My mother was not the world’s greatest cook. For that matter, she wasn’t the town’s or even our dirt road’s greatest cook. The few dishes she did well she did often, and on a few basic ingredients, she managed to get me raised.
It wasn’t her fault necessarily. The culinary skills in my family were indisputably vested in my great Granny Adams. Her passing in 1982 marked the end of some of the best food my taste buds have ever known. The cooking gene was primarily inherited through my great Aunt Georgie’s lineage, bypassing my branch altogether and leaving us with extra genetic portions of stubbornness and moxie.
I remember being very young and scarfing down what must have been my fourth plate of Granny’s chicken and dumplins. (Yes, that’s “dumplins,” not “dumplings.” I’d never heard the latter word until I was grown and off to college.) Granny said something about my having a hollow leg.
Hollow leg? Well, that can’t be good. I looked down. Although scrawny, my legs appeared to me to have equal heft. I must have some affliction.
“No, my word,” Granny corrected with a smile. “Means I’m gonna have to go to the back yard and kill another chicken if you keep eatin’ like that!”
What? I put my fork down and looked at my plate. Outside the kitchen window, my mind saw fluffy chickens romping through blades of green dewy grass, making plans for the future while the soundtrack to “Love Story” serenaded in the background. She may as well have told me she slaughtered litters of puppies and served them with gravy.
I deeply didn’t want to know where my food came from.
Fast forward a few decades to my friendship with my West Coast gal pal, a modern-day “back to the lander” who’s into everything nutritional. Try eating an Oreo in front of her and watch her face twitch like Sheldon Cooper before relenting into a tirade about high-processed foods and hydrogenated corn solids. I do it for the sheer entertainment! (OK, plus the tasty goodness of milk’s favorite cookie.)
Seeing me as a winnable challenge, she gave me a book to read about a year and a half ago and for a year and a half, it’s been dusted, packed, moved and dusted some more without my having the least compulsion to open the cover. Ignorance is bliss, I say between the crunches of cereal for dinner.
If you are what you eat, then I’m apparently fast, cheap and easy. I’m not proud of it, but the inside of my refrigerator looks very similar to the way it looked in Lowe’s the day I bought it, with the scant additions of pickles and freshly brewed tea.
But in the process of getting back to my roots, the contents of my kitchen are being overhauled.
I lifted the book entitled “Real Food” by Nina Planck from the stack of other books that I’m procrastinating about and cracked the cover. The author starts her story with how she grew up on real food, lost her way, and came home again. Hum. That story sounds familiar.
She explains for her, real food is old food. No, not the moldy-turned-hockey-puck kind of old food, but the traditional kind of food that’s been in our civilization for many years. For instance, butter is a dairy product known to exist around 2,500 B.C. and believed to exist long before that. Margarine, on the other hand, is a relatively new product from the 1800s created to taste like butter so the armed forces and lower-classed people without access to refrigeration could have something similar to the real thing.
So, if I have access to refrigeration and the real thing, why have I had margarine in my fridge all my life? (And why is it in my fridge if it needn’t be refrigerated?)
Because my mother did. And because it’s soft and spreadable. And because health nuts were telling us not long ago how butter would kill us.
I’m going to keep reading and I’ll keep you posted, but beyond the written page or current study, I feel an innate sense that Granny was onto something.
That simple foods taste better and are better for me. That I need to know where my food comes from. And that more likely than not, if she didn’t eat it, I shouldn’t either.
But I know she’d share some Oreos and a glass of moxie with me. I just know it.
LISA KELLEY IS A WRITER, MASTER GARDENER, ANIMAL LOVER AND ALL-AROUND GOOD OL’ SOUTHERN GAL WHO ALSO HAPPENS TO PRACTICE LAW AND MEDIATE CASES IN DOWNTOWN BENTONVILLE.