Sugar

I love sugar. Well, not straight sugar. I was never a big fan of Pixie Stix, or rock candy, or sugar cubes. But I love chocolate frosting and Nutella and Twizzlers and marzipan. I like candy in every color and shape and size. When I first watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I was pretty sure it was a vision of heaven. I don’t like bitter or sour very much, savory is good, salty is okay, but sweet is my thing. Sushi was a wonderful discovery, because it looked and tasted like candy but had actual food value.

One winter, Mom and I took a series of cake decorating classes. They were inexpensive, and once a week, at the local Michael’s craft store, and once we finished level one, we went on for levels two and three, and would have done level four if it had been offered. I loved making cakes, and frosting, and doing crumb coats, and lattice work. I learned how to make royal icing flowers, and animal characters out of fondant and marzipan, and experimented with Nutella cream cheese frosting. I made chess pieces and roses out of molded chocolate, and white chocolate molded flour pots with chocolate frosted dirt. I tried to make petit fours and failed miserably.

Chocolate music on a flourless chocolate cake.

Marzipan fruit is just as good for you as real fruit, right?

Chocolate dirt, enough said.

The trouble with petit fours is, even after you find the right recipe for the cake, so that it’s moist but not delicate, you need a sure hand for the cutting and placing of layers, and then you need to be willing to waste a lot of icing by pouring it over the cakes on a wire rack so that the excess pools underneath. This is where Cricket came in, waiting for the overflow to overflow.

“You can start pouring, Mommy.”

Cricket was an only dog during the cake decorating winter, and she made full use of her prominent place next to the table, standing by the edge as the icing dripped onto her head, or jumping as high as she could to reach the counter to inspect whatever was going on up there. She cried and scratched at Grandma’s leg to get access to the mixer as it rumbled and tumbled and created glossy white frosting. She’s not especially dexterous with her paws, so she couldn’t participate in molding marzipan figurines, but she loved to help with clean up whenever something fell on the floor. We all had a great time that winter.

Cricket, after icing removal.

But, my father developed adult onset diabetes by the time he was the same age as I am now. In fact, his brother and father also developed diabetes, and then diabetic neuropathy and strokes, and a whole host of other problems, so it is definitely in my genes. I focus on moderation, and go to doctors regularly, and eat my vegetables, and take the medications I’m required to take. I use a lot of vegetables in my cooking, because I like my food to be colorful: red and yellow and orange peppers, tomatoes in all shapes and sizes, red onions, and French green beans, and perfect heads of broccoli cut into individual trees. But I worry.

I am always being told to cut sugar out of my diet completely, that it will solve all of my health, mood, intellectual, spiritual and whatever other problems I may have, immediately, and I will have the energy of a cheetah.

This, of course, is never true. I try it, I suffer, I keep trying, and then I stop. And whether I’ve tried the diet for two weeks or two months or two years, someone is always certain that if I just tried a little bit longer it would all work out and I would be perfect. I’ve tried sugar free, and dairy free, gluten free, and wheat free, and it’s all terrible and squeezes my brain until there is not even one drop of serotonin left and life is not worth living. Mom tells me that too much sugar makes her feel sick and tired, but I’ve never felt that way myself. I might refuse to notice such a thing.

My father went on a high protein diet, eventually, to try and manage his diabetes and ate mostly chicken and spinach. This would not work for me at all, but it would be Butterfly’s ideal, without the spinach. Butterfly, my ten year old Lhasa Apso, has diabetes too, but her diabetes is more like type one, or juvenile onset diabetes in humans, and is controlled by twice daily insulin shots. She also has a special diabetic-friendly kibble and eats a lot of chicken, though not as much as she’d like.

“Yummies?!”

She doesn’t look or act sick, unless her sugar gets very low, and then she gets maple syrup on her gums and she bounces back. It’s a relief to know what’s wrong with her and how to fix it. For Butterfly, sugar is directly related to how she feels every day; no matter how much she craves things like pizza crusts and pancakes and bread, which were among her favorite things in the world before her diagnosis last year, she’s better off, and happier, without them.

The same isn’t true for me. There is no diet that will fix what’s wrong with me, at least that I know of. And while, theoretically, I’d be healthier overall without sugar, I would not be happier, or even happy at all, with a diet like that. I tend to think, and I know this is not the prevailing view, that a little bit more sugar in our diets might help us like each other a little bit more. Maybe I should try to make those petit fours again, and pass them out to my neighbors. I just have to make sure that the icing doesn’t drip to Butterfly’s level. She’d be licking the floor for days.

Cricket, licking the bowl.

Butterfly, staying on her diet.