Food

I recently read (#68) The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan. McMillan is a journalist who worked in farm fields, the produce section of a Supercenter Walmart, and at Applebee's in a quest to figure out how food (produce) makes it from field to table, why so many of us lack access to affordable, fresh produce, and how, regardless of one's race, ethnicity, age, class, socio-economic status, or any other factor, most of us truly want to eat good food.

It is a powerful book and more than once I found myself nodding in recognition and agreement. For the politics and economics of food distribution, and what can be done as a society to make food more accessible and affordable, read the book.

What I was not expecting was how this book triggered food memories in me. McMillan wrote of her own upbringing in a working class Midwest family and what she learned and did not learn about cooking and eating and nutrition growing up. This sentence says it all: "We ate a lot of Helper Meals and Ortega Taco Dinners when I was growing up, and I liked them." She describes salads of chopped iceberg lettuce, some diced carrots, and Wish-Bone Ranch dressing. Oh, Tracie McMillan, I could match you meal for meal with some similar variations of my childhood: frozen fish sticks, cheap hotdogs and chips, and the occasional (and intensely disliked) rice with margarine, milk, and sugar (I was a teenager before I realized that most people I knew did not eat warm rice as a cereal, let alone for supper).

At supper Saturday after I finished the book, we had a somewhat more deliberate meal than we often manage during the workweek. A filet of salmon (from the Aldi bargain salmon last fall), a baked potato for Warren, a baked sweet potato for me, steamed broccoli. We ate slowly, savoring the flavors.

And I talked about food.

At one point in her yearlong quest to source and follow food, McMillan worked in the produce section of a Walmart. She eventually realized that one of her shortcomings in produce was that she was "incredibly ignorant when it comes to buying quality produce." McMillan observed that most of her "food literacy" came from her family, as it does for most of us.

I shared that observation with Warren, adding, "I was fortunate to have Grandma Nelson."

Grandma Nelson was my dad's mom. She was not a warm woman. Hardworking, yes. An excellent cook, absolutely. Most important of all, along with my grandfather, who did the tilling, she grew a large vegetable garden every year out of which we ate fresh and canned (and eventually frozen) food all year long.

Because there was a large garden and because Grandma Nelson did not believe in coddling children, I learned early on not just how to pick vegetables but also how to choose which ones were ready. Green beans, tomatoes, sweet peppers (always called mangoes), sweet corn, cabbage: she taught me how to choose and how to pick. The lessons I learned from her stood me in good stead when I discovered the vast extent of the world of produce.

Grandma Nelson has been dead for 36 years. She was not affectionate; she never once hugged my dad, let alone any of her grandchildren. She could be hard. But she nonetheless left me a legacy. After reading The American Way of Eating, I now realize just what a treasure it was.