Year of No Sugar by Eve O. Schaub

First of all, I'm going to link this review to the Weekend Cooking event on Beth Fish Reads because it is about food.  I actually got the idea to read this book from a post that Trish at Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity wrote last weekend concerning her quest to give up sugar for 3 weeks.  All sugar and all sugar substitutes and gluten and I'm not sure what else.  And good luck, Trish - hope you are doing OK.  She thought her biggest sacrifice was probably going to be no sweetener in her morning coffee.  And I sympathize.

I knew I had a book in my audio library that was about one family giving up sugar for an entire year.  I decided I would see what giving up sugar might be like.  The book is Year of No Sugar and it was written by Eve O. Schaub.  This is how it begins:

Sugar and me, we go way back.  I love sugar.  LOOOOVVVVE it.  I love everything about it: how it makes little occasions special and special occasions fabulous.  How it performs hot, bubbling magic on sour fruits, like rhubarb and gooseberries, to make the most succulent mind-blowing pies and jams.  How it crunches with perfect granulation in the best cookies and how a single cube of it adds fairy-tale perfection to a real Italian cappuccino.  And don't even get me started on chocolate.

OK...so I'm thinking, this is a book about depriving oneself and one's family of sugar.  Really?  Maybe she will just spend the whole book describing how wonderful sweet things are.  The author then goes into a funny story about a junior high "how to" assignment she had where she "taught" the class how to decorate a cake and how very wrong it went.  Wait, I thought - deja vu - did I do that?  Did my daughter?  I had to stop and call my daughter to ask.  Yes, she said, I did do that and thanks for reminding me of my humiliation, Mom.  It was awful.  Everything got too warm and the icing melted and the fudge syrup didn't work right and it ran everywhere.  It was a horrible project.  But the cake was good.  She's still our family baker - my daughter.

Year With No Sugar is a memoir of a family, Eve Schaub's family, who decide to try to avoid eating any food with added sugar or sugar substitute for an entire year.  Eve had seen a video by a doctor that opened her eyes to the harm that could come from all the added sugar, mostly fructose, that we routinely eat in our diets.  Because sugar is everywhere, in lots and lots of foods and goes by many, many names.  She discussed the project with her husband and enlisted her two daughters, ages 6 and 11 (they weren't quite as enthusiastic) in her quest.

The book was really very interesting and funny.  Eve kept a blog the whole time and related the joys and horrors of that year.  She included a lot of relevant information, but it didn't overwhelm things with statistics.  She also included bits from her daughter Greta's journal as well.  Greta was 11 and she did fairly well on the project - mostly - well, sometimes.  Her journal is really amusing, very much from an almost teen viewpoint.  The author related stories of the family's once-a-month planned desserts.  A camping trip for 6th graders with a s'mores dilemma.  Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Finding out that certain products that you never dreamed contained sugar did have sugar.  Did you know that balsamic vinegar is not really a vinegar?  And that it contains sugar?

Eve tried many food experiments that sometimes worked well and sometimes not.  The family took a two-week trip to Italy and managed to stay strong on their quest - well, except for that peach gelato.  The year included visits to extended family who had bowls of Hershey kisses available, a trip to the Mayo Clinic with her father and trying to find no-sugar-added food in a hotel breakfast buffet or hospital cafeteria, and spending the year asking question after question anytime the family ate at a restaurant.

I actually enjoyed the book very much.  I learned some things and found myself picking up foods in my pantry and fridge and reading the ingredients.  While I don't think I want to go a similar route for a year, it did make me consider how much sugar I eat (and I don't really think of myself as having a sweet tooth).  It also made me consider whether the best decision would be to save my sugar calories for really, really tasty and planned-for events.  I think that could be doable.  Plus, I paid a lot more attention this week to added sugar.  I didn't do what Trish is doing, but I did make better choices.

The audio was read by Hillary Huber and John Lee. Year of No Sugar gets a thumbs up from me.