Year of No Sugar Read Free

marched together in local parades. But the main idea of Indian Princesses was that it was a father-daughter bonding activity, so I knew it was Dad who would be taking me. Would he break down? I wondered. Wouldn’t he cave just a little at the sight of so much potential happiness just beyond his adorable little Indian Princess’s reach?
    The answer to that, actually, was no. Although my dad is known to be a bit of a softy, I’m guessing my mother prepped him in advance: no dessert means…No. Dessert. End of story. I sat and watched all my friends and their dads pile bowls high with what seemed to me at the time to be just about the most delicious combination of ingredients I had ever witnessed—not just ice cream and sprinkles, but M&M’s, hot fudge and butterscotch, even whipped cream from a can ! ARRRGGH!!!!!!! I was in Hell.
    Let me just tell you, I never touched my mother’s things again . Ever.
    Since then, a lot of time has passed; over my teenage, college, and early adult years, I continued to bake and even became interested in actual meal cooking as well. No one I knew in college seemed quite as interested in these things as I was. Most everyone I knew was content to be spoon-fed whatever was trucked in to the myriad dining halls we had on campus. I insisted on going off the meal plan and doing my own food experimenting in the dorm mini-kitchen across the hall. While my floor-mates were discovering Jell-O shots or arguing over their Dungeons and Dragons powers,I was making hummus in my room, buying bulk quinoa at the co-op downtown, and trying to figure out how to devein shrimp on top of my bedspread. When the apple pie I had baked from scratch for a friend’s birthday was stolen from the communal fridge, I was beside myself. Stolen!! Pie tin and all— gone ! Pinching money I could almost understand, but food? Dessert? A birthday dessert!?! Did these barbarians have no humanity ?
    Of course they didn’t. We were talking about young adults whose idea of gourmet cuisine was mozzarella sticks from the Hot Truck. From an early age, I was long out of step with my peers when it came to my passion for food.
    At the same time, I’ve been extremely lucky in life never to be in real need of losing weight, so food fads have come and gone without my feeling the need to pay much mind. The Low-Carb Diet, the Low-Fat Diet, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Blood Type Diet, the Eat All the Liver and Pistachios You Want Diet…I ignored them all. The only one that grabbed my attention in the late nineties was the popular Sugar Busters diet, which dictated that followers give up refined sugar and white flour.
    â€œWhy not just give up eating!?!” I would scoff to myself whenever an acquaintance would profess to have lost “a ton” of weight on Sugar Busters. I was annoyed. I was offended at the suggestion that cakes and pies— my cakes, my pies—made from scratch, with love , could be harmful. Harmful! “This is all going too far. What, are we never supposed to have fun anymore?”
    Seriously. What harm could possibly be done by enjoying dessert ?
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    1 Wait, what did we eat our slices with? ’Cause that was the crux of the story—I had no fork, right? Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe we used spoons? Our fingers? Chopsticks?

CHAPTER 2

OUT OF THE OPIUM DEN
    â€œHow did this thing, this spice, sugar, become a staple? How did something that ought to be like saffron, a rare thing to add, become the thing we build on? How did a whole way of cooking creep up from sweetness?”
    â€”White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses 2
    The morning I watched the YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” my brain caught fire.
    â€œHey, Eve, come watch this! You’re gonna want to see this!”
    My husband was calling to me from upstairs. There was a video posted on Facebook with some doctor droning on about sugar and health. Well, how