Liz Snyder

OK, confession time: I really haven’t exercised in about 6 months.

There, I admitted it.  I have always harbored a certain aversion to structured physical activity. And every time I start up a new physical routine, it feels more like punishing my body that loving it. I get disgusted with my body, disgusted at being out of breath at the top of a stairwell, disgusted that my pants don’t fit – and I have this little furious spasm of workouts that never lasts much more than a month at a time.

I spend so much of my time thinking and writing about healthy, nutritious food. I eat pretty healthy stuff, but I never use food (or lack of food) to punish myself. Food, for me, is a joyous experience to be celebrated and enjoyed. Food is pleasure – and I’ve learned to take pleasure in everything, from chocolate cake to collard greens.

Movement? That’s another story. Since I was a teenager I’ve used exercise exclusively to punish myself. I’ve always felt on the awkward ungraceful side of humanity and have never, ever felt true ‘ownership’ of my body as a physical entity. My intellect is all mine, but my body is this unwieldy appendage that never quite does what I want it to, never quite looks how I think it should. A nuisance. And when I exercise, I direct my irritation right down into every ungainly muscle, right into my cellular framework.

When I began this blog and started writing about learning to love oneself from the inside out, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore. So I quit. And I let myself rest. Really rest. I needed the time to free my mind from the guilt of “I really should” and free my body from the punishment of workouts that were a zero-sum-game of physical fitness vs. damage to my psyche.

It was in that deep rest that an inkling of an answer came to me. It started with just noticing my daughter in all her glorious, frenetic and yes, awkward, physicality. Her ability for movement to be play, to inhabit her body so unselfconsciously.

I realized: I want that too. I want to dance, I want to play, I want to feel every muscle and have the spazzyness that is me put a smile on my face.

So off I went, to dance class of all places. I have never, and I mean never, taken a dance class in my life. There’s a movement called 5Rhythms and it’s all about free-form, ecstatic, no-holds barred life-affirming dance. You move and sweat for 3 hours and there are no rules about how you do it. It’s easily the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I’ve started to go about once a month, and its all I can handle – not because of the physical workout, but because of the emotional upheaval I experience in that process of deeply and profoundly letting go in a roomful of strangers. Of realizing that there’s a world full of people who are at least as ungainly as I am but take joy in their bodies in a visceral, creative, and joyful way. Of hoping against hope that I will someday be that way too. That I can help my daughter hold onto that.

I realized… slowly but surely… that there is a part of me that loves to move. I just have never given her permission to inhabit my body.  Never let myself feel exposed and raw and sensual in the way that only dance can allow.

In coaching people about learning to love the simple pleasures of food and get away from the diet-fail-shame cycle I have so often talked about just letting go of rules, of expectations, of “shoulds”. It’s funny that I’m only now beginning to allow the same for myself with movement.

Nowadays, I have an awesome list of activities that I actually love and want to do. I love dancing, hiking, hoola hooping, the occasional yoga class… and I am finally giving myself permission to learn to surf. I’ve wanted to ever since I was 9 years old and watched Endless Summer one sweltering landlocked summer in southern Indiana. I’ve been in California for 20 years and I’m finally done telling myself I’m not coordinated enough to try!

I’m trying to do each of my favorite activities about once a month, but if I don’t get to it, no biggie. I have permission to move, permission to rest, and permission to be.  It’s time to live with the contrast, to celebrate life in its fullness without judgment, punishment, or shame. Chocolate cake and collard greens, sofas and surfboards… I’m learning that it’s all meant to be enjoyed.

This week, I had the honor of having my blog post One Week, Four Fish published on Civil Eats.  Unlike my usual ramblings about school food and urban agriculture, this one takes me WAY outside my comfort zone into the world of sustainable seafood and… ahem… working corporate.

It’s been a longtime dream of mine to be published on Civil Eats, and I never would have dreamed that either of these topics would let me dip my toes in such a big pool of thought-leaders and talented activists. In fact, I somehow thought my taking a corporate job would spell the end of my days of getting published at all.  When am I going to learn that living outside my comfort zone is where I find my inspiration?  As I belabor in great detail in the post – there’s really no place in this world that doesn’t have something to teach you – if you’re in the habit of listening.

Also, while I’m here, I thought I’d post Kim Triplett’s awesome halibut recipe that I mention in the article. It’s SO worth the trouble of cutting up pears into teeny tiny pieces, trust me on this:

Baked Fresh Halibut with Pear Chimichurri and Roasted Fennel Curry

Ingredients

• ¼   cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bulb fennel, thinly sliced
• 1 shallot, minced
• ½ cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1 (4-pound) Pacific halibut fillet (Seafood Watch best choice)
• 1 teaspoon red chili paste
• 2 Bosc pears (or seasonal firm-fleshed variety), finely diced
• 1 bunch cilantro leaves, chopped
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon yellow curry powder

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 300°F (150°C). Spray a 9”x13” baking dish with cooking spray.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Stir in ½  clove minced garlic, fennel, and minced shallot. Cook, stirring, until the fennel has begun to soften. Add cinnamon and curry powder. Remove from heat, cover and set aside.
3. Season the fish all over with salt and pepper to taste. Place  in prepared baking dish and drizzle with  2 tablespoons olive oil. Sprinkle with 1 clove minced garlic.
4. Bake in preheated oven until fish is no longer translucent and flakes easily with a fork, about 20 minutes.
5. For pear chimichurri, mix together diced pear, minced parsley, minced cilantro, chili paste and remaining ½ clove minced garlic. Add remaining 2 tablespoons oil and salt to taste.
6. To serve, place fennel on bottom of dish and top with halibut and pear chimichurri.

Enjoy!

In three days, my little girl will start Kindergarten. I have deadlines to meet, articles to write, clients to schedule… and yet that fateful Monday is all I can think about. For three years I’ve been really lucky to have Helen attend Water and Sunshine Preschool, a home-based preschool in Sunnyvale run by a family that keeps an organic garden in their spacious backyard and cooks three meals a day from scratch. For Helen, life is about to change, and while she’s excited as can be, I enter into this new phase of life with one big trepidation… school food.

Our new school district uses… someone ring a gong please… Sodexo. And while the educational philosophy of the charter school we were lucky enough to get in to is amazingly progressive, the campus is about 80% concrete and blacktop. Luckily, the philosophy at Stevenson PACT is centered on parent participation (PACT stands for “Parents Acting in Community Together”) so I’m pretty confident that what I don’t like, I can work to change.

So I’m giving myself two years. I’m writing it here because I am promising myself, my daughter and the world. Hold me to it.

By the time Helen is in second grade, my plan is to:

1. Have Sodexo out of PACT, if not the entire district,

2. Raise the funds to build a kitchen on the Stevenson campus,

3. Organize local chefs, Stevenson parents, and volunteers to build a menu and cook meals from scratch,

4. Expand the raised bed garden, yank out at least a third of the concrete, and establish a natural play area, and

5. Create a unique school environment where kids take part in growing and preparing the meals that they eat together.

Ambitious? Yes. Optional? No.

I’ve spent a lot of time on school lunch reform, long before Helen was in school herself. Thank goodness for the work of Chef Ann Cooper and the many trailblazers in the healthy school food movement before me, and for all the moms before me who have worked on this issue so tirelessly. My work with school food service at Full Circle Farm was a long, painful slog through miles and miles of bureaucracy, red tape, and inertia. But I’ve always found it totally worth it – even when it was not my own kid’s lunch at stake. Because all kids deserve access to fresh, healthy food and green spaces. They deserve the home & hearth feel that life centered around the kitchen and the garden creates. As a working mom, I have one chance a day to create that feel for my daughter – that’s what made me so grateful that she had a school that created that for her as well. Now I need to fight to keep that experience in her life.

In the meantime, I’ll be packing her a lunch every day. We have a painfully cute rainbow & unicorn Planet Box all ready to be stocked with her favorite foods – tomatoes, hummus & pita, avocados, and dark chocolate covered almonds (aka “chocolate beans”), along with a thermos cup of raw milk. It’s nutritious, sure, but it’s not home and hearth – it’s not the way we were meant to experience food. We were meant to experience food from the field to the plate – growing together, cooking together, eating together – it’s how we build healthy emotional connections to the earth, to each other, and to our food! If there’s one big lesson I’ve learned doing school-based farming and with my own daughter’s preschool experience, it’s that school lunch reform needs to go WAY beyond the cafeteria – that the only way to turn the tide on unhealthy habits is to incorporate healthy food – growing it, thinking about it, preparing it, and understanding the reasons why junk food companies don’t want you eating it,  into the school day.

Home & Hearth need to be written into the curriculum.