My Kids Have Never Had Fast Food

My kids are six and eight years old, and other than one very specific exception, they have never had fast food. About three years ago my oldest became student of the month and his teacher rewarded him with a Happy Meal. Apparently academic achievement came with a cheeseburger that month. That's the entire fast-food history for both of my children.

I've never taken them through a drive-thru for lunch or dinner. I've never picked up fast food on the way home because I didn't feel like cooking. I've never ordered it to the house or had a night where I said fuck it, we're getting burgers. It just isn't something we do.

I notice how unusual that apparently is because I hear parents and grandparents with little kids talk about fast food constantly. I'll hear somebody tell a two-, three-, four- or five-year-old that they're going to get fast food for lunch, and nobody thinks anything of it. It's not a treat or somebody's birthday. It's just lunch.

I haven't eaten fast food myself since I got sober almost five years ago. I didn't make some grand decision that fast food was evil or overhaul my diet. I stopped drinking, a bunch of routines changed with it, and fast food disappeared somewhere along the way. Eventually I realized I hadn't eaten it in years and didn't miss it.

I cook every meal we eat, and I mean I cook it. Breakfast, lunch when we're home, dinner, weekends, weekdays, whatever. I'm the one figuring out what we're eating, checking what we have, cooking it and usually dealing with the fact that one of my children has decided he no longer likes something he ate without complaint four days earlier.

I'm not making elaborate meals every night either. Sometimes I make something really good, and sometimes I'm standing in the kitchen at 6:30 trying to turn whatever we have into dinner. We eat leftovers. I use frozen ingredients. We have pasta, sandwiches, easy meals and plenty of stuff off the grill. I don't have some weird requirement that everything has to be made from scratch for it to count as cooking.

I just know how to feed my family, and I think that's a pretty basic thing an adult should know how to do. Somehow we've reached a point where it is completely possible to live by yourself and never really learn how to turn groceries into meals. You can have somebody else cook your food, put it in a bag, drive it across town and leave it on your porch every day if you're willing to pay for it. That still seems fucking strange to me.

I understand why people do it, especially with kids. Everybody is tired, people work too much, evenings disappear into activities and nobody gets excited about dirtying the kitchen after a long day. There are plenty of nights when I don't feel like cooking either. I cook anyway because everybody still needs dinner and there's food in the house.

What I actually wish we could do more is go out to restaurants. I like taking the kids somewhere, sitting down together, ordering something I wouldn't normally make and having somebody else deal with dinner for once. The problem is that taking a family of four to a normal restaurant can easily turn into an $80 or $100 night now, and I'm not doing that every time I don't feel like cooking.

I know fast food sits in the middle of that equation for a lot of families. It's cheaper than sitting down somewhere and easier than going home and cooking. I'm not judging somebody who gets trapped after work with hungry kids and needs to feed everybody. What surprises me is when it stops being the backup plan and just becomes the way a family regularly eats.

My kids have no idea that our way is unusual because it's the only way they've known. They ask me what's for dinner. They come into the kitchen and look at what I'm making. They complain about it, steal pieces of it before dinner is ready, suddenly become starving fifteen minutes before I'm finished and occasionally tell me something looks disgusting before eating two servings of it.

I've done that thousands of times now. There isn't anything memorable about most of those meals, and that's probably why I never thought much about it until recently. You cook, everybody eats, you clean up, and the next day you do it again. Eight years of doing that starts to become something even if none of the individual nights felt important.

Eventually my kids are going to eat whatever they want. They'll be out with friends, they'll have their own money, and sooner or later somebody is going to introduce them to the completely reasonable experience of eating greasy food late at night because it sounded good. I'm not trying to raise two people who think a drive-thru is some forbidden place Dad warned them about.

I just like that their starting point is home.

When they're hungry, they don't think about where we're going to get food. They ask me what I'm making. They have grown up expecting that there are ingredients in the house and Dad is going to turn some of them into dinner.

They've never known anything different, and I'm pretty damn proud of that.