Changing Diet

Changing Diet ©

By

Michael Casey

Well its a sunny day here in Birmingham, and the Bank Holiday approaches so everybody is happy, apart from students taking exams everywhere. Life is changing for these students, my daughters included. As life changes so does our diet, we become more educated in what we eat. Sadly we have a Latte generation, generating plastic waste, why don’t they buy a jar of coffee and invite the friends over, much nicer than plastic coffee cups in plastic environments.

For the price of a Latte you can buy a jar of instant and instantly invite friends to come on over, with or without Shania Twain. Take it in turns and then you have a different life style, or maybe buy a thermos and a manbag and then you can meet somewhere to have a DIY Latte on the grass. My mother would think it stupid in the extreme to waste money on Latte Life, as you all know it’s a sin to waste food, and as my dad would say, a fool and his money is soon parted. Then you have politicians carrying a cup with them as they get into official cars. They think its glamorous, I’d say it’s stupid, didn’t their mum wake them up in time for breakfast, now they are taking their cuppas with them. Give me strength, but no sugar.

Yogurts are a big thing too, I was thinking today I can actually remember when my mum brought one home, over 40 years ago. It was a new thing in the shops, I only thought of this today but I can remember her taking it out of her red leather shopping bag, plastic carriers had not been invented then. Dad tried it, but they were expensive and tasted bad, the flavouring of yogurts had not been thought of then. In my job I can even remember Alistair McCallum saying Alcopops would not catch on, that was maybe 40 years ago too. So tastes and diet move on, Alistair was a computer programmer, he wrote in Cobol which was Latin for computers.

Tastes change but love of Sugar remains, now we have a nanny state telling us what to eat, whatever happened to self control and parents saying NO. Spare the rod and spoil the child maybe? No doubt the causal reader will deliberately misunderstand that sentence. But I’ve made a conscience decisions not to waste my life on negative people. That’s 2 sentences that they might not like, or maybe I’m just goading them.

Back to food, as a child we enjoyed loaves of bread, and sometimes 2 fishes, bread could be bought from the local shop and we’d eat all the crusts and just leave the middle. Then we’d be lashed by my mother, just her tongue, but a Kerry tongue can be very sharp. So the lump of bread from the middle was saved for soup.As time moves on so does bread,  or rather brown bread is introduced into the family diet. In the old days we just ate what we liked but as your children grow and interact with other kids at school. So brown bread raises it’s head and then margarine arrives, yes I can remember when margarine was a newish thing.

History can be told through food, what we eat and what we like.I can even remember my brother introducing us to Chinese and Indian food in a box, with curly noodles which always seemed to burn. My mother would scream at us to open all the windows, then we opened the windows and let the smell of burning out of our then small kitchen. This is what education had brought us, go to Oxford and bring back a stink to our Birmingham kitchen, higher education higher stink. When the same brother had gone to grammar school he brought back Nescafe, and that is why I’ve been drinking coffee these past 55 years. I can remember my mother moaning at the cost of coffee compared to tea, she even tried to poison me with chicory.

So you grow up and your tastes change or broaden, frozen food and processed food arrived. Nobody had a fridge when I grew up, yes really. I can remember when we got our first fridge, so we hid it in the pantry under the stairs with a hole drilled into the living room to access the power supply. We used to leave our daily 6 bottles of milk in the hall on the Minton tiling, this was our chiller. And a green tin bread bin by the side door under the coat hooks had the bread in, it’s now under my kitchen sink. Obviously everybody had a cat too, just in case mice came a calling. Jean our black cat with green eyes was rewarded with the giblets every Sunday. So Jean always knew for 20 years when Sunday arrived.

A meal freshly prepared with love, and lots of cabbage if you lived in an Irish household is always the nicest thing. Now a meal prepared with ginger and garlic is more common in our house, a Shanghai Chinese house. Fish galore too. Chinese people must always cook, its in their blood, and no matter how rich or successful they become it’s the love of food that marks them out. When my mother in law visited one very prominent member of the Chinese community wanted only one thing, the recipe for my mother in law’s chicken. And in the end that’s what life is all about, no matter how the diet changes. For the sharing of food and breaking of bread or rice, this is what makes us all happy. But make sure you open the kitchen windows first, or all our mother’s will be screaming. 


 https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC