FAST FOOD WARS MAKING MOM SICK

It’s the nutritionists versus the marketers, and this battle for the waistlines of America is being fought at my kitchen table every day.

The kids want fries, and while mom secretly covets the crispy creations herself, she holds fast and serves up the veggies with glee. Or, in my case, she buys a jumbo bag of baby carrots, plops them on the plate at every meal and wonders why she has to buy a new bottle of Ranch dressing every week.

What happened to the good old days when we didn’t know so much about food?

My mom fed us Hamburger Helper twice a week for 10 years and never read the label once in her life. Fat content? What was that?

Then again, things were different waaaay back when in the glorious ’70s. Kids spent three hours a day playing outside and poultry processors had yet to discover the profitable joys of hormone injections.

Back then we may have stuffed bras and recited the sweater filling mantra, “we must, we must, we must increase our bust.” But a quick look at all the double D’s running around the average high school will tell you wolfing down genetically engineered chicken planks or synthetic hormone burgers would have been more effective. You can’t fool around the development of chickens and cattle and not expect it to have some effect on the people eating them.

You can’t shoot chickens so full of hormones that their top-heavy breasts make them topple over in their cages and not expect it to have some effect on the people eating them.

Now, you not only have to watch what you eat, but you have to worry about everything that goes into your kids’ mouths as well.

Chef Ann Cooper, author of "Bitter Harvest: A Chef’s Perspective on the Hidden Dangers in the Foods We Eat and What You Can Do About It" (Routeledge), suggests that our present era of bioengineered "Frankenfood" is far cry from America’s agrarian past.

In "Bitter Harvest," Chef Cooper (www.ChefAnn.com) describes how Native Americans were spiritually, emotionally and physically connected to their food supply. "Hopi tribes people would watch each plant grow and sing prayers of encouragement as if to a precious child," she writes.

I guess the modern version of giving thanks for your food is to stand in the Super Wal-Mart parking lot and bellow out an ode to processed pork parts.

I didn’t realize just how disconnected my own family was from our food sources until I was explaining to my then-3-year-old daughter the concept of how same word can mean two things. Like I want two cookies or I am going to the store.

"Oh, I get it," announced my precocious child, "like chicken. There’s the chicken that you eat and then there’s the kind of chicken that lives on a farm and goes cluck-cluck."

I’m embarrassed to say I was too - yes, you guessed it - chicken to tell her the truth. But it was clear from her comment that my kids believed that food was something you got at the grocery or drive-through, not something you grew or raised.

I didn’t turn into Ma Ingalls and send Laura and Mary out to gather the eggs each day, but it did make me start to think about my relationship with food. My kids now know that the little red hen - or at least one of her bioengineered, deep-fried, breaded relatives - is the basis for McNuggets.

And years after the cluck-cluck incident, when the movie "Super-Size Me" came out, I bought the family-friendly version and showed it to my kids three times. Yet despite freeze-framing on the guy hurling his burger and fires in the Mickey D’s parking lot, my children still love fast food. And, truth be told, so do I.

Little wonder. "Super Size Me" producer and star Morgan Spurlock discovered the addictive nature of fast food when, after eating nothing McDonald’s for 30 days, he realized he felt terrible all the time - except when he was eating the food.

What is this stuff? Deep-fried crack?

I like to refer to myself as an aspiring vegetarian. In theory, I think we should all be eating cruelty-free, non-antibiotic, organically grown food that has been lovingly tended our own backyards, nourished by egg shells and harvested with a wooden trowel.

But the truth is, of the 21 meals a week my family eats, I probably cook less than half of them. And if you subtract the frozen waffles, mac-n-cheese and a few nights of "I’m too tired, I’ll pick up fast food just this once," we aren’t getting too many organic, or even home-cooked meals.

But I’m trying. I’m steaming my vegetables, I’m buying organic whenever I can, and tonight I’m even serving non-farm-raised fish. My only question now is,

"Would you like fries with that, kids?"

Lisa Earle McLeod is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the author of Forget Perfect. (Penguin/Putnam) www.ForgetPerfect.com