Two amazing things happened in the fall of 1979. Before, I explain what occurred, I need you to stop saying how old I am. Yes, I get it already, I’m old. Okay, now can we get back to my story, please?
Back in the Day
In the fall of 1979, I started high school. If you are able to remember your time as a freshman in high school, you are probably wondering what in the world could have been so amazing about being a freshman. Trust me when I tell you being a freshman was terrible or in the words of Charles Barkley – “turrible“.
It’s Not Cheers…Nobody Knows Your Name
I was back to being at the proverbial bottom of the food chain. I had gone from being the “man” in eighth grade to a virtual nobody over the summer. Hazed by upperclassmen which I think today is referred to as being bullied. Shunned by the freshman girls. Girls who would later expect boys like me to ask them out on dates. Girls who had the audacity to expect the boys – who when freshman they avoided like the plague – to want to take them to the prom when we became upperclassmen. (I think I might have just discovered what is wrong with marriages in America but I’ll save that for a later discussion). Humbled by teachers who consistently referred to freshman boys as being immature and who seemed to gloat when they reminded boys like me that we were “no longer in middle school – we were now in high school”.
Nope, there was nothing amazingly good about that part of the fall of 1979. However, despite being put in my place by seemingly everyone around me, I managed to find solace in two places. In the spring when I was still a “middle school king”, I completed my freshman schedule. Unlike most of my “brought down a peg freshman male compatriots”, I didn’t sign up for Shop class. Instead, I registered for Home Economics.
Kiss the Cook
Yes, you read that correctly! I signed up for Home Economics and I did so for two reasons. First, my father was the most mechanically inclined person that I knew so taking Shop seemed a waste of time. I worked on our cars and did home repairs with him – much too often in my opinion. My dad even had me assisting him when he made furniture for our home. So with that as a back drop, there was no way in H-E double hockey sticks that I was going to be in a shop class for a minute much less an hour each school day doing things that I would probably be forced to do again when I got home.
Second, I signed up for Home Economics because that’s where the girls were. Yes, I recognized that I was being rejected by the girls but back then I was forward thinking, a visionary if you will. I thought if the girls spent time with me seeing my domestic side they might stop giving me the cold shoulder. Sadly, this line of thinking was flawed. Even worse some of the girls began to question my sexuality. Apparently, they had yet to learn that most great chefs are men and that men who cook are sexy. (Note to mothers, please clue your daughters in when they are young about just how good it is to have a man who is willing and able to share in the domestic responsibilities. I think today there is some national discussion about this very thing which is called “Lean In”.)
Cooking Terrorism
Refusing to be deterred by my decision to take Home Economics, I chose to use the class as my way to enact some revenge on the other gender. I committed myself to humiliating the girls in my class by not simply being the boy who could cook but by being the best cook in the class. Remember from the last post, I had started cooking at age ten so I wasn’t taking Home Economics like most of the students who were learning to cook. I already knew how to cook but now that the girls still refused to show me any love, I would use Home Economics to become a diabolically great cook.
Grand Ma and Me
This brings me to the other thing that I found solace in the fall of 1979. I spent an inordinate amount of time with my paternal grandmother. I would spend most Friday nights with her playing penny poker. Sounds boring I know – until you realize that I was a freshman who had no party invites, no car to drive and no girl to date. So getting hustled in penny poker by a senior citizen was as good as it got – well at least until the next morning.
On Saturday mornings, I would join my grandmother in the kitchen. It was in her kitchen – not in Home Economics – where I really began to perfect my cooking skills. In my grandmother’s kitchen, I took my advanced Home Economics class. In my grandmother’s kitchen, I trained to exact my revenge on the other gender.
Fortunately, for all concerned something else occurred when I was spending those weekends in the kitchen with my grandmother. Rather than resolving to be a cooking terrorist, I learned important and life-long lessons about good health and healthy living:
1. Legacy – There were no Pillsbury biscuits being baked in my grandmother’s oven. She taught me how to make biscuits from scratch. She taught me how to bake cakes and pies from scratch. She explained why making my own food was healthier than just about anything that I could get from the grocery store.
Today, I have shared many of my grandmother’s secrets and recipes with my son. He now knows what my grandmother and her elders before her knew – that food which is homemade is a vital step towards good health and healthy living.
2. Gardening – Not only did my grandmother share with me how to prepare meals from scratch, she taught me how to grow many of the things that I ate. So it seems ironic to me that today urban gardening is some type of national movement but as a child it was simply a way of life.
My maternal and paternal grandmothers both had gardens. Back in those days, I learned how to distinguish between good and bad, ripe and unripe fruits and vegetables. Regrettably today, as a nation of food deserts, far too many parents and children have never seen a fruit or vegetable as it grows in a garden. Even those children who fortuitously grow up outside of the food deserts rarely see farm grown fruits and vegetables outside of a visit to their upper-middle class boutique farmer’s markets.
3. Ingredients – Cooking with my grandmother provided me with the opportunity to differentiate between what we were eating and what was being sold as the “same food” in the grocery store. I believe families would benefit from conducting an experiment at home where you could see the difference between fresh and store bought foods.
Here’s idea that I will explore in greater detail later. Compare something simple to start. Try examining the ingredients listed on a bottle of apple juice, a carton of orange juice or your child’s favorite juice box. Then get a bag of apples, a bag of oranges and some combination of other summer fruits (strawberries, pineapples, mango, etc.). Take the fruit and insert them into a juicer. Examine the fresh juices and the store bought drinks from all perspectives: taste, texture, color and smell.
I trust you will find the real fruit juice to be the better in ever way than the store bought drinks. Moreover, you won’t need a dictionary, thesaurus or medical encyclopedia to research the names of the ingredients of the freshly juiced drink as will be required with the store bought drinks.
4. Medicinal – Food as I learned from my grandmother had other purposes. Today the lessons that I learned from my grandmother are termed holistic health. When we were in the garden and/or when we were in the kitchen, it would not be uncommon for my grandmother to point out that something we were growing or eating could also be used as a medicine. From apples to ginger to watercress, my grandmother showed me not only the significance of how to eat healthy but she instructed me on how to return to good health if I became ill.
Back to the Future
In 1979, the time with my grandmother not only changed the way that I approached my freshman year in high school, kept me from becoming the first cooking terrorist in Home Economics and persuaded me from writing off the other gender but it also introduced me to the significance of good health and healthy living. Without Home Economics and the valuable lessons learned in my grandmother’s kitchen, I might be one of the millions of Americans who fail to understand that healthcare is simply caring for your health. Without Home Economics and my grandmother in 1979, my family might be like millions of Americans who are dying to eat and foolishly mistake healthcare to be an insurance policy, a doctor’s appointment and prescription drugs.
Are you preparing your children to be healthy or are you leaving their health to chance?