MARY ANN FITZMORRIS / L’Observateur / August 12, 2000

One of the most common scary stories in the newspaper the last few years is the bulging (if you’ll pardon the pun) population of overweight children in the United States.

The reason cited for this, besides inactivity, is the type of food we eat.

Too much of the processed stuff.

Quite by accident I’ve discovered a technique for cutting down on the consumption of processed food. It’s so simple! When you discover that your child has taken a fancy to a specific product, buy it in quantity.

Something about seeing the product en masse on the shelves at home makes them instantly lose the taste for it. If you run into a good sale it becomes one tiny ingredient away from poison.

My first encounter with this phenomenon occurred years ago on a family shopping trip. Smiling ladies stationed around the store offered little samples of frozen products which, coincidentally, were on sale. My kids lead a sheltered life, and they were awed at the supermarket’s version of frozen pizza.

The nice pizza lady kept giving them samples, and the children seemed thrilled with this new taste. So when my kid’s new best friend showed me the pizza in the case I was easily persuaded to buy this cheap and quick snack idea. At $2.99, I bought two.This discovery was exciting for me as well, because it was one more thing to add to their very short list of edibles. The next day everyone was excited when mom brought out the new frozen pizza for lunch. Mom was surprised to pick up lunch and notice only one bite taken from each piece of pizza.

“I thought you loved this stuff!” I murmured as I picked it up. “Well, it just doesn’t taste so good today. Maybe it’s not the right stuff,” they offered sheepishly. My reply was a testy smile as I carefully filed the incident in the “I TOLD YOU SO” part of a mom’s brain, which is right up front for easy reference.

It was many months before this subject came up again. By this time one was in school and had noticed the Oscar Mayer Lunchables of some of his classmates.

Summoning the pizza experiment from the “I TOLD YOU SO” file, I fought off his pleas for awhile, but a field trip provided the perfect opportunity to try this very convenient lunch solution. He ate most of it.In accordance with the Law of Even Stevens, as written in the Universal Parental Code, I was required to buy my daughter a Lunchable for her next field trip. She left most of it.Soon we discovered that the Lunchable went to waste because I bought the wrong one. The Nacho Lunchable is the right one, the Pizza Lunchable is all wrong. On the next field trip she consumed the entire Lunchable. Mom was elated, because now my lovely daughter would have something for lunch at school, where all previous attempts to fill her belly have failed.

I was thrilled. I was especially thrilled to find that the price of these Nacho Lunchables on sale was even lower than the school lunch, which usually went untouched into the garbage. And it was safe to buy these in large quantities, since spoilage only occurs when real food is present.

So it was with glee that I filled an entire shelf of the refrigerator with Nacho Lunchables. She was delighted to take these to school for three days. On the fourth day she declined as I handed her the lunch. “I don’t like those,” she remembered.

“Since when?” I whined, opening the refrigerator to show her our stock.

Unsympathetically she dismissed that detail asking, “Who told you to buy all that? I never did like them THAT much.”A few days later, while I was still mourning this turn of events, we were visiting friends. The subject of dinner came up as one of their kids began to complain of hunger. After her daughter’s fourth pathetic wail, my friend said, “Go put a Freschetta in the oven.””What? I hate those things!” replied the resident children.

Mom screamed incredulously, “But I have an entire freezer full of Freschettas out there!” I looked at her sympathetically, and groaned, “Naturally.”

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