I’ve learnt a lot about food and healthy eating from my grandparents over the years. I would say that they have along with my parents been a major influence on my attitude towards eating and diet.
Since I am asking the question ‘What could you learn about food from your grandparents?’ in my project, I had a little interview with my grandmother (who I call ‘Nani’) to see what she had to say on the subject.
Each place has its own cuisine and specialities. When in a place one should adopt the food style of that place.
We ate all the vegetables when they are fresh and in season. Each morning I would buy one vegetable for lunch and one for dinner. If you wanted to eat something that was not in season, you just couldn’t get it.
What people did was preserve and store the surplus quantities to save up enough for the rest of the year. There were lots of traditional methods of preserving vegetables, fruits, grains and spices. There are traditional recipes for these dried and preserved vegetables.
We still eat rice, butter, ghee, sweets… Now-a-days people don’t eat rice and sweet and butter because of some dieting or something. We have always eaten these things but controlled the amount.
When we were young, you ate whatever had been cooked at home. There was no fussing and cooking different things for different people.
Now children’s food choices are influenced by what they see on the TV.
We ate meat once a month or so. Families who ate meat regularly ate it once a week, ususally on Sundays. Meat was very expensive. It was considered a very expensive vegetable!
