here come roly and poly

my mormor had strong opinions and severe tastes. one of her strongest and most severe was her distaste for the overweight or “fatties”, as she so often referred to anyone carrying more than five pounds of voluptuous curve. She did not censure her displeasure or contempt in any way or with any effort. on the contrary, she made comments like “i don’t know who is winning the contest for the fattest, mary or beth but they doing their damnedest to win” or my favorite, when looking out the window and seeing my two PREGNANT aunts walking up to her front door, she looked at me and said with dripping disgust, “well, nail down your cookies, here come roly and poly”.

she wasn’t playing around with fat people. even when a cancerous mass ravaged her body and sealed her fate, i knew her resentment was less about the football sized tumor that was destroying her body and ending her life, she was angrier that the tumor destroyed her waistline and ended her days of cinching her 24 inch waist. vanity thy name was mormor.

contrary to your expectations, she was a healthy and voracious eater of almost all foods. the richer, the dearer…she ate desserts at every meal and sometimes as a meal in themselves. at christmas the house was a cookie factory, reeking of butter, sugar and cardamom. cakes, pies, tortes, cookies…ice cream, whipped cream, custard…she devoured with relish. she loved the rarest of red meat, developed a great fondness for american fried chicken and biscuits in her later years. she ate almost anything and everything…i remember sharing deeply rubied plums, strawberries so red they stained fingertips and tongues, shaved fennel tossed with tomatoes from her garden…she taught me that everything tasted better fresh and grown close to home.

while she denied herself nothing, she was always lean as a whip. she attributed her tall, hourglass shape to her superior swedish genes and also to eating “real” food. she said (what Michael Pollan is frankly saying as well) that she ate things that looked as much like they did in nature as good cooking would permit. that her pastries and puddings and other ‘godis’ were homemade from farm fresh ingredients. she swore up and down that americans were fat because they bought things to eat and not real food, to cook at home. i think she was on to something and it seems that most health educators agree.

you know that i talk about reinvention and adaptation quite a bit…but when it comes to what we eat, keeping it in its original state seems to be the superior choice.