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| a teen enjoy his food |
Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing. James Thurber
I've witnessed babies throw themselves on the floor wailing and crying after being given a taste of asparagus and then proceed to pick a piece of dirty lint off the floor and pop it, delighted, into their mouth. Susan Grout
Artichokes: These are things are just plain annoying...after all the trouble you go to you get about as much actual 'food' out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking thirty or forty postage stamps. Miss Piggy as told to Henry Beard
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| Mom at 83 |
Don't get between Jane and her food or you'll get a fork in the back. a brother in lawMy mother was a most notorious championship eater. She had an enormous appetite and six darling children. At the Sunday dinners, that our Mom laboriously prepared, she would inevitably with great enthusiasm clean her plate. Then she'd motion to my siblings, especially the picky eaters, to "pass your plate" to her and Mom'd finish off their leftovers. Granted Mom grew up during the Depression when getting an orange in her stocking for Christmas was a deep thrill. Also during the Depression many Americans were victims of scarcity and often hungry. Look at the pictures of the American people in the 1920's through the 1950's and try to find anyone who was overweight. Why aren't there many? Several factors, people walked everywhere, they cherished a good meal and they had no experience with fast foods or convenience foods. That craze started after the war in the late 1950's. We've paid for it in pounds, higher blood pressure and diabetes.
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| Me about to attack the cake |
Bread that must be sliced with an ax is bread that is too nourishing. Fran Lebowitz
I started thinking about food and eating when I overheard my son say, to someone at Thanksgiving, "She doesn't eat that much." Meaning me, I was surprised. I'm not the gourmand my mother was but I eat plenty, just more cautiously than my mother. I'm also a selective eater. I survived the Carob fad, the bread made to taste like a brick fad and the no butter anywhere fad in the 70's and declared that I would never eat anything that was supposedly healthy but tasted dreadful. However I'm sometimes rather oblivious.
Recently, at a very nice restaurant I unwittingly chomped down on a bit of metal that was in the salsa. I cracked my molar and endured lots of pain. The results involved several visits to the dentist and a very long drawn out procedure that ended in a root canal. Ugh x 2. So for a couple of months I was so cautious trying to avoid more pain. I needed to be super careful about what I ate and how I ate. The interesting part is I've became a slow, careful eater. Naturally I did lose weight [which was unintentional] but the temporary debilitation also showed me how to value being able to eat with abandon. Not sure if I'll ever go back to bolting my food. I realized that I really don't like the feeling of being stuffed like the turkey.
The ironic part in my gourmand mother's story is she was never overweight in her life. The guesses I have about why she wasn't hefty is probably her genetics and also the culture of the day was not about overeating all the time. In her early days prior to marriage, getting food required some effort, some luck and some preparation. Overeating just wasn't normalized as much as it is today. There was no directions about what a portion of food was at that time and certainly none of the foods were highly processed--- there was no such thing as a Big Gulp. About portion control, for example, when I was a child in our school lunch box was--- a sandwich, period. Great days for me at school involved perhaps a cookie, only one, in the lunchbox. Once in awhile we had the privilege eating from cafeteria at school which the adored Myrtle the school chef made. I dearly loved her Spaghetti with brown gravy. I was a most fortunate child in that I never remember going hungry for long. One of the reasons, peculiar to our family, was my parents owned and worked in our family restaurant. We always had fabulous food from the restaurant when Dad would remember bring it home. When I was working at the restaurant I remember snacking but never sitting down for an entire meal. I suppose looking at food and serving it all day long actually acted as a deterrent to overeating for me and most probably for my parents as well. This would absolutely not be true if I worked in a bakery.
The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it. Andy Rooney
What's also happened in the last decade is people are discovering they have sensitivities to various foods. These are not true life threatening allergies like the few who unfortunately suffer from extreme reactions to peanuts or truly have Celiac disease. I've about given up asking if people have food sensitivities, figuring they can bring extra food that they can eat rather than me scrambling to cook yet another dish that might not even get touched. How many rice crackers have I tossed into the compost that have gone stale from neglect? Too many to count. And worse in my estimation: the enormous waste of food in our country. I'm lucky to have a vigorous compost pile and grateful for every last worm. This, sadly, is the exception rather than the rule, in our country the waste is 125-160 billion pounds of food a year. Prior to food going bad in the refridge a good strategy is to not over buy. Don't people know about food banks? We all need to shop more judiciously.
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