My Grandparent’s Diet Tips

Dieting is not a new thing, but the need to watch what we eat has grown as access to food has increased. Hundreds of years ago the food supply was not as consistent as it is now. The lack of refrigeration or ability to transport food long distances meant that people were a little more careful about what they were consuming.

My Paternal Grandmother used to “can” produce that she and my Grandfather grew. I can remember fondly eating stewed tomatoes she had put up from the summer before. The amount of work it took her to grow the tomatoes, pick them, skin them and cook them down into the stewed form, sterilize the jars, pack them and then seal them took not just hours but days. No wonder she used to dole out the precious fruit to us as if it were gold. There was no way we would get fat on one spoonful.

If I had to live on what I could grow, can, put up freeze, catch, kill, find, hunt or gather I would be the thinnest person on earth. My father was born in 1938 so was just a little boy during the War. I can remember him telling me about how he was in charge of killing the chickens for Sunday dinner when he was five years old. I say chickens plural because he used to tell me this story in relation to the preacher coming to Sunday dinner — my father’s immediate family got to split one chicken among the four of them and the preacher got a whole chicken to himself.   I bet this made an impact on my father’s younger brother who was three at the time. Unknowingly this might have been one of the reasons he grew up to be an Episcopal priest.

My maternal Grandmother Mima was always concerned about her figure as well as her daughters’. My mother used to tell me that when she was a teenager her mother told her that having a cigarette rather than something to eat would be better for her figure. Selling cigarettes as a diet aid was brilliant until they started killing people.

I think for Mima the thing that cigarettes did best was dull her taste buds to the point that nothing tasted good so why bother eating.

Of course for all my Grandparents cocktail hour was more than an hour long. I think that drinking so much that you forget to eat dinner was a big diet aid. Not that bourbon was calorie free, but if it caused enough fighting someone was bound to storm out of the room and go to bed without dinner rather than sit down at the table together. Oh how times have changed in my generation. No one produces all their own food, none of us smoke and I don’t think that any of us drink our meals. We might be heavier, but I think we are happier.