When I was too young to babysit, I had a job babysitting for a hippie family down the street. There were two two-year-old twins and their older sister, who might have been five. I can’t remember playing with them, or interacting with them at all. What I do remember is they had a low bookcase with lots of books for kids, including the plain-talkin’, illustrated facts-of-life book “Where Did I Come From?” [1] (by Peter Mayle), and a small photo album of their naked, pregnant mom, month by month, and then in childbirth with the twins. Shocking! Fascinating! Hippies are so wild! And they eat the weirdest stuff!

Along with the hippie sex books, I was obsessed with their kitchen and pantry, filled with fragrant plants, dried herbs and glass jars of… what? What were those things? I took every chance I could to sneak tastes of every little thing I could, most of it unrecognizable to my white bread, Velveeta cheese culinary awareness. I crunched dry, brown rice, gagged on carob, chewed extra long pasta from an extra long canister, and was amazed that someone would have a whole jar — A WHOLE JAR — of sunflower seeds! You didn’t even have to do any work to eat them! There were strange, chewy cookie like things, and brown bread with birdseed on top. Babysitting in the hippie house was my first inkling of what sex was, outside of sneaked peaks of Playboys, and it was my first experience with whole foods.

After many adult years of a fairly average (read not so healthy) diet, I became a whole grain freak. I tried to emulate the hippie kitchen, with jars of dried fruits, nuts, grains and, yes, sunflower seeds. I duly consider most white items in the food pyramid poison. Without much thought I banned white sugar, white flour, white potatoes and white rice from our home menus. Potatoes came back in an anti-Atkins revolt, but I felt slightly smug that I’d been on the whole grain wagon before at least some of the band. I’m one of those moms who tries to add a little whole wheat flour to every cookie, pancake or home made Birthday cake. In my pantry I’ve got whole wheat pasta, whole grain bread, brown rice, a bag of whole wheat flour, a bunch of grains we experiment with and then never add to our repertoire, and a cheapo bag of all-purpose flour we use exclusively for making play dough. Hova accidentally used it to make David Joachim’s killer vegan chocolate chip cookies, and they tasted like paste. Even Georgia didn’t like them.

Georgia doesn’t have a problem with whole grain pasta or chewy whole grain bread. She eats cookies made with whole-wheat flour with no complaint. But when we go out and she gets a grilled cheese on white bread, or mac-n-cheese with white macaroni, it’s like heaven on a plate for her. Hova knows the things I make are better for him, but he’d choose a crusty white French baguette with his white flour ravioli any day. I’m just the opposite: If I have too much refined, processed food my body rebels and I crave brown rice and veggies to get my inner workings back in order.

Recently I started to notice how everything suddenly seemed to say “made with whole grain” and that something that looked healthful might include “unbleached wheat flour” but not “whole wheat flour” and I was feeling a little duped. When I started checking labels I noticed lots of stuff that claimed whole grainage didn’t really have much extra fiber. I guess this crazy, whole foods health craze has made bread and cereal manufacturers feel the need to jump on the whole grain wagon. But they don’t want to sacrifice the shelf life of white flour, which has none of that pesky bran and fiber. Those go bad more quickly, so they add whole grains in small amounts and write “unbleached wheat flour” instead of the legal synonym “flour” and tinker with the claims on the package. For a dizzying glance at what the FDA has to sort through when they aren’t busy patrolling our ports for tainted food imports, check this [2] out.

So now I am a little more careful to get past the claims on the label, to see if something actually has whole grains, or just flour made from what once was a whole grain. If it just says “wheat flour” it just means flour made from wheat, just the starchy part, without any of the germ or bran goodness. If it’s whole wheat [3], it’s made from the whole wheat grain, ground together, giving us five times the dietary fiber of all-purpose flour plus good stuff like folate, thiamin, magnesium, and vitamins B6 and E.

I find myself thanking the hippies a lot, for my intro to whole foods, and for an eye popping picture that served as mental contraception for those important years!