Terra Madre

"Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories." Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
One of the sessions I attended at last weekend's "Women & Spirituality Conference" was: "Eating Is An Agricultural Act" - Wendell Berry, Slow Food/Terra Madre - What does food mean to us?" (That was the entire title.) The session was put on by two MN women farmers who had attended the Slow Food/Terra Madre world meeting in Turin, Italy along with 7000 other people from around the world. http://www.terramadre.info/ Just one of the topics they touched upon was the slow preparation and eating of food; something my parents and grandparents did on a daily basis. "It's odd how large a part food plays in memories of childhood." Caroline Lejeune
For our noon meal today, I made beef and noodles, mashed potatos and gravy and green beans - what I call comfort food. So, the noodles were the frozen kind, as were the green beans and the gravy was the jarred kind, but I did peel and mash real potatos instead of using boxed instant ones. And the beef was leftover from a roast I had purchased and cooked.
Compare that to the way my Mom would have made the same meal: The roast beef would have been from a steer they raised themselves. The potatos and green beans would have come from their own garden. Mom would have made gravy from the drippings left from cooking the roast. Ahhh, the noodles. Mom's noodles were hand made: flour and eggs and salt mixed and rolled out, cut into strips and allowed to dry before being cooked in beef broth. Often when she made noodles it was because earlier she had made an angel food cake which required only the whites of 13 eggs. That meant she had 13 egg yolks to use up - perfect to use making noodles.
What a difference between the way I was raised and my relationship with food and that of my children. Too many of their meals were from fast food drive-thrus or frozen pizzas. (Doug says all we ever ate were frozen pizzas!) I tried to do better, but too often was just too tired or didn't care after a day at the office. Every once in a while I would do the entire meal planning, cooking and freezing thing over the weekend so we would have nutritious meals, but regardless of how often I vowed to keep that up, I quickly slipped back into whatever was easiest.
It does seem more people are beginning to care about where their food comes from; how fresh it is and how many chemicals were used to grow it. And more families are eating together at a table, discussing their day instead of eating in front of the t.v. The pendulum swings back. It is a good thing. Good for us; good for the earth.