Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The yoga retreat

God I am a nerd.  But I embrace it these days.  So yeah, I am one of those crazy people that believes in karma and the power of the universe, collects buddhas, does yoga and meditates, eats vegetarian, buys organic and local, and is thirsty as hell to learn more, more, more!  I teach my autistic students yoga and deep breathing while other teachers roll their eyes.  I feed them veggies and hummus for snack even though their lunch was raviolis and corn from a can. 

But here is the clincher.  I have two dogs.  They are 16 and 8, and they eat shitty pedigree food from a can.  I throw in lots of veggie scraps, which they like, so they eat healthier than most, but still.  This plagues me.  I used to feed them higher quality dry food, still not vegetarian, but Ty my 16 year old cant stomach the dry stuff anymore so now we have resorted to crap food.  But between his 60 dollar a month arthiritis medicine, and the 50 bucks a month the cheap crap food costs me, I literally cant afford to do any better.

So again, I am back to thinking about parenting.  Most of us desire to have our children be as healthy as humanly possible, right?  But most of us also are not rolling in dough, so to speak.  Why is it that the crap food is so much less expensive and why is it that children like it so much more?  Is it because of the cafeteria from a can lunch?  Or something else?  Is it because parents just get so tired of the fight to eat healthy that they finally settle for just eating??  This happens in my class too.  Sometimes its either let them eat the stinking dessert or they will eat nothing, and their skinny little bodies just need some damn calories.

This isnt what I really wanted to talk about, but now I wonder.  Where exactly does the problem with healthy eating in our society begin?  Are healthy things too expensive?  Are we teaching kids the wrong things?  Are we poor models ourselves? Hmmmmm

1 comment:

  1. this is the problem i'm having right now. eating healthy is expensive if i buy prepackaged healthy/organic items. if i cook (which i cringe at, creative cooking is not my thing) it's cheaper and healthier. kids snacks can be really cheap and fun but are they healthy? sometimes i have to say let them enjoy those "fruity" snacks from scooby doo once in a while - i'll load their lunch and dinner with fruits and veggies to make up for it. much harder to do for doggies - not sure there's a good fix for them. Anima

    ReplyDelete