(no subject)
Time moves on, and we all get older. Or at least, every one else gets older, but I enjoy good health year after year and don't seem to age as fast as other people.
The reason for this is mostly because mum fed our family on a remarkably advanced and sensible health food diet for most of my youth. One constant fact of my adult life has been the legacy of this solid foundation for my health. It's a valuable asset which I can and do rely on all the time.
Anyway, after a long silence mum called me a couple of months ago, and we managed to speak without arguing or guilt tripping. I decided to write her a letter thanking her for what she did, and also to try and get to the bottom of why? I mean, she just wasn't from the type of background that would get into the nascent organic health food scene in the 70s.
Here's the letter I sent her:
Dear mum, there's something I've been meaning to tell you for some time. I want to thank you for the excellent diet you raised us on. All through my life I've been grateful for this, but I've never explicitly told you so.
The diet you fed us when we were young was very advanced. It was right on the cutting edge of nutrition. I don't even know how you became aware of the ideas of macrobiotic food and scientific balanced nutrition, although I remember you were reading "intentional living" magazines of the time such as Earth Garden and Grass Roots. Those magazines mostly focused on self sufficiency and really only mentioned diet as a justification for living on mostly vegetables and avoiding processed food. Wherever you got the ideas from, you were also brave to carry them out at a time when the concepts were mostly regarded as hippy nonsense or neurotic food obsession.
The benefits have lasted and will last me the rest of my life. All your children have enjoyed good health right up to our forties. We are taller, smarter, and have actually aged less than most of our friends. The aging is really the most amazing part, most people think I'm somewhere in my early thirties. It can't all be blamed on genetics, Helene is significantly taller than her biological family, and healthier. It is definitely because of the diet you fed us.
Although I was never allowed to cook when I was young I definitely learned a lot from observing you and eating the food you cooked, so when you left I was able to pick up the techniques in the kitchen easily. It was good, because I avoided switching to packaged foods, partly because I didn't know anything about them! But really, because I was already "hooked", and had a good object lesson in how easy it is to make food from scratch and how satisfying, I continued looking after myself much better than most other people. The benefits have spread as well, I have taught quite a lot of what I knew to friends I've lived with over the years, and especially Michelle.
I know you took criticism from dads family about it, because they didn't understand the benefits, and even thought that we were being hothoused in some way, and wouldn't be able to cope with packaged food, as though we would fall on the ground convulsing if we ate a burger! I'm glad you stuck to your program and kept us healthy. In reality you were setting us up the other way. Our healthy bodies can absorb more punishment from fast food and shrug it off easier than anyone raised on the stuff, and we can easily repair ourselves by being virtuous for a time and get back to our usual state of good health. I'm no model of virtue when it comes to hard living, but it hasn't really left a mark.
I think this is really coming home to me now because just now the fad diets are starting to fall in line with your original program. I'm talking about low carb diets, the "revelations" about green vegetables defending against cancer, the antioxidant craze, the recent discovery that so called indigestible fibre is actually digested by gut bacteria to provide essential nutrients you can't get any other way, the importance of colour in fresh foods, the benefits of whole grains. Actually, it really makes me steam when I see processed food manufacturers try to capitalise on this, like those recent ads for margarine that sell it as healthy because it's full of "plant seeds", implying it's like whole grains when really it's the vegetable oil cooked out of a seed and then cracked in a pressure reactor! But I won't get stuck in a rant, because I know better, because of you.
Every week Michelle and I visit the Marrickville Community Centre where they have a good farmers market. We buy a large quantity of veges from a particular stall which sells veges mostly grown on a farm near Dural, which although they are not certified organic they don't use any pesticides or chemical fertilisers. We buy lots of brassicas, cauliflower and broccoli and kale and any other interesting varieties and crosses they might have. That's another thing, when you were cooking for us the variety of food available was much narrower. You couldn't just go somewhere and have such a variety laid on for you, even at Paddies. There were just round cabbages, iceberg lettuce, and roma tomatoes were just something wogs ate. We always get their bags and boxes of mixes of multi-coloured capsicums and tomatoes, and salad mixes with mustard greens and english spinach. At Marrickville they have stalls which sell only fungus, small flavoursome mushrooms like shitake and wood ear and others which add flavour to stir fries. Of course it's not all healthy, they have a cheese stall which sells imported roqueforte, expensive but you don't need much! They also have a truck butcher who sells "salt-bush lamb" which is also expensive, but you can't eat more than two of their lamb chops, they're so tasty. We don't just shop there for the sake of our health either, we like the political aspect of giving money directly to the grower and cutting out the multi-national middle men, plus we see some friends there and browse the junk stalls. The only things we buy in the super market are usually cat food and cleaning products. We try as much as possible to buy condiments and spices from ethnic shops.
So there you go. I don't know how you feel about this yourself, but I definitely appreciate the gifts both of good health and an appreciation for good food that you gave us. I'd love to know where the inspiration came from. You were never really a hippy, although you obviously had a lot of respect for some of their ideas. Actually, I shouldn't fall into that trap - most real hippies were disgusting punks whose diet was far worse than normal because they were too lazy to cook. The association between hippy culture and health food came from the Diggers, a group in San Francisco who used to provide free food at rock concerts and festivals and had a strong respect for organic ingredients, and they spawned the whole California raw food cuisine in the seventies. I don't think your diet when young was anything special, or even before you got married. Somewhere along the line you learned a great deal at a time when the information wasn't being pushed by the media or lying around on the internet. Then you went to the trouble of sourcing the ingredients and learning new cooking techniques, and fed us food we didn't appreciate at the time because we were kids and wanted junk, and didn't appreciate the benefits because we never knew anything else.
Hope you are as well as we are, and here's to many more years of eating good food.
So she replied as follows:
Dear Matthew,
What a surprise your letter was and I am delighted to accept your thanks.
Your are right my knowledge of foods was "just" better than my mothers knowledge. Her constant dieting, egg and white toast for breakfast, sao with tomato lettuce and cheese for lunch got her into trouble with diverticulitis. Boarding school for 9 years didn't help me. later I learned to cook liver, onions and bacon for my flat mate and later bridesmaid Veronica - she couldn't bear to even look at it raw. She needed the iron but didn't know it.
Then you came along and initially I fed you on canned baby food and the dog on dog food until one day I put the rubbish bin out and realised it was almost full of baby food cans so I gave you and the dog our food (yours mashed) and hers with more brown rice (you could feed your cats on this) and you both loved it. To keep you busy while I cooked dinner I put cheese in a piece of net and tied it to the high chair and you sucked on that.
I had heard John Denver speak of his macrobiotic diet, so introduced more veges and grains. Meatloaf was made with lots of hidden veges and brown rice and some meat with wholemeal breadcrumbs on top. I hid a lot of _good_ food in casseroles. I only made cakes that were "good for you" cakes. Fruit, carrot, sultana damper or cheese etc.
You children only had green GI cordial because the orange colour - tartarazine - was even then thought to be dangerous. I listened to ABC radio a lot.
How did all this awareness come about? Because I'm me, I suppose, forever questing for more knowledge, trying to be "rounder woman" and thinking too much (things I have been accused of). The rounder woman thing was the reason I acquired 4 different types of arthritis (there are at least 150) 9 years ago. I was "king hit" and could barely move. Alone I worked through all that, sold Dorrigo and moved to Brisbane, had a hip replacement and received 3 other infections and remained in hospital alone for 3 weeks.
The lesson here is "don't drop your guard" when our mind and body are very stressed either by too much work or not the right foods or both then something steps in and in my case it was the arthritis my mother had had - a genetic defect in waiting.
Hopefully you and Martin will never acquire this and now you know how to avoid it. I'd like you to allow Martin to read my letter.
You all rarely had a day off school - your school reports I sent you show this. Helene is bigger than her 3 sisters but today is not healthy - years of drinking too much and junk food. She won't change.
Don't hate me when you see that BUS coming towards you and you think "all those vegetables" when I could have eaten endless chocolate! Love from Mum.
Here are some things that came to mind as I was reading your letter.
Have a large range of foods preferably WHOLE FOODS. Drink water.
Make your own muesli...
Read labels - use Heinz Organic Tomato Ketchup no preservatives, no colours, no flavours. I don't buy organic fruit and veges but try to buy organic grains which I buy when passing at Byron Bay at Santos. I know how barley is treated on the trucks either with a wand inserted in the load on the truck and gassed or big tablets are inserted. I had a friend, Frank who carted barley often for Joe Whites malting works in Tamworth from sidings all over western NSW. It was fun to ride in the truck and see places with dog Buddy keeping an eye on everything. Sometimes I drove behind the truck in Tamworth and see millions of maggots tumbling over the side from under the tarps as the barley had not long been treated. It was revolting especially as it was used for BEER and BABYFOODS.
Harris Farm markets at pennant Hills was a good source of fresh veges and fruit.
There was an organic store at Dundas (not today). They delivered if you bought a certain amount. Do you remember the carob beans you loved to chew?
Grass Roots and Earth Garden certainly made me aware of many things.
Not bad, a little rambling and she does go off into a little guilt trip there, but interesting. The fact that I owe my good health in part to John Denver doesn't entirely surprise me, mum was a rabid fan of his right up until the cocaine bust, when she dropped him and switched to Mark Knoppfler in his solo career.
The reason for this is mostly because mum fed our family on a remarkably advanced and sensible health food diet for most of my youth. One constant fact of my adult life has been the legacy of this solid foundation for my health. It's a valuable asset which I can and do rely on all the time.
Anyway, after a long silence mum called me a couple of months ago, and we managed to speak without arguing or guilt tripping. I decided to write her a letter thanking her for what she did, and also to try and get to the bottom of why? I mean, she just wasn't from the type of background that would get into the nascent organic health food scene in the 70s.
Here's the letter I sent her:
Dear mum, there's something I've been meaning to tell you for some time. I want to thank you for the excellent diet you raised us on. All through my life I've been grateful for this, but I've never explicitly told you so.
The diet you fed us when we were young was very advanced. It was right on the cutting edge of nutrition. I don't even know how you became aware of the ideas of macrobiotic food and scientific balanced nutrition, although I remember you were reading "intentional living" magazines of the time such as Earth Garden and Grass Roots. Those magazines mostly focused on self sufficiency and really only mentioned diet as a justification for living on mostly vegetables and avoiding processed food. Wherever you got the ideas from, you were also brave to carry them out at a time when the concepts were mostly regarded as hippy nonsense or neurotic food obsession.
The benefits have lasted and will last me the rest of my life. All your children have enjoyed good health right up to our forties. We are taller, smarter, and have actually aged less than most of our friends. The aging is really the most amazing part, most people think I'm somewhere in my early thirties. It can't all be blamed on genetics, Helene is significantly taller than her biological family, and healthier. It is definitely because of the diet you fed us.
Although I was never allowed to cook when I was young I definitely learned a lot from observing you and eating the food you cooked, so when you left I was able to pick up the techniques in the kitchen easily. It was good, because I avoided switching to packaged foods, partly because I didn't know anything about them! But really, because I was already "hooked", and had a good object lesson in how easy it is to make food from scratch and how satisfying, I continued looking after myself much better than most other people. The benefits have spread as well, I have taught quite a lot of what I knew to friends I've lived with over the years, and especially Michelle.
I know you took criticism from dads family about it, because they didn't understand the benefits, and even thought that we were being hothoused in some way, and wouldn't be able to cope with packaged food, as though we would fall on the ground convulsing if we ate a burger! I'm glad you stuck to your program and kept us healthy. In reality you were setting us up the other way. Our healthy bodies can absorb more punishment from fast food and shrug it off easier than anyone raised on the stuff, and we can easily repair ourselves by being virtuous for a time and get back to our usual state of good health. I'm no model of virtue when it comes to hard living, but it hasn't really left a mark.
I think this is really coming home to me now because just now the fad diets are starting to fall in line with your original program. I'm talking about low carb diets, the "revelations" about green vegetables defending against cancer, the antioxidant craze, the recent discovery that so called indigestible fibre is actually digested by gut bacteria to provide essential nutrients you can't get any other way, the importance of colour in fresh foods, the benefits of whole grains. Actually, it really makes me steam when I see processed food manufacturers try to capitalise on this, like those recent ads for margarine that sell it as healthy because it's full of "plant seeds", implying it's like whole grains when really it's the vegetable oil cooked out of a seed and then cracked in a pressure reactor! But I won't get stuck in a rant, because I know better, because of you.
Every week Michelle and I visit the Marrickville Community Centre where they have a good farmers market. We buy a large quantity of veges from a particular stall which sells veges mostly grown on a farm near Dural, which although they are not certified organic they don't use any pesticides or chemical fertilisers. We buy lots of brassicas, cauliflower and broccoli and kale and any other interesting varieties and crosses they might have. That's another thing, when you were cooking for us the variety of food available was much narrower. You couldn't just go somewhere and have such a variety laid on for you, even at Paddies. There were just round cabbages, iceberg lettuce, and roma tomatoes were just something wogs ate. We always get their bags and boxes of mixes of multi-coloured capsicums and tomatoes, and salad mixes with mustard greens and english spinach. At Marrickville they have stalls which sell only fungus, small flavoursome mushrooms like shitake and wood ear and others which add flavour to stir fries. Of course it's not all healthy, they have a cheese stall which sells imported roqueforte, expensive but you don't need much! They also have a truck butcher who sells "salt-bush lamb" which is also expensive, but you can't eat more than two of their lamb chops, they're so tasty. We don't just shop there for the sake of our health either, we like the political aspect of giving money directly to the grower and cutting out the multi-national middle men, plus we see some friends there and browse the junk stalls. The only things we buy in the super market are usually cat food and cleaning products. We try as much as possible to buy condiments and spices from ethnic shops.
So there you go. I don't know how you feel about this yourself, but I definitely appreciate the gifts both of good health and an appreciation for good food that you gave us. I'd love to know where the inspiration came from. You were never really a hippy, although you obviously had a lot of respect for some of their ideas. Actually, I shouldn't fall into that trap - most real hippies were disgusting punks whose diet was far worse than normal because they were too lazy to cook. The association between hippy culture and health food came from the Diggers, a group in San Francisco who used to provide free food at rock concerts and festivals and had a strong respect for organic ingredients, and they spawned the whole California raw food cuisine in the seventies. I don't think your diet when young was anything special, or even before you got married. Somewhere along the line you learned a great deal at a time when the information wasn't being pushed by the media or lying around on the internet. Then you went to the trouble of sourcing the ingredients and learning new cooking techniques, and fed us food we didn't appreciate at the time because we were kids and wanted junk, and didn't appreciate the benefits because we never knew anything else.
Hope you are as well as we are, and here's to many more years of eating good food.
So she replied as follows:
Dear Matthew,
What a surprise your letter was and I am delighted to accept your thanks.
Your are right my knowledge of foods was "just" better than my mothers knowledge. Her constant dieting, egg and white toast for breakfast, sao with tomato lettuce and cheese for lunch got her into trouble with diverticulitis. Boarding school for 9 years didn't help me. later I learned to cook liver, onions and bacon for my flat mate and later bridesmaid Veronica - she couldn't bear to even look at it raw. She needed the iron but didn't know it.
Then you came along and initially I fed you on canned baby food and the dog on dog food until one day I put the rubbish bin out and realised it was almost full of baby food cans so I gave you and the dog our food (yours mashed) and hers with more brown rice (you could feed your cats on this) and you both loved it. To keep you busy while I cooked dinner I put cheese in a piece of net and tied it to the high chair and you sucked on that.
I had heard John Denver speak of his macrobiotic diet, so introduced more veges and grains. Meatloaf was made with lots of hidden veges and brown rice and some meat with wholemeal breadcrumbs on top. I hid a lot of _good_ food in casseroles. I only made cakes that were "good for you" cakes. Fruit, carrot, sultana damper or cheese etc.
You children only had green GI cordial because the orange colour - tartarazine - was even then thought to be dangerous. I listened to ABC radio a lot.
How did all this awareness come about? Because I'm me, I suppose, forever questing for more knowledge, trying to be "rounder woman" and thinking too much (things I have been accused of). The rounder woman thing was the reason I acquired 4 different types of arthritis (there are at least 150) 9 years ago. I was "king hit" and could barely move. Alone I worked through all that, sold Dorrigo and moved to Brisbane, had a hip replacement and received 3 other infections and remained in hospital alone for 3 weeks.
The lesson here is "don't drop your guard" when our mind and body are very stressed either by too much work or not the right foods or both then something steps in and in my case it was the arthritis my mother had had - a genetic defect in waiting.
Hopefully you and Martin will never acquire this and now you know how to avoid it. I'd like you to allow Martin to read my letter.
You all rarely had a day off school - your school reports I sent you show this. Helene is bigger than her 3 sisters but today is not healthy - years of drinking too much and junk food. She won't change.
Don't hate me when you see that BUS coming towards you and you think "all those vegetables" when I could have eaten endless chocolate! Love from Mum.
Here are some things that came to mind as I was reading your letter.
Have a large range of foods preferably WHOLE FOODS. Drink water.
Make your own muesli...
Read labels - use Heinz Organic Tomato Ketchup no preservatives, no colours, no flavours. I don't buy organic fruit and veges but try to buy organic grains which I buy when passing at Byron Bay at Santos. I know how barley is treated on the trucks either with a wand inserted in the load on the truck and gassed or big tablets are inserted. I had a friend, Frank who carted barley often for Joe Whites malting works in Tamworth from sidings all over western NSW. It was fun to ride in the truck and see places with dog Buddy keeping an eye on everything. Sometimes I drove behind the truck in Tamworth and see millions of maggots tumbling over the side from under the tarps as the barley had not long been treated. It was revolting especially as it was used for BEER and BABYFOODS.
Harris Farm markets at pennant Hills was a good source of fresh veges and fruit.
There was an organic store at Dundas (not today). They delivered if you bought a certain amount. Do you remember the carob beans you loved to chew?
Grass Roots and Earth Garden certainly made me aware of many things.
Not bad, a little rambling and she does go off into a little guilt trip there, but interesting. The fact that I owe my good health in part to John Denver doesn't entirely surprise me, mum was a rabid fan of his right up until the cocaine bust, when she dropped him and switched to Mark Knoppfler in his solo career.