There's a graphic getting passed around, suggesting a treatment for a sore throat is to microwave jello and honey. I saw a friend share it, and the first thing I thought was, "why bother with the microwave?" I have been using my own microwave less and less, and I am finding myself much happier with my meals the less I use it. It takes longer to cook when I use my oven and stovetop, but food is starting to taste like food again. Of course, it helps that I have completely stopped buying all processed foods. No mixes, no frozen meals, no more junk. I have slowed down, and started paying attention to food, to cooking it well, not just making it hot as fast as possible. I heat leftovers in glass pans in the oven. I taught myself how to make the real versions of foods the processed products imitate. I have time to get excited about eating, which was totally foreign to me since adolescence. I don't have to scan labels, to worry that I would accidentally eat ingredients that make me feel ill. Since I have taken control of my eating, my skin is softer, my pants fit better (but the scale hasn't budged), and I have stopped having heartburn, bloating, or any of those other common problems with a standard American diet. I wonder why we put ourselves through all that? I understand that people rush while they are at work, but when you aren't answerable to a boss for a 30 minute lunch break (which I feel is scandalous), why would you choose to rush? Why wouldn't you put a few minutes of effort into putting together real food? Especially when it means you stop feeling gross once the feeding is over, as I always did after eating fast food.
I started thinking about the perception we tend to have, that our grandparents knew how to do so many cool things, because they had to know. They built their houses themselves, or they could survive out in the wilderness, in ways we never could, because they knew how to make fires, tie knots, hunt, preserve, whatever. I'm starting to wonder, do we just think that of our grandparents, because they had time to learn all the things I am teaching myself now, and once their own kids grew up and moved out, they had the time to put those things into action? Did they tell themselves, when our parents were children, that they just didn't have time to do very many things? I am starting to wonder if maybe they learned these things through the first forty or fifty years of their lives, and by the time we grandkids came along, they had decided, as I have, that it isn't worth rushing and missing out on the actual processes of life. I'm going to be the kind of grandmother who teaches my grandchildren how to cook for real, how to sew by hand, how to make furniture--everything I can think of to show them. I want them to think I was raised on a prairie, and had to do all this stuff myself. I have a few years yet before I have any of these hypothetical grandchildren. I wonder how much more I can teach myself to make by hand between now and then.
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