When I was a kid, food was merely fuel to feed an active body. I had little choice about what we ate.
Meals were a regular event and I was a reluctant eater rather than keen to gorge myself. Being busy and running everywhere was my preferred activity.
Few meals really appealed and I was of the ‘chop and three veg’ generation, with the vegetables boiled to extinction and the chops often burnt. It would have been more nutritional to drink the water the vegies were boiled in.
I knew as a kid what we would eat most days of the week. Friday was always fish – the Catholic background of the members of the family led to that preference. One of us would walk to the fish and chip shop, bringing back the hot parcel, but not before one of us would poke a whole in the parcel and munch a few hot chips, the tastiest for their illicitness.
I hated Thursday, as it was corned beef and cabbage. Monday was the recycled leftovers from the Sunday roast – perhaps shepherd’s pie and Sunday night was always tomato soup while watching Disneyland. With the veil of nostalgia, it all seems so simple and easy and good.
In season
Food was also seasonal, the only time we had strawberries and summer fruits was in summer. There was no expectation to have food flown in from thousands of kilometres away, out of season.
We were ecologically ahead of our time, conserving food miles without thinking, really by ignorance and lack of choice than anything else. We grew food in the suburban quarter acre block – every house with a lemon tree and some silverbeet at least.
But now all of that has changed, and much more. My memory of childhood is that we were all thin, not just the kids but the adults I mean. I don’t remember an overweight or obese person at all. I don’t remember anyone going on a diet and certainly no-one was championing weight loss drugs as they do today. There was little ‘junk food’, perhaps potato chips and lollies the favourite treats, but not much else.
Food, glorious food
Food is now ubiquitous, available 24/7, with every type of cuisine generally available at the touch of a phone app and a delivery person. Now cooking has become either an art form or a savage competition, and watched by millions.
Years ago, as I watched one of those cooking shows I thought, “Good they will teach people who feel unsure, how to cook. It will aid everyone’s nutrition and lead to better health outcomes.” But no, those cooking shows really aren’t about teaching you to cook or even engendering a love of cooking, they are an extension of mini dramas, a battle of contestants over the roux or the bechamel sauce, to see who can perform under pressure and woo the judges.
We hear the contestant’s life story (usually sad, a battle even) interspersed with their perceived failures in the cooking process or plating of the food or misreading the ingredients or poorly timing their concoction. The list is endless. To misquote Tina Turner: What’s food really got to do with it?
So where do we go with food into the future? Will there be a backlash against the nutritionally poor fast food? Or will we in a cost-of-living crisis, an era of high interest rates on debt, begin to learn again the simple menus of our grandparents and parents? Baked beans on toast anyone?
Why do you think we have an obesity epidemic? Why not share your thoughts in the comments section below?
Also read: Why I miss old school banking
