The 500th Post: A Celebration of Past and Future

Recently I heard a lecture by Nicholas Gonzalez, a physician in New York who is having amazing success with protocols for pancreatic cancer, and other, usually lethal, disease. He offered many insights in his 6-hour presentation, including reasons why the blood type diet might work (and it has nothing to do with cavemen and evolution, despite what the Eat Right 4 Your Type book might claim).

Rather practically, he suggests that we would be well-served to eat the foods of our ancestors. If your ancestors came from Hawaii, a diet low in fat and meat and high in fruit would be a good choice. But if your ancestors came from Alaska, the Hawaiian diet would be a poor choice: you would need a lot of animal fat and meat. The Mediterranean Diet is a great diet for you, if your family came from the Mediterranean. The Chinese diet: good if you're from China.

Which made me wonder: what did my ancestors eat?

My Grandma turned 90 this year. She grew up on a farm in Holland, and she and my Grandpa immigrated to the US in the early 1950s. She lives alone, in her own house, and is still "sharp as anything" (or so my mother reports). I wrote and asked her what they ate when she was growing up.

As far as I can remember, yes, we drank milk from the cow. Bread for breakfast and for supper, potatoes, vegetables for dinner. We ate meat we slaughtered, a pig mostly, so plenty of bacon. Every dinner my mother would fry bacon and the fat she put in a small bowl and was placed in the center of the table so everybody could dip his or her potato in that fat to eat.

Bread we must have bought because I cannot remember that we baked it. Cheese my father made, especially during the war. We had chickens and a vegetable garden. Also fruit trees.

We did make sauerkraut in a big tub, which was white cabbage sliced and a big rock on top. In the long run it became sauerkraut.

We had raspberries and gooseberries. I cannot remember if we drank goat milk. During the war we slaughtered every calf that was born. Otherwise the Germans took them.

I read this in amazement: I am my Great-Grandmother! I save the bacon drippings and fry the boys' potatoes in them! I have raspberries growing, drink milk from the cow, kill pigs. I have fruit trees and raspberries (hopefully productive one day). I make sauerkraut!

My sons are eating the diet of at least two of their eight great-grandparents.

May they live into their 90s and beyond and tell stories of their mother, who made sauerkraut and bacon.