Oh, for....

[oursin]

Another annoying recommendation from Michael Pollan in second lengthy extract from his book in today's Guardian G2:
Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as foodWhy your great-grandmother? Because at this point your mother, and possibly even your grandmother, are as confused as the rest of us; to be safe we need to go

Comments

[mrissa]

Hey, I win at this game! My Gran loved Chinese takeout and anything else we wanted to feed her!

[redbird]

I don't know what any of my great-grandmothers would have recognized as food, not having met them, but they'd only have served the kosher subset.

I know there was one from urban parts of Germany, one from probably rural Poland, and two from shtetls in what's now Ukraine. But what they would have recognized as food, I don't know--nor what subset of that they would have been willing to eat, and known how to, except that I think it was pretty short on fresh fish, even the kosher kind.

And yes, I suspect this is coming down to both more work for women, and "I know stuff and neither you nor any of your family do."

[dhole]

Things my great-grandmothers would have considered food: Shmaltz, shmaltz herring, griben (chicken skin fried in fat), and suchlike. Things they wouldn't have really considered to be food: Raw vegetables.

[dichroic]

Mine, too.

[hafren]

Somewhere in Bertrand Russell's autobiography he mentions that in his (otherwise privileged) childhood he was never allowed to eat fruit, because it was thought to be bad for children. I treasure my Children's Encyclopedia in which that upstanding gent Arthur Mee recommends home-made toffee as a fine, nutritious food for children....

[oursin]

Rebecca West hasa riff somewhere in The Fountain Overflows about dietary errors of the Edwardians, and memoirs and novels of the period suggest that there were a lot of very odd ideas about concerning the appropriate way to feed the growing child, even without going as far as the eccentricities of the Mitfords' ma.

[veejane]

If I count backwards to a great-grandmother -- I don't actually know dates, but I'll guess both were born in about 1890 -- then my ancestral target is smack in the middle of the period in American food about which Upton Sinclair wrote his (badly-plotted, annoyingly screedy, but convincingly horrifying) exposé.

Thank you, no.

[legionseagle]

There are only two things I am aware of (specifically) my great-grandmother consuming.

The first was when the cat was found to have dragged in a large flatfish (a plaice or sole or something of that sort) which it had presumably stolen from one of the fishmongers down at the market. She grabbed it, cut off the bit that had been in the cat's jaws (presumably returning it to the cat) and washed it off under the tap, then fried it.

The second was milk stout, which featured in her last words, as in "I could just do with a milk stout."

I know my great-grandfather was bringing a penn'orth of tripe pieces home to her as a peace offering on the occasion when he nearly got saved by the Salvation Army, but I'm not sure she actually got to eat them.

Anyway, she is not someone whom I associate with raw vegetables. Or indeed cooked ones.

And her mother - the one who got knocked up out-of-wedlock while working as a cook in Didsbury - while presumably recognising a lot more things as food since she had too - passed down the family wisdom that