I love food; buying, preparing, and eating it, but best of all, sharing it. It wasn’t always so. The food I ate growing up was neither healthy nor tasty. I come from Montreal, Quebec, and French-Canadian food in the 1970s was a weird combo of three main influences: French (helloooo, country pate!), a bit of British (meat pies, Shepherd’s pies, other kinds of pies, and also pies. Did I mention the Brits like pies? No? Well guess what? Yea, they will kill you for a single delicious pie crust), and a lot of processed American foods (Campbells soup, Wonder Bread, Jello, to name but a few). We were a family of six that lived through some serious financial instability, so the unifying thread was: cheap, boring, and quick to make.
It was only when I began to work in the restaurant industry at the age of nineteen that I discovered what “good food” was. Of course, “good” is subjective and can be defined in many ways. My grandmother’s version of good food, which she served us when we visited during the holidays, consisted of pigs’ feet stew with “grandperes” (homemade dumplings), deep-fried pork slab, cabbage slathered in Miracle Whip, and sugar pie. A diet high in fat, sodium, and cholesterol. Somehow, she still lived until the age of 89, after surviving a few heart attacks. My grandfather, who ate the same food and was very active physically (shoveling snow well into his 90s), died of old age a few months later, at the age of 94.
My own idea of what is good food has changed a lot over the years. I went through many phases and followed many known trends: macrobiotics, pescatarian, vegetarianism, veganism, intermittent fasting, keto. I experimented with friends and learned a lot along the way. When I met Phil, I was following a keto diet five days a week. It helped me shed some of my menopause weight—maybe not as much as I was hoping for, but, more importantly, I felt good.
It just so happens that keto and a diabetes-friendly diet share one important goal: keeping daily carbs as low as possible. Once Phil was aboard after that dreadful and scary call from his doctor, I was ready to make low-carb food that I thought would appeal to him. But in order to do that, we needed to not only count carbs but also know how specific carbs affected his glucose levels. The traditional route to figure out all of that is to meet and consult with a nutritionist, or, if your insurance doesn’t cover that, spend a lot of time googling, which, as you might already know, can give you a whole bunch of different, confusing, and contradictory information.
That’s why Phil’s decision to get the FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor was so important—it was the crucial tool we needed to create a diet and adopt a lifestyle that would work for him, for me, and for us.
Sylvie has worked in the restaurant industry for over 35 years as a server, bartender, manager, wine buyer, and, since 2011, co-owner of a popular neighborhood restaurant in Brooklyn. She is the co-founding editor of the literary magazine, CAGIBI, and teaches memoir writing at the Writers Studio in NYC. You can read some of her writing at svbertrand.com, and in various publications
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