WHAT'S UP WITH CARBOHYDRATES?!

 By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

I first heard the word “agita” voiced in New York by my friends of Mediterranean heritage. It turns out that it is Italian-American slang for the Italian “agitare,” meaning “to agitate;” translated in English as “heartburn” or “acid indigestion” or “stomach-ache” or “a general feeling of upset of the digestive system.” A person like me with a history of digestive disorders is right familiar with painful and gassy “agita.” For nearly three decades, antacid tablets were such a staple of my daily cuisine that they might have passed as after-meal mints. But no more! I found my cure for “agita.” It came down to simply removing specific foods from my diet. “Such and such food just doesn’t agree with me,” is a sentiment replete in our lexicon, and oftener than not, we let it go at that without further investigation as to why it is that so much of our food makes us sick and/or obese and/or a too-early arrival at St. Michael’s heavenly door.

            From the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper and able to understand such pronouncements, my mother informed me often that I had been a fussy baby. “Colic!” she asserted. She had removed me early-on from her breast and put me on warm and thick cow’s milk in a bottle, drawn directly from a cow, for we lived then on my grandparent’s farm where fields were scattered far and wide with bovine creatures whose mammary sacs literally leaked the white poison. I think now that my mother’s milk made me ill because it was laced with nicotine. She was a heavy smoker. And it wasn’t until decades later that I figured out that I am lactose intolerant. People who study such things swear that humans should not consume cow’s milk anyway, lactose intolerant or not. I am convinced that my mother’s proclamations about my being a fussy baby were her unwitting way of vindicating herself for the sin of too soon extricating her body from the ritual of nursing me, and of rationalizing to me the fact that I was always too much for her to handle. Through my early childhood, stomach-ache was as much a part of my identity as were the blue of my eyes and the yellow of my hair.

            My strongest sensory memory of my pre-school years is the blissful aromas emanating from my grandmother’s wood-burning cook-stove. Light breads; yeast cakes; biscuits; peach pies; apple pies; chocolate-cream pies; blackberry cobblers, all dressed up in snowy white flour and sparkling crystals of refined sugar, seeming as pure and sweet and alluring as Cinderella on her evening with the Prince. The entrees comprised one of the farm’s free-range chickens, slaughtered, butchered, coated in white flour, and sizzled to a crisp on the stovetop in lard or left-over bacon grease, all accomplished at my grandmother’s competent hands. Side dishes oftener than not were mashed potatoes and white flour gravy, creamed corn, and green beans boiled in water and flavored with bacon grease. Sunday menus might feature chicken and dumplings, the dumplings floating in their starchy bath as golf-ball-sized bundles of gooey white flour and other ingredients, each dumpling delivering a punch of carbohydrates (carbs) equivalent to the human system’s requirement for an entire week. And piled on were the additional carbs of the light bread and the pies. My point is that there was venom in all that tasty goodness as surely as if the wicked stepmother had woven toxins into the swanky threads of Cinderella’s frock.        

Of course, none of us was conscious of the evil lurking in our carbs-laced food. My parents and grandparents were loving and solicitous guardians of the welfare of their progeny in every way available to them. At about age eight, though, something strange happened to me. I absolutely could no longer eat the food served up at table at our house. My appetite for it just up and walked away. By then, residence on the farm had exchanged itself for life in the big city. But even so, my parents always maintained a vegetable city-garden in the backyards of our homes: corn; tomatoes; scallions; radishes; potatoes; cabbages; cucumbers; and a brand of single-leafed lettuce. And mom always kept a head of iceberg lettuce and stalks of celery bought at the grocery store in the refrigerator. Some intuitive food genius inside my body set me to nibbling on those raw vegetables like a rabbit. I often consumed an entire head of iceberg lettuce in one sitting. I still drank milk because I loved the stuff, and also because there was only water and coffee and sickeningly-sweet Cool Aid as alternatives. Mom could get me to eat a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup now and then—but that was about it in terms of my food consumption for the next twelve years. During that time, my stomach was as docile as a lamb.

And then I met and married a man of Latin ancestry and moved to New York with him. My Puerto Rican/Spanish mother-in-law took one look at me and proclaimed, “Ju are too skeeny, Leenda! I wheel put some meat on ju bones!” And she did just that. She introduced me to a cuisine that at the time I could only describe as “exotic.” Steaming pinto beans plump and soft in a savory mix of olive oil, onions, green peppers, garlic, and tomato sauce, cradled in a fluffy nest of Spanish rice tangy with olive oil, olives, capers, chicken broth, onions, green peppers, garlic, and tomato sauce. On plate was also a thick slice of pork, roasted to tender perfection in a wash of delicate juices. To top off the meal was ‘flan’ a delectably quivering wedge of oven-baked eggs, milk and sugar swimming in caramel. This was custard like I had never come across. The aroma alone was like entering food perfume heaven. My head was already spinning from the red ‘Paisano’ wine—my Spanish father-in-law’s contribution. I took to this cuisine as naturally as if I were born to it. But it didn’t take long for the digestive distress to show its nasty head again, and for my body to begin its steady expansion to alarming dimensions.  

These are snapshots of my back-and-forth, bittersweet relationship with food throughout the years of my life. When at the age of 49 I was struck down with Crohns Disease, I had no other choice than to undertake a close study of my nutrition habits. A flood of controversy is afoot about this subject of carbs. My own experience has shown me that “bad” carbs found in packaged and “white” foods, certain fruits, as well as sugars are the devils in my diet. I feel safe in stating that the ubiquitous danger of sugar (sucrose - C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁) is widely known and accepted, unless of course, a person has lived under a rock for the last several decades.©

Recommended Reading: SUGAR BLUES by William Dufty



Essay Image: DINNERWARE - acrylic painting by Linda Lee Greene



Multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene’s eBooks and Paperbacks are available for purchase on Amazon. An overview of her latest romance/thriller/paranormal novel, A CHANCE OF THE MOON, is below:

Amid the seductions of Las Vegas, Nevada and an idyllic coffee plantation on Hawai’i’s Big Island, a sextet of opposites converge within a shared fate: a glamorous movie-star courting distractions from her troubled past; her shell-shocked bodyguards clutching handholds out of their hardscrabble lives; a dropout Hawaiian nuclear physicist gambling his way back home; a Navajo rancher seeking cleansing for harming Mother Earth; and from its lofty perch, the Hawaiian’s guardian spirit conjured as his pet raven, conducting this symphony of soul odysseys.

Was it chance or destiny’s hand behind the movie-star and gambler’s curious encounter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas? The cards fold, their hearts open, and a match strikes, flames that sizzle their hearts and souls. Can they have the moon and the stars, too? Or is she too dangerous? Is he? Can their love withstand betrayal? Can it endure murder?

While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.

Amazon Buy Links Here> Paperback - Kindle