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Post by swankivy on Oct 29, 2010 18:06:47 GMT -5
You Are What You Eat
Do you eat the same sorts of foods that you were raised to eat, or have you developed a set of preferences based on later influences? Do you credit one person or experience with revolutionizing your diet, or is it too much of an amalgam to pinpoint?
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Post by SHO! on Oct 30, 2010 2:44:12 GMT -5
An amalgam? To be sure. Too much to pinpoint? You know better than that!
Honestly, I grew up in my paternal grandparents' household and was raised mainly on a poor, southern, turn of the century, black people's cuisine (mostly fried food, soul food, and cheap alternatives to American family favorites). We weren't poor, but my grandparents grew up in the Depression/World War eras in places where blacks weren't allowed fancy things and so they fell into a life style of saving and frugality and using what was on hand or just plentiful and readily available to construct appealing meals. My grandfather developed a distaste for most spices and my grandmother had a habit of squirreling just about EVERYTHING away in our deep freezer for MONTHS before we could use it. Hence, I didn't even know what freezer burn was until much later because almost everything we ate started out that way! That and the lack of spices meant in my younger years I ate mostly bland food but didn't know it.
At the same time my father, who has a penchant for always wanting to purchase the latest things for himself, bought a microwave. It was the first time I'd ever seen one and knew what it was (cable, VCRs, and microwaves weren't really introduced or made affordable to my area until sometime in the early 90s). I'd seen them on TV shows but never knew they were different from a toaster oven until I saw one at his house (I only lived with him briefly from birth to just prior to turning two, then just forced visitation from about six on). He, liking to always have the latest things, purchased every microwaveable fad there ever was (remember Micromagic microwave milkshakes?).
Because of custody battles I was pulled from my mother around age five, but in my preteen years I was afforded the opportunity to be reintroduced to her cooking. She was an adopted, only child to a woman with a more worldly and refined outlook on food (as opposed to my paternal grandmother who was very xenophobic and regrettably quite racist about other people and their food, she wouldn't even drink bottled sodas from some of the places my sister and I enjoyed take-out). So my mother initially learned cooking from her mother who had a large catalog of recipes and enjoyed experimenting and adding new things to her repertoire. My mother also worked in a real Italian food restaurant and expanded her knowledge there as well as developing her on love for experimentation with recipes. Cable cooking shows and the Food Network furthered that in my late teens/twenties.
When I got older I began realizing I didn't really fit in with the people in my neighborhood. That and the strong desire to be away from my father made me choose a college almost 2000 miles away from home in a place that was completely unfamiliar. There and with the help of the Internet I found that strong friendship bonds would be formed not with just people that looked like me, but with an eclectic group from all around the world with similar interests but were most alike in that they didn't always fit in with the people fate surrounded them with. From them I have and continue to be introduced to a variety of foods from different parts of the world and different ethnic backgrounds (within the varying rigors of some of my food phobias, e.g. mayonnaise was created by demons and cheerleaders and ist verboten!).
I guess all of these things combine and form my diet. I enjoy cooking and learning new recipes. I am very good at taking the ingredients I have on hand and improvising things so tasty that people ask me for my recipes (which are sometimes harder to pin/pen down than this monologue). I love cooking gadgets and own quite a few kitchen novelties and am very good at creating microwave dishes that others don't believe I created in a microwave. And though I like when my friends and family introduce me to new tasty dishes I can be quite satisfied from eating the exact same meal, for every meal, every day for a stretch, as long as it is delicious!
Wow, I wonder if when this topic was created was such a babbling, run on, and self-involved answer expected?
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Post by blondiviolette on Nov 5, 2010 5:06:46 GMT -5
I was raised to eat healthily, the usual three square meals a day, sandwiches for lunch perhaps, meat and vegetables for dinner, it was good but I always had a soft spot for junk food. Now, I still like junk food and it's not really seen as a good thing by others much so I haven't really done well in keeping up with the past! I don't follow what I ate in the past being raised to eat because I basically just stuff my face fill of salty and sweet stuff. The family eats healthily like they always have. If you are what you eat then I must be partially a gooey tortilla wrap, thin enough to be, pale enough to be, and full of grease, well my skin can be, that's kinda gross, sorry... I do feel much like a soda can at the moment, the lemonade bubbling around in my stomach even though the drink was finished ages ago. Well maybe I'll have a better answer next time around, interesting question as always though, Ivy.
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Post by swankivy on Nov 5, 2010 11:46:01 GMT -5
I was raised on a fairly bland diet. I don't say that as a bad thing, though . . . I mean that mostly our family ate food that wasn't heavily spiced or varied. My mother was one of eight children in a Catholic family, and they were served food that would basically be nourishment and very little more. My mother took a cue from that in her cooking.
My mom made the usual things like chicken, meatloaf, occasional steaks . . . soups from cans, frozen/microwaved veggies, boxed pasta with jarred sauces, occasional creative attempts. We ate sandwiches and cereal and cheese, and desserts were either store-bought or made from boxes for the most part. My mom didn't like cooking, but I liked most of what she made. We didn't eat out or order in often; Mom usually home-cooked whatever we were having.
On my twentieth birthday I became a vegetarian and never switched back. Even after all these years my mother isn't happy about it--she doesn't like that I won't eat turkey at her house and she seems to think cooking for a vegetarian is VERY HARD. (Considering I once went through and counted eleven main dishes she used to make when I was a kid that didn't have meat, I think she's exaggerating on principle.)
I've become slightly more adventurous with my tastes and have come to love some vegetables and foreign foods that weren't in my diet growing up, but I still like my food to be mostly non-spiced and non-spicy, fairly simple without a big mix of flavors, and straightforward.
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Post by SHO! on Nov 5, 2010 21:42:37 GMT -5
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Post by SHO! on Nov 5, 2010 21:51:47 GMT -5
Speaking of the Tea Party, isn't it funny how they named their whole political agenda after what is most iconically and main streamingly{ } thought of as the wackiest, most insane, most nonsensical part of Alice in Wonderland, filled with the loopiest of characters? People should do anti-demonstrations to Tea Party gatherings dressed as Mad Hatters and March Hares, drinking tea from tea cups and shouting, "SWITCH!" where they run around like morons, every time a new Tea Party speaker begins a new speech.
When I did spellcheck it marked "iconically" but not "loopiest", that's dildos!
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