How I Eat part 2 : Family History
“When diet is wrong, treatment is of no use. When diet is correct, treatment is of no need.” ―Ayurvedic proverb
I credit food with being the primary factor in my remission, but the way that I eat is determined by the context into which I was born. Growing up, most people around me ate the standard American diet that included a great deal of meat, fat, protein, and refined industrial foods. I don't recall knowing a single vegetarian until I was a teenager.
Although my mother tried her best to feed me vegetables, from the time I started feeding myself I did what the people around me did, and I ate anything I could get my hands on. Fast food, fried food, liters of liquid sugar. Multiple coffees a day for years. Pizza and poutine at 6am after an all-night alcohol binge. You name it, I ate it, but that's not how my mom raised me. It's how my cultural context socialized me. I consumed that way to fit in and fill a void left by a fragmented social fabric.
I was born to a mother who loves food. I grew up to the scent of soups simmering and seasonal jam preserves by the dozens; blueberry, blackberry, peach, and strawberry jam to last through winter. My mother was a hippie and is to this day a lover of good food. When the organic food movement hit its stride in the 80s, she was in the thick of it. In her kitchen, I grew up eating brown rice, organic chicken breast, potatoes, boiled root vegetables, artisanal sausage, bakery-fresh bread, and steamed broccoli. As a sign of the times, I also grew up with Nutella and white bagels.
Seeing my mom cooking from scratch in the kitchen gave me a predisposition that made learning to feed myself much easier. There were years when I saw her turn hundreds of kilos of fruit into preserves to sell at Vancouver's markets. I don't think about it so often, but to have been shown that care, labour, and love for food really shaped me. I asked her recently how she learned to cook. Her answer was, "I taught myself."
My grandmother cooked a lot, but she never taught her daughters. Mamie didn't have time to teach, but my mother also grew up in a household with an active kitchen, so she knew what cooking looked like, smelled like, sounded like; the passionate fury of the stove with four pots on it, the oven welcoming dozens of meat pies, the sizzling of onion and garlic in fresh butter. My mother didn't learn how to cook from her mother, but she learned that cooking was possible, and she passed that on to me.
My mother grew up eating post-war homegrown meat and potatoes, fresh caught fish, carrots, turnips, cabbage, and preserves stored in the house by her mother. Mamie fed the whole family while holding down a job doing customer service at the Hudson's Bay Company in Murdochville. She had grown up on a farm, churning butter by hand. My mom's childhood in the Gaspe was one of local food, not out of choice, or because of some received idea that "local organic food is better for you," just because it was the only option.
In the 50s, the mining economy gave the family the ability to buy anything they needed, and my grandmother had never wanted to be a peasant farmer anyway. She became a modern wife holding down a house and a job. No one else cooked, but at least she didn't have to plow the fields and tend the cows. The family's dairy came from the grandparents' farm; the meat and vegetables came from producers known to Mamie.
She could use the money she and Papie earned in Murdochville to buy a house, car, sugar and milk in bulk, and all the ingredients to make what her mother, my great-grandmother, had shown her how to make. Before the organic food industry had lobbyists, the idea of organic vs conventional agriculture didn't exist.
Industrial imports became available as the years went on, and at first, the difference in the quality of the ingredients was barely noticeable. The taste wasn't quite the same, but it made life so much easier, simpler, and less labour-intensive. Time was still scarce, but it was easier than Mamie's mother had had it. Instead of 12 kids, she only had 3. Instead of the farm, she worked at the department store.
She still used her time cooking and working. She boiled 'baboche' (moonshine) regularly because there was no liquor commission nearby. When the liquor store moved in, she stopped. Over time, she barely changed how or what she cooked. Fresh fish and meat pies, boiled potatoes and root veggies, all seasoned with industrial butter, margarine, iodized salt, and Red Path sugar.
I don't hold too romantic a view of homesteading. It's a painstaking, constantly backbreaking labour that keeps one beholden to place and to weather. It is really, really hard work. But the fact is that as a child, my grandmother ate better than her children did, and much better than most of her grandchildren's generation.
All I know of that reality comes from Mamie's stories and from the food she cooked for me when I was growing up. She's eaten fresh-caught Atlantic fish her whole life. Now, she doesn't cook for herself, and the fish have nearly run dry. She fed her kids the same way she had eaten. The ingredients just kept getting worse over 90 years. Distant industrial farms now supply everything Mamie's family used to make, grow, and buy locally.
I was recently in an Ayurvedic nutrition course, and one of my peers in their 30s was clearly uncomfortable in the kitchen. The teacher encouraged us to share our knowledge and coach each other in cooking techniques. And she was right: it's only by sharing what we know, whether across family or friends, that it becomes possible to make new choices, should we want to make them. The fact that my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother (etc) all cooked, and that I was lucky enough to be born into that lineage, makes food a comfort zone for me.
I began a dietary transition in my mid-20s towards the whole foods plant-based way that I eat now. My extended family of origin eats nothing like I do. They're still on the standard American diet, and they seem happy enough. I was forced to examine my food habits for recovery, and so I changed. Force majeure wouldn't have it any other way.