E. Rachael Baird

Written by E. Rachael Baird

The truth about me and my journey through a food life.

Food. It is the love of my life and the bane of my existence in some ways. I was born pretty ‘special’ as one of the first babies of the year on January 1, 1981. I was immediately whisked off and dolloped with a knitted cap. I looked like a blue-cupie doll.  At 3 months I decided to stop breast feeding and this is where my food journey really begins. My parents were always health conscious and for the majority of my life they have both have been in tip top shape, health and working order. They are both tremendously active and as a family we spent our weekends outside in parks, flying kites, hiking and kayaking. We are, by all intents and purposes, however, a very normal family – My mother had her bought of chubbiness for about 10 years and my brother was deemed ‘husky’ by his height to weight ratio, all normal occurrences from a family that lived 30% of their life in the Midwest, lived and breathed food.

My parents were creative foodies. They had orchestrated their own form of an alternative 70s diet long before I entered the scene; my mother practicing a form of vegetarianism as she lived on a Kibbutz in Israel and my father living off a self-medicated regiment of herbal plants and remedies. Both building a foundation independently before meeting in San Francisco at the height of the alternative food movement explosion. Every house we lived in had a massive food garden and as a family we spent our time together growing food, playing music, making art, cooking, sharing and sitting around the traditional American dinner table.

I was raised on a mostly macrobiotic and vegan diet until I was 5. There was a moment at a fabulously french 5-star dinner table in Rochester, NY with my father’s family where I was given a bone from a gigantic piece of meat to occupy myself with (basically it was the only way that they got me as a 1 year old to shut up). On the spot, my family coined the term ‘boney girl’ and has referred to me as such ever since. Because of this tremendously natural diet, I have struggled with integrating processed and unnatural foods into my diet. As a kid I remember going to friends houses and having hot dog octopus’ (you know where you slice the hot dog and the ends fry in the microwave?) and getting quite sick after. My dad’s sister is obsessed with meat (like the rest of America) and one time she forgot to tell me it was in a delicious bean dip she had made and I paid the price after. Because of the nervousness around me eating foods that I shouldn’t eat, my mom spent a lot of time preparing food for me to take with me wherever I went and the best part was getting her little heart-shaped notes in the lunch box. “I love you, Erin” or “Have a great day, sweetie” or “Do your best, Erie!” I can picture them now and have to smile at her wonderful mommy-ness.

I was allergic to citric acid first and foremost. This was discovered after eating strawberries when my mom and her friend Janet took all the kids Strawberry picking one hot summer day when I was 4. Michael was just 1 and I was a clever child, running all over the fields in search of more strawberries. They were plump and sweet and I devoured. It wasn’t until we had started driving home that I broke out in hives all over my body. ALLERGY 1: CITRIC ACID. Lucky for me, this means a lot of things – soda was always out of the question as was juices so I grew up loving water. [SIDE BAR – I remember doing a "Bill Nye the science guy" experiment with Michael and we had a great go of watching a penny's tarnish dissolve in minutes and rubber bands deplete in days in a vat of Coca Cola... makes you think.]

Did you know that you can be hospitalized via frozen peas? My favorite snack as a child….  and one time I got one stuck up my nose and my face turned blue from lack of oxygen. My mom couldn’t get it out and I guess she didn’t think to stick a hair dryer up there, so we went to the hospital. By the time I was 3 they knew me by name from incidents.

I was a relatively normal kid and had my bout of carnival foods and the like, but at the end of the day the detox was in the normality of my mothers everyday cooking. Fresh salads, occasional fish, lots of raw food, etc. While I have remained Vegan for most of my life, I did happily try other kinds of dining and a variety of foods to test my allergen abilities. She was brilliant at figuring out what I needed and my diet was always considered. Growing up in the summers in Canada we fell in love with Diana’s Sauce (a fabulous bbq sauce) and Michael and I went mad over Canadian Corn Pops (which in Canada are like round balls of fabulousness) and she would whip up a mean Pepsi Chicken during the summer. I tried everything to the point of discomfort and I wanted to understand what it was like to be ‘normal’ always as a kid.

When I was 5 we moved to Minneapolis and our house was built on a landfill. As a new construction, I saw them build the house, digging into the garbage and knowing we had created this as a human population. I had nightmares for two years, my dad calmly helping me to sleep every night by telling me to picture the back of my eye lids and the blackness of night. It was fear that kept me up at night and eventually we wrote a letter together to waste management to encourage them to do a recycling program. It changed my view of waste and food completely – what I felt was the world piling onto me, diminishing my ability to breath because I was overtaking with trash. In my mind then and still it was mostly food waste from packaging, McDonalds and the like, so naturally I have an opinion about it. The nightmare still plagues me and my response is the I still have the letter and the recycling program was implemented in the year we left Edina, Minn.

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Tags: Allergies, Barclay Baird, Gluten, GMO/GM, Grumpy, Jan Ruby, McDonalds, Michael Baird, Paris, Richard and Bill, Roy's, Soya, Tanya Alekseeva, Tony Foreman and Cindy Wolf Restaurants