Credit mom Joan with keeping the crew fed. But dont ask her to make lunch

Joan Hunter has a lot of mouths to feed—11 of them at times. That tally includes her husband, herself, and their nine children, who range in age from 11 to 26. Among the children is Drew Hunter who in February became the eighth American high school runner to break 4 minutes for the mile. He ran 3:58.25 on an indoor track in New York and set an American indoor high school record. 

Hunter, who signed a contract with Adidas over the summer after graduating from Loudoun Valley High School, credits his mother with talking to him about the importance of nutrition when he started to take his running more seriously and when one member of their family was diagnosed with Type I diabetes, which changed their eating habits. 

For most of this year, Hunter is living at home with his parents and siblings, and together they plan for his education and his future. “I am still feeding him, and one of my goals for him is to develop his cooking skills this year,” Joan Hunter, 53, said. “He’s fairly capable already, but the practice will be good for him. Hopefully he will leave home able to prepare a variety of healthy meals for himself.”

He’s currently putting that into practice with a one-month training stint at altitude in Boulder, Colorado, and Flagstaff, Arizona. “I’m eating out a little bit, but I’m trying to cook meals every day,” Hunter said, noting that it’s going well, even though he’s surprised by the price of groceries.

He heads to a morning workout on nothing but a cup of coffee with butter in it, then eats a full breakfast at 11, has lunch between 2 and 3 p.m., and does his second workout at 4 or 5 p.m. Dinner is later in the evening, between 7 and 9 p.m. “I try to have one meal that’s lots of vegetables,” he said, and he focuses on iron-rich foods, like spinach, while he’s at altitude. 

In the meantime, parents Joan and Marc are coaching cross country and track at Loudoun Valley and at the Northern Virginia Athletic Club, which they founded. One of the siblings is away at college, but with two in middle school, three in high school, Drew sometimes at home, and their two oldest daughters working and going to school but living at home, Joan—who counts the 2:22 800 meters she ran as a 49-year-old as one of her own favorite running achievements—spends a lot of time shopping for food and preparing meals for their busy family. 

Here’s what Joan says about how they eat: 

Breakfast
Most of us for will eat some version of eggs. We go through probably six to seven dozen eggs a week at least. And sausage or bacon, we eat a lot of that. The kids will usually have some form of egg, fruit, and maybe a piece of toast and sausage. Some of the kids will just do their own thing in the morning, but we don’t have convenience food. I don’t ever buy cereal. Cereal is like, “Oh my gosh, mom bought cereal,” and it’s gone in two minutes. So I don’t buy it very often. Last month, I bought gluten-free Honey Nut Cheerios at Costco and it was gone so fast. It was like candy. 

I don’t eat a lot of breakfast. Drew and I usually have coffee with coconut oil whipped up in it with a little half and half and stevia. We both drink that every morning and I can go on that for hours. Depending on when he’s running in the morning, he’ll also eat coconut porridge with flax, almond milk, stevia, and cinnamon. It’s the consistency of cream of wheat. 

Lunch
They all pack their own lunch for school. Some pack the night before and some do it the morning of. It’s totally up to them.

When Drew was in school, he might take leftovers that he could heat up at school, salad, a clementine, and some trail mix or Kind bars. He likes chocolate peanut butter. That’s probably our main grab food that we have; we don’t have a lot of junk food. He would do a big salad with mixed greens and lots of vegetables and turkey and cheese in it.

I’ll buy prewashed romaine at Wegmans. They’ve already taken the ends off and I can just chop it up. Or I’ll buy the bagged baby greens that they have at Costco with kale and spinach. Usually we mix those two together for salads. We make homemade dressing: olive oil and apple cider vinegar. We package the dressing separately. 

I don’t worry about lunch too much. Because I know they’re going to be eating dinner and usually have a decent breakfast. I never make lunch for the kids. Never. I mean other than my littlest one’s school lunch, I’ll help him, but on the weekends, everybody is on their own for lunch. If you live in this house, you can come up with something. 

Tupperware
[The kids] use Sistema to take their lunches. It’s like Tupperware. They have all different kinds of good containers for different kinds things you might take for lunch, and the containers are divided up into sections. They have to wash it [when they get home]. If my youngest doesn’t wash his out, he loses his electronics for a day, because I can’t stand that.

Shopping

I do almost all my shopping at Wegmans and Costco. I will often go to Costco Sunday right after church, because it’s in the same town. I try to get to Costco midweek too, and I’ll go to Wegmans in the same day as the midweek Costco run. I keep cooler bags in the back of my car if I need them. But I’m at the store at least three times a week, making little fill-in trips. 

Dinner
Dinner is crazy. It depends on the season. In the winter I make a lot of soup, homemade soup. You know, that’s kind of a favorite. It’s easy for me, I can put everything in one pot. We have a lot of favorite soups I make. One is a pizza soup from Mel Joulwan. Another is a Best Big City Marathons. 

The rest of the year—there’s almost always some kind of meat. We have salad, I would say, most nights. Drew for sure eats a least one large salad a day. If we don’t have salad, we would have, broccoli, or kale, or some form of a vegetable. 

We don’t eat a lot of grains. We have one Type 1 diabetic, and my husband and one other child—we suspect maybe more—have a dairy sensitivity. But I will do a pot of rice and then some of the kids will eat that to get some carbohydrates. 

Drew eats probably fewer carbohydrates than a lot of distance runners do. He’s a pretty good fat burner from the way we eat. For my child who is a diabetic, it just doesn’t make sense to have a diet that’s based on grains when you’re trying to keep your blood sugars regulated. 

One favorite dinner is pork chops. It’s very simple. I just season them with smoked paprika, and salt and pepper, and thyme and then I cook them in a cast-iron skillet. My bigger boys eat two, and my little people only eat one, usually. Yeah, I would probably cook about 15 pork chops.

We eat fish sometimes, we eat sausage and cabbage. We try to get a half cow that’s grass fed from a local farmer every year and keep it in the freezer. Chicken thighs and legs are a staple because they’re cheap and I have to make so much of it. We do a lot of chicken thigh dinners. We do one that’s a chicken cacciatore, in the crockpot. It’s really easy and good.

For a fast dinner in a pinch, I do buy frozen, gluten-free pizza at Costco, which we would probably add toppings to. Maybe some pepperoni or some green peppers and mushroom. We will do that occasionally.

I also keep those those reasonably healthy Steak-Umms. I can’t remember what brand they are, but they’re sirloin frozen steak things. And I’ll make a stir-fry out of that if I have any leftover rice, and put vegetables in that, and they like that. That’s a fast dinner.

Family Dinner
Yeah [eating all together], it’s a test. The sports thing has gotten insane in my family, with us coaching two teams and almost everybody’s involved in a sport, either basketball or running. My husband leaves at about 4:50 in the morning so he can be back in time for practice at 4 p.m. He has a long commute, almost 60 miles, working for the Department of Defense.

We usually eat at around the same time, but it’s like, ‘Okay, come get dinner’ and then maybe four or five of them will sit down and eat together and I’ll still be cooking.

We usually eat dinner really late because of the way sports practices go. On a good night we eat dinner at 7:30. On a bad night we might eat dinner at 9 o’clock. Yeah, they don’t do a lot of snacking at night, they just kind of go to bed. 

The one sweet thing that I do keep in the house, for my kids that can eat it, is ice cream that is additive-free. Several companies are making it. They are just cream, milk, vanilla, sugar—there’s your ingredients. Turkey Hill makes one and there’s Peter’s store brand. There are probably others. The ones who have dairy sensitivity eat ice cream from cashew milk.

Fortunately, my 14-year-old daughter appears to be developing into a cook. She’s pretty capable; she especially likes to bake things. She’ll make gluten-free treats for the family and her brothers. 

I can leave instructions with her. If I forgot something for dinner, but I’m out the door for practice—she’s in middle school, so she’s not at my high school practice—I can say, you know, ‘Grace, you need to do this, this, and this’ and dinner—you guys can eat dinner at 6 or 6:30. That doesn’t happen all the time, but she’s pretty capable.

Grocery Bills
I don’t even want to think about it. We really try to eat a lot of whole foods. I don’t buy many snack foods. I try to buy organic apples and strawberries, but we don’t do all organic, I just can’t afford it.

Cooking
I don’t generally enjoy cooking. I occasionally will find something new that I really like, that I want to cook, and I’ll be excited about doing that. But I don’t love it.

Mother’s Day Celebration
Mother’s Day? What the heck is that? I tell them every year, “It’s Mother’s Day, I will not be cooking anything.” And that’s that. And I’m happy.