sittings.
Looking back I can see some ways in which this has formed my eating habits as an adult.
- I enjoy eating a wide variety of healthy foods. My parents believed in at least trying everything once so as an adult I have very few things I won’t eat. Vegetables and fruit were a daily part of my diet. My family always bought apples by the box. Old-fashioned peanut butter was a staple. (In high school my mother was literally buying it by the gallon to feed all the extra kids hanging around.)
- I rarely skip a meal. I don’t remember ever skipping meals as a kid. Being late for a meal would cause my father’s blood sugars to drop and he would look and act as if drunk. My shy mother, in these instances, would be amazing. She’d bypass people waiting in line for food, order an orange juice, and somehow get it down my father’s throat.
- I accept almost any sweet offered to me. Since sweets were infrequent I took them where I could get them. This realization has only come to me in the writing of this document. We all have our relationship to sweets, but mine I think is based a feasting and fasting mentality.
I’ve been looking into my past relationship with food because I want to look forward. I want a balanced spiritual view of what food is and how it should function in my life. I also want to look outward, examining how food affects my relationship with others and how it can become a missional part of my life.
