Then someone who lives in Abu Dhabi read my blog (imagine! an actual reader who isn’t my mother or my sister!) mentioned Maria to me, and then a friend in my building mentioned Maria, and then someone else mentioned “Maria…” They sounded like maybe they’d found the Grail—a Grail made of masa, chipotle, and black beans.

Maria doesn’t have a website or a restaurant or even one of those New York-style high-end food trucks.  She’s more like having a friend who also happens to be a fabulous chef. To order from Mari, someone has to give you her email address, then she sends you a menu, you  put in your order, and then once a week, you go collect your delicious, home-made Tex-Mex meals.

Maria’s salsa makes even rice cakes taste good

When I went to pick up my order, I had a moment of cultural confusion: sitting at a low table was a dimpled woman wearing bright-red lipstick and wearing full hijab: black abaya, black sheyla. She was checking orders and handling the money while three teen-age boys in dishdashes gathered each customer’s cartons and containers.  The food smelled delicious—but how on earth had an Arab woman learned to cook really authentic Mexican food?You’d think that after almost five months in this part of the world, I would stop leaping to conclusions based on what people are wearing, wouldn’t you? Here’s the secret about Mari: she’s from Texas. Born and raised in El Paso—“you don’t get much more Tex-Mex than that,” she said with a laugh.

Mari took time from her busy cooking and catering schedule to have breakfast with me last week, because I wanted to know more about her story: how does a nice Catholic girl from El Paso end up in Abu Dhabi speaking fluent Arabic?

The beginning of her journey starts, as journeys so often do, with love. She met an Emirati man at Fort Bliss (what a name! what an omen!); they got married and moved to Abu Dhabi in 1989, when the tallest building only rose about ten stories (I live in a fifty-story residential tower, and it’s not the tallest thing on the skyline) and traffic jams were unheard of.

When Mari first moved to Abu Dhabi, she did not wear the hijab, but, she says, she dressed “modestly” out of respect for her in-laws, with whom they were living.  Her long-sleeved shirts and long skirts gradually were replaced by jellabia—long traditional dresses, “like nightgowns,” Mari says, and then, finally, she began wearing the abaya and headscarf.  Her mother-in-law was pleased, she said, when she finally converted to Islam, mostly because it meant that the grandchildren (five boys and two girls) were being raised as Muslims.  The lovely boys who were helping Mari the day I picked up my order are her sons—all of whom have helped out with “mom’s business.”

I asked if her mother-in-law, or anyone in the family, frowned upon her entrepreneurial spirit and she said not at all. Her oldest son, who is now twenty-three and working here in Abu Dhabi, told her “it’s your drum, mom, go ahead and beat it.”  Her mother-in-law supports the work Mari does because that extra income helps provide extras for the kids—and with seven kids, there are a lot of “extras” (not to mention shoes, books, diapers, and all those other kid-related essentials).

During our conversation, I fell victim to yet another assumption: that all Mari’s recipes came with her from El Paso. “Oh no,” she said. “I learned to make tortillas from a Latina woman who was living here but was originally from Seattle.”  Another assumption bites the dust.  It seems that when Mari moved here, she found an entire community of Latina women here, including some from El Paso.  Although Maria now counts herself as an Abu Dhabi “local,” she also says that it’s only in the UAE that she has justify being “American because she doesn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes.”

So how does a Tex-Mex Emirati learn to cook Mexican food?  She reads cookbooks, talks long-distance with her mother, and good-old-fashioned trial and error. Over the years, Maria has developed an entire repertoire of Mexican recipes, so everything on her menu is made by hand in her kitchen—just Maria and her Indonesian maid, Itoh.  They’ve been cooking to order for about nine years and have inspired a devoted following—so much so that when Mari tried to retire last year, due to health reasons, her clientele was willing to drive out to her house, pick up the food, deliver it themselves, and even serve as sous chefs, if she needed.

Thinking about my own futile attempts to find Mexican ingredients in local Abu Dhabi grocery stores, I asked Mari where she got her raw materials.  She smiled and said that sometimes, on her rare trips home, she will bring back chipotles and other spices; but the tortilla chips and a few other things are made by two companies in Sharjah, of all places (Sharjah is a much smaller, less Westernized Emirate).  With the help of Itoh, all the sauces, fillings, salsas, and guacamole are made right in Mari’s own kitchen and stored in one of three refrigerators she’s accumulated over the years.

On Thursday and Friday, Mari processes the orders that have come in through the week, while Itoh does prep work. On Saturday, they do the shopping and more prep work; Sunday they make sauces and tortillas; Monday morning they put together the enchiladas, salsas, guacamoles; pack up all the orders, drive into Abu Dhabi (Mari lives about ½ hour outside the city), and deliver their Mexican deliciousness to their hungry clientele.

In addition to her deliveries to people in the Khalidiya area, Mari delivers to the Emirates College of Applied Education, and—as if that’s not enough—she’s now at the Ripe Food Market every Friday.

Now that I’ve met Mari, I can see why the expats who live here are so protective of her culinary expertise—if she tried to retire again, I’d be one of those people lining up to help her in the kitchen.

if you’re interested ordering from Maria’s Kitchen, please email me or leave a note in comments, and I will get you the ordering information.  Maria is at the Ripe Farmers’ Market in Khalifa Park on Fridays.

1. “because I said so, that’s why.” Yes. That was me. And more than once. The phrase of parental last resort–and it’s not a resort that I’d like to visit as often as I seem to be doing.

2. There was a time, back in the day, when I thought team sports were the exclusive realm of the Great Santini and his offspring. I didn’t play a team sport growing up (me and hand-eye coordination were strangers for a long, long time); I don’t follow a particular team; I don’t get the whole “team” thing. Mostly I just don’t play well with others, is what it boils down to.  But then Liam fell in love with soccer and there I was…standing on the sidelines in the freezing cold, driving all over New York to games, and here in Abu Dhabi, I’m back in the shlep-wagon, out to soccer school, over to practice…And you know what? Being on a soccer team (and having the great coaches he had in NYC–thank you, Sean and Marcus) — it’s the best thing that could’ve ever happened to him.  Of course, my weekends are shot to hell, but hey, who needs a weekend away, right? Rah rah rah go team.

3. “do you know how many starving children there are in the world who would eat that?” I have a very clear memory, when my mother would say that to me, of saying back to her “well why don’t you mail my food to the kids in Biafra then, hmm?”  Funny, she didn’t seem to appreciate that idea. I remember also thinking to myself “I will never, ever say such a stupid thing to my kids.”  Yeah. Well. Um. What can I say. It’s true, dammit. So eat your carrots!

4. In graduate school, I spent a lot of time thinking about feminism, poststructuralism, gender theory, and other stuff that now makes my early-middle-aged brain hurt to even contemplate. At the time, however, my friends and I sat around talking learnedly about how gender differences were really just socially constructed ideologies that could be done away with if parents would just be a little more, you know, thoughtful.  I believed my own words until the first time my little boy picked up a stick and said “pwang pwang pwang…”  I’m still a feminist but now I’m a feminist who has to accept that she has sons who will, for reasons known only to their DNA, step over or around the socks on the floor, leave the toilet seat down, and look at her blankly when she says “why did you knock that over?” Let me be clear–they are made to put the socks in the laundry, wipe off the toilet seat, pick up the thing they knocked down. But I’m fighting against genetics, here, people, which means that, yes, I’ve been that person who smiles and shrugs and says “well (nervous giggle), you know, boys…” Ugh.

5. Related to 4: when my boys were toddlers, I’d watch their adorable chubby selves playing “bakery” in the sandbox and look in horror at those ill-bred “big boys” playing chase and I’m-gonna-shoot-you-with-my-triblatteringlaserpistolgrappler.  I’d be all smug and judgey and decide that the mothers of these boys had utterly failed. I mean really, what mother would let her children play such a violent game? Um…hi. That would be me. And I’ve even said “run around and chase with your friends,” because I recognize that children are like puppies. They need to be exercised regularly or they’ll just wreck the furniture. .

6. MY children will never be like those OTHER children who walk around surgically attached to their screens. Cue hysterical laughter here. Computers, e-readers, DSi, iPod touch…the electronics in this family could stock an Apple store. I think we manage their computer time pretty well but the sad fact is that when screens are up, bickering is down.

7.  You know how when you were little and your mom would spit a bit on her shirttail or (worse) her fingers and smootch at your cheek to get off the remnants of your last meal? And remember how you thought “god that is gross!” Remember how you thought, nah, you’d never do such a thing? Yep. I thought so too. And then just yesterday, I grabbed Caleb’s arm just before he got on the school bus and swiped–with my shirt and some spit–at the glob of jam on his cheek. He said “MOM THAT’S DISGUSTING” and squirmed away.

8. I never thought I would have sons.  How’s that for hubris? I always wanted to have children but in my mind’s eye, it was always me and charlottedoralucyameliaruby reading Little House on the Prairie and playing dress-up and then later, when they were grownups, my daughters and I would hang out and have long conversations about Life and Shoes and Relationships. They’d tell me what to wear so I didn’t look too dowdy and we’d be the best of friends.  But noooo, the gods have a larky sense of humor and so I am the mother of boys, which means I don’t sit on the beach and flip through magazines. No, it’s SWIM and DIG and PLAY BALL WITH ME and DIG and SWIM.  And when I’m an old woman living alone with a hundred cats, the boys will buy me the valu-pak of Depends and the high-grade cat food, and congratulate themselves on being good sons.

9. I would never make separate meals for my picky eaters. If they don’t want to eat what I cook, then they’ll go hungry. HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHA My children’s eating habits keep me in a state of perpetual humility. I have failed here and here and here and will probably fail again at dinner tonight.

10. God. Some people just can’t shut up about their damn kids. That’s what I thought. And then I started a blog.

Double-dipping this week: this post also links to the wonderful lovelinks site–it’s like Cheers bar for small bloggers (or micro bloggers, in my case). It’s where everyone knows our (screen) name and they’re always glad we came, where everybody can see that all our troubles are the same…and now everyone knows that I’m old enough to remember that show when it wasn’t in reruns! Click on the button below to find some great reading–and then come back on Thursday to vote for your favorites. I won’t even be mad if you don’t vote for me!

Grace notes? The first is extraordinarily simple:

1. Toast with butter and fresh honey, which I had for breakfast. I may, in fact, head back for a third piece. (It’s very small bread!)

2. The fresh honey comes from Food Queen Honey and we buy it from Suhil, from Yemen:

To amuse Caleb, Suhil did a dramatic pour:

3. Fresh naan bread, baked in a clay oven:

Finished:

We bought 3 plain naan and one filled with minced potato and onion, for 6 dihram. That’s about…$1.50.

4. Sunsets.  Our apartment faces south and west, and every evening, I watch glorious slow sunsets.  Even through my grimy windows (a natural filter of salt, sand, and dirt films the outside of all the windows. There aren’t enough window washers in the world to keep the windows of all these glass-clad skyscrapers clean):

5. Bougainvillea. Not so much the flowers themselves as their color. This city’s color scheme, aside from the color of the water, is generally…dust. Dusty brown, dusty green, dusty dust.  So the shock of scarlet against a blue sky hits deep:

Hmmm: I wonder if Proflowers can match that?

full disclosure: I was compensated to include the link to proflowers, but the ideas, photos, and experiences in this post are completely my own

It’s the end of the first week for the boys in their new school and I’m in a food fight.

I’m fighting for my kid’s right to eat a Nutella sandwich.

On the first day of school (first day of second grade, new school, new country), the assistant teacher in Caleb’s classroom decided that his lunch was “unhealthy” and only let him eat the carrot sticks I’d put in his lunchbox.

His lunchbox contained: carrot sticks, small cup of pudding/yogurt, granola bar, and—here’s the crux of it—a nutella sandwich (let the jury be advised that the nutella, about a tablespoon, was spread on whole-grain brown bread).  Plus—oh the ironic horror of it all—I’d put a small bag of potato chips in his lunchbox for a “special first day treat.” Potato chips are almost NEVER in our lunchboxes.

Now is this the platonic ideal of lunchbox lunch? Do I wish Caleb were one of those kids who just LOVES broccoli and gets cravings for sushi? Well sure. Do I wish that I could send him off to luch with a cunning wee tub of hummus and some celery sticks? Absolutely.

But that’s not my kid.  Me? I’m a Michael Pollanite; I’m an Eating Animals acolyte; I think “Food Inc.” should be required viewing for all US citizens.  My kid? He spits on my desire for locally sourced organic produce, thinks that vegetables (other than tomato sauce) might kill him, never met a chicken nugget he didn’t like. Somewhere there’s a Tyson tycoon laughing at me.

So I’ve made my (relative) peace with the lunchbox. Whole-grain bread,  pretzels not chips, yogurt, granola bar, slices of apple or carrot. And either nutella or peanut butter (for the record, although nutella has more sugar, peanut butter has WAY more fat. Nutritionally they’re about equally good—or bad).  (Click here for a nutritional info on both)

But this assistant teacher has decided that Caleb’s lunch is bad. Unhealthy. And thus, of course, she is also judging me.  And thus, of course, I’d pretty much like to rip her head off.  Who does she think she is—particularly on the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL to tell a seven year old not to eat his lunch?

I sent off a shirty email to the teacher, who responded promptly and said she would talk to the assistant, so I figured everything would be fine, going forward. But then three days later, the assistant did it again.  The sandwich was deemed “dessert” and so she allowed him yogurt and pretzel sticks.

Would you like to know who came home from school utterly exhausted, crabby, and crying?

See earlier on “want to rip her head off.”  Off went another shirty email sent to the teacher, who again apologized and said she would now tell “Miss Ella” to leave Caleb alone at lunch.

It’s not like I’m sending my kid to school with candy bars and bottles of soda; he’s not standing on the playground selling crack, for god’s sake.  It’s just NUTELLA.

Here’s the thing: Miss Ella doesn’t know what she’s up against. I’ve survived seven years in the Manhattan Public Schools.

That woman is toast.

With Nutella.

But today is Caleb’s birthday; I don’t know how or where to find a store-bought cake in Abu Dhabi and his instructions (chocolate in the middle, vanilla on the outside, marshmallows on the top) would’ve defied my procuring abilities even in more familiar territory.

So. I baked. In an electric oven with spanking new cake pans from Marks & Spencer. Cake pans, I’ll have you know, that promised to be NON STICK.

This morning there was much mixing and stirring and breaking of eggs and then the apartment filled with the lovely scent of…cake. Easy-peasy, who knew, maybe I am a baker at heart.

Um…no. Cake pan number one, after waiting the requisite 10 minutes before inverting cake onto a plate:

Dammit! Chunks of cake stuck to the bottom of the non-stick pan.  Okay, though, because we still have cake pan number 2:

goddamnmotherfuckingshit.

(This is why I should never bake with children in the room).

Here is the bottom of my non-stick baking pan:

Non-stick my fat ass.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, although really the saying should be mothers are the inventors of necessity.

I wadded those pan-stuck pieces of cake into the cake bits that had made it onto the plate and hoped that in a few hours the whole thing would congeal into some more vaguely cake-shaped form.  Then I whipped up a rather marvelous frosting, if I do say so myself (amazing what 1 full cup of butter and 3 cups of confectioners’ sugar will do), and big brother executed the marshmallow/chocolate design on top, as per the birthday boy’s instructions.

Et voila!

And that’s when I realized it:

Slide enough frosting on something and you can hide any multitude of sins: Frosting, basically, is the Spanx of baking.

In New York, I moved fast.

I knew how to work the lines at Trader Joe’s on 14th street so that I could be in and out in under 45 minutes; I knocked off my farmer’s market shopping early in the morning, before the shuffling herds came through taking pictures of picturesque radishes. (I took my arty roughage shots in my early morning rounds. I love a pretty beet as much as the next gal.)  Dry cleaning, school trips, doctors’ appointments, work meetings? Done, done, done, and done. I was one efficient Mannahatta Mamma: Things. Got. Done.

Now? Everything has slowed down. Time has blurred into one long hot swirl: our apartment only has one working clock, in the kitchen on the microwave; my phone’s battery is dying and so the clock keeps slipping back to New York time (unless can phones be homesick?) I never know exactly what time it is and even if I did, we don’t have anywhere to be.  The boys haven’t started school, I haven’t started work; it’s Ramadan and a sticky 115 degrees at midday, so the streets are quiet and lots of shops are closed until after sundown.

My sister, who lived for a few years in Paris, told me that the thing about being an expat is that everything takes a lot longer than you’re used to, and she’s absolutely right.  Being new anywhere, of course, means it takes twice as long to do the things you did at home, but the triple whammy of new city + new country + new culture has slowed me practically to a crawl.

So for instance the other day I went to a mall to scope out a store that sells skateboards (yes, Avril, there are sk8rboys in the UAE.)  Caleb has his heart set on a skateboard for his 7th birthday, thanks to the influence of his much-adored fifteen year old cousin Charlie. In a burst of inspiration, I found a skateboard store on a mall website and reminded myself to make sure that the mall was open in the afternoon, despite Ramadan. The mall was open, in fact, so I girded myself for the heat, found a cab, found the mall, found the store.

Which was closed. Mall open, store closed. Closed with no indication about when (or if) it would ever open.  Undaunted, I went to another store, looking for sheets. Closed.

Refusing to admit defeat, I went downstairs to Lulu’s, which is the huge “hypermarket” that is less expensive than Spinney’s (probably because Lulu’s doesn’t have the overhead of maintaining a pork room) and not as overwhelming as Carrefour, which as near as I can tell is a combination of K-Mart and Food Emporium.  Yes, it’s true, there have been any number of grocery store trips in the last week: big grocers are reliably open during Ramadan and I can stay inside playing Hearts with my kids for only so many hours before losing my mind.

So I tell myself that I can do some grocery shopping – get some staples, a few household items, and then I’d head home. I have a list, I like grocery stores, I can do this.

HAH.

Next time you’re in the grocery store, notice how much of your shopping is done through visual cues: you’re on your way to one section of the store, you see a flash of something out of the corner of your eye and remember you’re out of bread; you’re on your way to the cheese, see the Land O’Lakes lady and remember you need butter.  You know the pattern on the cereal box, the color of the pasta box, the layout of the shelves.

I meandered through Lulu’s, down the aisle devoted to ghee and oils, past the aisle of rice, along the trays of meat (Brazilian beef mince, Australian beef mince, Irish beef mince—aka, hamburger meat).  I’m weaving up and down the aisles, looking for items on my list and not finding much: I don’t recognize labels and while many things are printed in Arabic and English, it’s the Arabic side that usually faces out to the aisle, so I am, quite literally, clueless.

And then I found myself  in the vegetable scrum. My blurred sense of time had erased a key efficiency mantra: thou shalt not go anywhere at rush hour. Somehow I’d hit Lulu’s at about 530PM on a weekend evening and the produce section was mobbed with people shopping for the iftar meal or grabbing their post-work dinner.

The vegetable scrum doesn’t start as a scrum: you choose your produce, sling it into the little plastic bags, just like at home. Then, however, instead of plunking the bag in your cart and waltzing on your way, you have to find the weighers: people who sit at scales in the produce section, weigh your selections, and smack a price tag on each of your little plastic bags. Woe betide you if you get in the checkout line of the store without having your produce priced first; and woe double betide you if you show up at the vegetable scales with your produce not in a bag. There’s very little recycling here, so I thought I would pass on the plastic bags. WRONG. I got dark looks and deep sighs from those all around me in the scrum as the weigher had to take an extra few seconds to put my bananas, garlic (one head), and grapes each in separate bags.

I suppose some would say it’s like Fairway on a Saturday morning or Zabar’s deli counter of a Sunday, but you know? I never go there because I hate crowds.  And if I were to go there, I’d know the etiquette, where to stand, what to grab, how to glare (or if to glare).  Instead I stood heavily in one place wishing that the six South Indian guys in front of me didn’t smell quite so bad, and envying the burka’d lady behind me who chatted confidently on the phone while elbowing me subtly out of her way so that she could Get. Things. Done.

Total time spent in the grocery store? Two-plus hours.

And you know what? There’s still nothing in the house to cook for dinner.  I was so undone by the process of figuring out the store that I forgot to buy food that went together: in my grocery bags were chicken, taco shells, a jar of oregano, my hard-won produce, a dust mop, apple juice, butter, microwave popcorn, cookies, babaganoush, a bottle of glass cleaner, and small plastic baggies. We ordered in Indian food.

This whole adjusting to expat life reminds me of being pregnant for the first time. You know, you read the books that say “life will change” and friends who are already parents do the mysterious smile and say “things will be different,” and if you were like me, you probably nodded and said I know, I know, it’s going to be different, sure sure sure.

But then you had the baby and HOLY CRAP MY WORLD JUST EXPLODED WHY DIDN”T ANYONE WARN ME?

Before we moved here, I was all yeah, it’s going to be hard, it’ll be an adjustment, blah blah blah.

I didn’t understand that “adjusting” would involve being the confused white lady catching dirty looks from tired shoppers because she’s holding out a bunch of bananas without the requisite plastic bag.

I forgot, in other words, that moving from Not Knowing to Knowing can sometimes be a bumpy journey.

The city seems a bit like Los Angeles or NYC  in that almost everyone here is from somewhere else…and the people who are really “from” here are very hard to find.  Plus that, when you leave the downtown area, where we live, the neighborhoods look like any swanky nabe, anywhere: walled villas set back from the road, green grass (green!), expensive shops and car dealerships: BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Lamborghini, Ferrari.

On my way to Spinneys (a British grocery store), the cab drove through one such Al Swankia neighborhood and for a moment I could have been in Beverly Hills.  When I walked into the grocery store, the illusion of Western life persisted: orderly aisles, food from Waitrose, rows of Campbell’s Soup, Betty Crocker pancake mix, frozen pizzas, organic frozen vegetables.  All very Whole Foodsy (with prices to match), all very familiar.

And then…this:

THE PORK ROOM!

Behind sliding glass doors, at the back of the store, a section of the grocery store set aside for us pork-eaters. In this room you’ll find porky happiness: babyback ribs, pork chops, and bacon, which comes with a sort of Surgeon General’s warning:

I wonder: what would constitute “pork for Muslims?”

Also in the pork room? Wee packets of pork scratchings, which I think are what George Bush the First liked to eat, yes? Pork Rinds? (Ah, the Bushies. What a classy group.)  The pork room also held shelves of Pop Tarts, that lard-based breakfast of champions. Should we call them Pork Tarts from now on?  (And yes, yes, I confess, if the box hadn’t been almost eight bucks, I would’ve brought some home. I loves me some Pop Tarts. )

Pork, it seems, resides in unexpected places. For instance, in seafood:

So yeah, everyone here seems to speak English, and yeah, there’s a Baskin-Robbins two doors down from our building, but squid balls and the pork room remind me that we’re a long, long way from home.

With all the schedule changes, family dinners have pretty much fallen by the wayside and with all the parties and celebrations happening during the school day both boys are getting lots and lots of opportunities for snacks and sweets—so the lunch boxes are coming home almost untouched. So much for that well-balanced lunch I pack each morning, hmm?

And at night, after the boys are in bed, I’m doing my own fair share of snacking, looking for a little extra sugary energy to get me through another hour or two of sorting through ten years of files, piles, and boxes.

When I was asked to review the FiberPlus cereals with antioxidants from Kelloggs in the midst of all this chaos, I got almost too excited: maybe the boys would like these nutritious cereals and I could know that even if they ate cupcakes and pretzels all day, their day at least had a solid nutritional start.

The first one we tried, FiberPlus Yogurt Berry Crunch has 10g of fiber, which is almost 40% of the daily recommended amount.  With a ½ cup of skim milk, a cup of cereal is 210 calories. The boys liked this flavor but we all agreed that it’s almost too sweet to be a breakfast food. A few handfuls of Yogurt Berry Crunch, however, have become my night-time snack, and I feel much less guilty than I do when I settle down with a plate of ginger snaps.

The second flavor, FiberPlus Cinnamon Oat Crunch was our hands-down favorite. It’s cinnamony and crunchy and tastes as good by the handful as it does with milk. A single serving with a ½ cup of skim milk has only 150 calories and contains 35% of the daily recommended intake of fiber.  Given that regular exercise has also fallen by the wayside in these chaotic weeks, a low calorie, high fiber way to start my day is a bowlful of happy.
The drawback to these two tasty boxes of goodness is that the list of ingredients contains a few too many polysyllabic chemicals (but no high-fructose corn syrup). Generally I like to serve food that’s pretty minimally processed—although, of course, Caleb regularly has hot dogs for dinner and Liam loves chicken nuggets, so I’m not sure I can quibble with what’s written on the side of these cereal boxes. I think these cereals will become a regular part of our morning routine.  Now if Kelloggs could only do something about the rest of my packing…

Full disclosure:
This is a paid post sponsored by Kellogg’s. I received one box of Berry Yogurt Crunch and one box of Cinnamon Oat Crunch to facilitate the review. The opinions in this post are my own, not Kelloggs.

I had an existential crisis in the meat section of Trader Joe’s.  I was staring at all chicken: chicken pieces packaged separately, chicken pieces in a big bundle, whole chickens, chicken boobs, “natural” chicken, “free-range” chicken, cheap chicken, less-cheap chicken.

On the one hand, I guess you could say, wow! what bounty! Look at all that protein so readily available to me, sparing me from having to get out to the back pasture with an ax and be all with the plucking and whatnot.

On the other hand, wow! look at all that cheap protein, farmed god knows where, killed god knows where by who knows what methods in who knows what layers of shit.

What should I buy? Or should I not buy it at all?

I’ve just finished reading Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer (not to be confused with Jonathans Lethem or Franzen; this Jonathan is the Everything is Illuminated guy).  The book is brilliant; it should be required reading for every human on the planet and excerpts should be plastered on billboards, buildings, and in the subway, forcing us to confront our eating habits.

We all sort of know about factory farms (those huge muddy shit pits that call themselves hog farms, chickens in cages not much bigger than this laptop screen) but many of us–okay, maybe only me–seem to close our eyes when it comes time to doing the grocery shopping.

Because really, who wants to know–really know–the conditions under which most of our proteins (beef, chicken, pork, fish) are produced?

Foer’s  book takes a lot of information that’s already been circulating out there, from Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, and others, and distills it into a central question: how can we allow ourselves to eat meat (and poultry and, yes, fish) that has almost certainly been produced under inhumane conditions (at best) and torturous, environmentally disastrous conditions (at worst)?

In the paperback version, Eating Animals has sixty pages of footnotes documenting its sources, but the book reads like a novel; there isn’t a dull moment.  Instead it’s a jaw-dropping account of the infuriating (dangerous, violent, corrupting, polluting) methods used in this country to produce animal protein at relatively low costs, at least in the short term. Long-term costs, of course, include environmental destruction, toxic waste, and tainted food supplies, but heck. What’s that to keeping the price of chicken at under two bucks a pound?

What about my free-range chicken, I hear you say (as I thought to myself, rather smugly, as I read).  Bwhahahaha!  Foer says that “the free-range label is bullshit. It should provide no more peace of mind than “all-natural,” “fresh,” or ‘magical.’”  Free-range, you see, is not defined by the USDA. Free-range simply means access to the outdoors–which can mean that a shed housing 30,000 chickens has one little door open to a five-by-five patch of dirt.  And the door is usually closed. Further, free-range has nothing to do with how those chickens are handled, in either life or death.

We eat lots of seafood, though, a friend of mine said when I told her what I was reading. So that’s better, right? (She sounded anxious).  Well, sorry kids, there’s no Santa Claus there, either.  Let’s choose just one factor in “farmed fish,” shall we? How about…sea lice, which thrive in the filthy water of farmed fish.  Sea lice create open sores and can sometimes eat right down to the bones.  Yummy!  And “wild-caught” fish? Let’s say your fish is caught on so-called “long lines,” which can reach out a distance of seventy-five miles.  The targeted fish are caught, sure, but so are about 4.5 million sea animals, called “bycatch”: sea creatures caught up by the long lines but not used: 3.3 million sharks, 1 million marlins, 60,00 sea turtles, 75, 000 albatross, 20,000 dolphins and whales.

So much for fish.

I’m not even going to talk about beef or pigs. Let’s just say it’s not pretty and leave it at that. I won’t say anything about shit swamps so toxic they can (and have) killed people who have had the hellish misfortune to fall in; I won’t say anything about slaughtering methods so haphazard that the cows are frequently alive even as their skin is being stripped off.

After I finished the book, I was talking to the boys about our eating habits and that we needed to make things like bacon, for instance, a “special treat” instead of an everyday occurrence (sayonara Trader Joe’s microwave bacon). That led to Caleb asking me, the first time we had “special treat” bacon, if the bacon came from a good pig or a bad pig that had been “all stuffed full of that chemistry stuff.”

But enough about bacon and bad pigs.  Let’s talk instead about … a little personal health problem I’ve had for the past few weeks.  As so often happens with us daughters of Eve, I got myself a wee UTI last week, which followed very quickly after a similar infection less than two weeks earlier. I went off to the doctor, who said no no, absolutely not, couldn’t be the same infection, had to be a new infection. She gave me more of the same antibiotic she’d given me the first time and so I started once again popping my 500mg pills twice a day.  One day, two days, three days…no relief.  Four days. No relief. I’m thinking, maybe I have cancer of the kidney or some deadly parasite eating away at my nether bits. I make an appointment to see a specialist.  I try not to pee because it, well, you know, it hurts.

Then day six. The doctor calls.  Seems the particular type of infection I have is immune to this antibiotic.

Eh?  Howzzat? Immune?

Another statistic: scientists calculate that 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics are pumped into farmed animals every year–antibiotics that aren’t to treat illness but are put into the feed so that the animals won’t get sick. Anticipatory antibiotics, we could call them. A number of studies have shown that this antibiotic usage has led to increased antimicrobial resistance, which is why a whole lot of acronyms–AMA, WHO, CDC–have called for a ban on this process. In other words, filling our animal proteins with unnecessary antibiotics is creating strains of bacteria that are…say it with me…immune to antibiotics.

We all know the phrase “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,”right?  It’s great if you’re at the gym or dealing with your children. But it’s not exactly what we want our little germie bacteria friends to be thinking, is it?

Call me paranoid if you want to but I think eating factory farmed meat led led to my delicate lady parts being decidedly out of sorts for quite some time. And when the lady parts are out of sorts, everybody is out of sorts.

Tomorrow is grocery day. Once again I’m going to wrestle with my conscience in the meat section at Trader Joe’s: chicken is one of the few things my kids will eat; I don’t have an unlimited budget; no one in the family (except me) is happy with vegetarian dinners.

And god knows, I don’t have any answers.  Just another bottle of antibiotics.