Lisa Sussman, NNN's Natural Mom, finds that a love of nature can be expressed in many different ways.

The green gene comes from unexpected places.

People sometimes ask me where I get my love of the outdoors from. And I surprise myself by replying, “My mother.” 

Let’s be clear. Mom definitely wasn’t a really a nature person. Oh, she had her moments. She actually met my father at a summer camp in the Adirondacks. He was a lifeguard, she was a guest. A mutual friend had asked my mother to deliver a note to my father. Dad, who is also a magician (!), made the note disappear although he was wearing only a swimsuit. Mom spent the rest of the day trailing him trying to find out what happened to the piece of paper. The rest, as they say, is history.

But while Dad loves the mountains, the ocean and the scent of pine (the real kind - not the kind that comes in a spray), mom would sooner go to the ballet than watch the birds cavort in the backyard. For her, the only grass and trees she wanted to spend time with were the kind painted as scenery in a play. Mom wouldn’t even venture outside without five layers of SPF50, a hat and a parasol and a fan. Going for a stroll to get some fresh air meant walking down a busy city street. Fresh flowers came in a bouquet. And as for ants, bees and other insects – it was fight or flight. Really, as far as mom was concerned, the best bug was a dead one.   

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Still, you don’t have to be a tree hugger to appreciate the earth’s bounty. Mom was the original locavore. She may not have known that potatoes needed flowering vines to produce or have been able to tell an apple tree from a maple, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t appreciate fresh vegetables and fruit. Anne, my closest childhood friend, says that the only reason she knew that peas didn’t taste like the mush you get from a can is because mom would give her peas in a pod as a snack when they were in season.

Mom was also one of the first people in the world concerned about preservatives. The other day, I was shopping with my children when they spied a box of Lucky Charms. Captivated by the colorful lettering and freaky leprechaun on the box, my son asked what kind of cereal it was. Without thinking, I replied, “It’s ‘magically delicious.’”  

My entire childhood, I coveted Lucky Charms. Apparently they – and all breakfast cereals at that time – had a Bad Horrible Thing, aka the preservative butylated hydroxtoluene or BHT (used to preserve fats in food). A similar preservative, BHA or butylated hydroxyanisole, was also considered off-limits.

So in our house, the only cereal served was Swiss Familia. If you’re not familiar with Familia, it’s old oats, extremely dehydrated raisins and some other unidentifiable dried thing which may have been apricot but could also easily have been desiccated flies. My mother tried to convince my sister Robin and me that it tasted infinitely better than the BHT-poisoned cereals, but we weren’t buying it. As far as we were concerned, it was more like something you’d feed horses – that is, if the horses were desperate. I had a bowl the other day at a friend’s house and I have to say that I don’t think the recipe has changed in 45 years. No wonder the Swiss are known for making clocks – they must be obsessed with counting the minutes to lunchtime and putting something tastier in their mouths.

Our ice cream choice was similarly restricted. When we would hear the tantalizing Brrring of the ice cream truck, Robin and I were the only children in the neighborhood who weren’t trying to break the four minute mile to catch up with it. That’s because unlike the other kids, whose (much nicer) parents would let them load up on chocolate covered crunch bars and gumball rainbow rockets, we could have only have Italian Ice. And only the lemon kind because that’s the one that had the least preservatives. I guess sugar was not as much of an issue for her. But then, corn syrup had not yet made its sneak attack into every ingredient list (it’s even in ketchup!).

I remember going to the supermarket with mom and getting embarrassed as she put some poor clueless kid working in the produce department through the third degree: “What country are these grapes/tomatoes/melons from?” She had read Silent Spring and was concerned about DDT and other pesticides. But mom was also a socialist who didn’t want to support big agra-businesses who exploited workers so that she could have cheap tasteless XXL-sized strawberries and multi-colored peppers year-round.  

Maybe because we didn’t have a flower garden of our own, I lusted after cut flowers. One year – I think I was about 10 – I snuck into our next-door neighbor’s tulip garden and snipped every single bloom. I made a bouquet for my teacher and one for my parents. Of course, mom wanted to know where the flowers had come from. I have to admit, this was not my cherry-tree moment. I lied backwards and forwards before being forced to finally tell the truth (no TV for a month was definitely the persuasive factor). Mom immediately marched me over to the neighbor’s house where I mumbled my apologies. But my punishment did not end there. Despite the neighbor’s protests that the bulbs would regrow the following year (my introduction to the simplicity of perennials) so no real harm was done, my mother offered my weeding services for the remainder of the growing season.  

I guess it could have gone either way. I could have ended up hating gardening and eating healthy food and never knowing that an apple didn’t have to be Sleeping Beauty perfect to be tasty. And I admit that when I went away to college, my diet consisted of instant stuffing and ready-made frosting – two products that never would have been on my mother’s shopping list. But in the end, our roots show. Today, I grow what I can and try to buy local what I can’t.

My mother passed away on July 12, 2008, at the age of 76. Thanks, mom. Every time I pick a fresh misshapen tomato off the vine and bite into its juicy flesh, I’ll think of you.