Can we talk about Fundies and food?

[Phoenix]

On 5/10/2017 at 5:03 AM, Melissa1977 said:

Yes but even for kids who had to cook, there are healthy&easy options. My grandma as a kid was really poor and she cooked very nutritious meals.

This said, I have the impression that American people doesn't use to cook very much. Is it true? Or is it just a wrong idea? No offense please, I've never been there and it's just something I've been told.

My family did a lot of the healthy but cheap options  you mentioned when I was growing up. Lots of bread and cheese, real butter, scrambled eggs "breakfast for dinner" or oatmeal most mornings, ate a great deal of yogurt, unsweetened orange juice from concentrate, fresh fruit and olives for snacks. We were not fundie and there were less than half a dozen siblings who attended public schools. Mom was simply busy running a household, raising kids and driving us around to endless after school activities. 

As far as Americans cooking or not cooking much there are large regional and generational differences. I grew up around many good cooks so had helpful examples around me. We were on the West Coast. However I didn't have to cook often for my family until I got married and cooked for my own. That is when I taught myself a lot about cooking for a family since the internet was (and remains)  awash with good free recipe sites. 

I have noticed many women my age (40 something) and younger don't know how to cook at all. Yet women 15 to 20 years older than me were good cooks before high school. Those in the South tend to learn to cook from scratch more. The West Coast has been addicted to convenience and fast foods since at least the 1970's. Recently dug up a grade school cookbook one of my classes put together in the late 70's. It was all instant packaged food and margarine. Ick! Ironically the recipes my family contributed were some of the few that didn't start out with a prepackaged mix. To this day I cook and one of my sisters refuses to, instead always going to overpriced pre-made food from local grocery deli's. Now there are lots of healthy options these days but I just can't wrap my head around buying shelf-stable polenta when you literally only have to boil corn meal in salted water to make it at home. The boys do almost all the cooking for their families and are darn good at it. We didn't have the fundie gender role crap to deal with. I enjoyed playing with my brothers cap guns and dump trucks as much as my baby doll. They played house and dress-up without a second thought.

[PennySycamore]

My rescued dachshund was rescued from an animal hoarder.  Even six years after adopting her, Trinket still gets kibble out of her bowl to eat elsewhere.  In her early months before she was rescued, she had to do that to make sure she got something to eat.

@Phoenix,  I noticed at Target last week that they only had packages of the shelf-stable polenta and not the kind you'd cook from scratch, but them I'm not sure they had bags of grits that needs cooking either.  

[Phoenix]

3 hours ago, PennySycamore said:

@Phoenix,  I noticed at Target last week that they only had packages of the shelf-stable polenta and not the kind you'd cook from scratch, but them I'm not sure they had bags of grits that needs cooking either.  

We just used plain old corn meal, the stuff you can buy at any grocery or warehouse club store. I think "proper" polenta might be a finer grind but I have never bothered to worry about that much. I was able to buy organic polenta, at Grocery Outlet just a couple weeks ago for a dollar a box. I am trying to find inexpensive organic options due to my reservations about GMO foods and anything made of corn in the US is pretty much GMO unless expressly labeled otherwise. But I digress...

[CrazyLurkerLady]

My mom grew up one of 10 and extremely poor in rural WV, so you'd think she'd have learned how to cook at some point, but not so much. I grew up eating almost exclusively packaged foods. Vegetables were always canned and boiled to death before being served without seasoning. A salad consisted of iceberg lettuce, a mushy tomato, and bottled dressing. For some reason, the one and only thing she refused to buy packaged was French fries. Our mashed potatoes came from a box, but if we wanted fries, we had to slice the potatoes and fry them ourselves, which I was doing from the age of 11 (which is terrifying to think of now that I have a 12yo!).

[Four is Enough]

8 minutes ago, CrazyLurkerLady said:

 Our mashed potatoes came from a box, but if we wanted fries, we had to slice the potatoes and fry them ourselves, which I was doing from the age of 11 (which is terrifying to think of now that I have a 12yo!).

BUT! @CrazyLurkerLady, if you taught your child how to make fries NOW, she will NOT try to make them when she's 22, and just toss wet, not salted or partially (at least) towel dried potatoes into a rapidly boiling pan of oil, thereby causing the oil to boil over and make a helluva mess on her kitchen, 

Did that with a Fry Daddy ONCE. Learned the hard way... So.. as the song goes.. teach your children well..

[CrazyLurkerLady]

2 hours ago, Four is Enough said:

BUT! @CrazyLurkerLady, if you taught your child how to make fries NOW, she will NOT try to make them when she's 22, and just toss wet, not salted or partially (at least) towel dried potatoes into a rapidly boiling pan of oil, thereby causing the oil to boil over and make a helluva mess on her kitchen, 

Did that with a Fry Daddy ONCE. Learned the hard way... So.. as the song goes.. teach your children well..

But they WILL, at the age of 12, whilst home alone with their 10yo sister, accidentally drop an ice cube being used to soothe an oil burn right into the hot oil, sending flames shooting to the ceiling and damaging a rental apartment's wall!

[Four is Enough]

28 minutes ago, CrazyLurkerLady said:

But they WILL, at the age of 12, whilst home alone with their 10yo sister, accidentally drop an ice cube being used to soothe an oil burn right into the hot oil, sending flames shooting to the ceiling and damaging a rental apartment's wall!

Ho, Kay. You win. Wowsers!

[ophelia]

I just watched the first Duggar special "14 kids and counting" and although there can't be seen any fresh fruits or produce their pantry was full back then. Was that staged for the show? Some previous posters mentioned that the older Duggar kidults probably remember a time when there was limited food and they had to stay hungry. When do you think this stopped? Their pantry full of canned food might be gross, but I don't see why some should stay hungry. 

[FeministShrew]

@CrazyLurkerLady, are you sure she wasn't the youngest of 8, dirt poor in Upstate SC? Cause your mom sounds exactly like mine. The sad thing is we had a one acre vegetable garden, and my paternal grandparents next door did, too, but neither my mom nor my dad's mom could cook worth shit. All those fresh veggies boiled to mush or fried to a blackened crisp! My mom believed in plenty of vegetable oil and a red-hot burner,
And the homemade fries! Limp, soggy, dripping with grease. To this day I hate homemade fries.

Thankfully, I taught myself to cook, and my adult kids can cook, too.

[CrazyLurkerLady]

@FeministShrew, sounds very familiar! She refused to ever measure anything, even if it was the water for a boxed mix, and the stove only had two settings in her mind - high and off. I learned to cook as a teenager out of sheer necessity and I'm a total foodie now that I've discovered what food SHOULD taste like. 

[BlackberryGirl]

BlackBerryBoy has always said that my mother had a war with food. She was raised dirt poor, we were Catholic and she had this weird attitude that nothing should taste good. In between times of straight food poverty, she managed to make ordinary eating unpleasant.  

3 examples stand out. In 1989 we went to Thanksgiving dinner at her house, 4 miles away. The food was sooo nasty that the minute we got home, I prepared a full Thanksgiving dinner.

when we moved to a new house when I was a teen, our next door neighbors invited us to dinner. She served a fabulous, to me unknown food. It was amazing, and I said so and asked "what IS this?" Ummm ...meatloaf.. She replied.  My mothers meatloaf was the consistancy of thin mashed potatoes, dumped out in sloppy spoonfuls. I had no idea meatloaf could be sliced.

when I got my first job waiting tables, i was given something to serve that looked and smelled wonderful. What's this? Rich gravy, carrots, meat, onions, celery, and big chunks of some whiteish stuff.. Umm its beef stew....those are potatoes... Mom made beef stew by throwning chunks of meat, ONE cut up carot, One onion, and One stalk  of celery into boiling water. No seasonings, no potatoes, no four, no rich gravy.. It looked like lumps of garbage in dishwater.

[CrazyLurkerLady]

@BlackberryGirl, that's terrifying! It sounds like eating disorder tactics where they make everything taste gross so they won't want to eat it.

[Bad Wolf]

We had a couple of foster kids once who had been badly starved. Age 16 and weighing 40lbs. We had to keep the refrigerator and pantry locked, because their bodies couldn't handle too much food. Their organs had begun to shut down. We did keep out any snacks approved by the dietician. It was hard. I used to keep butter on the counter for easy spreading until we noticed its rapid disappearance.

PS. They're grown and healthy, now.

[acheronbeach]

4 hours ago, BlackberryGirl said:

When we moved to a new house when I was a teen, our next door neighbors invited us to dinner. She served a fabulous, to me unknown food. It was amazing, and I said so and asked "what IS this?" Ummm ...meatloaf.. She replied.  My mothers meatloaf was the consistancy of thin mashed potatoes, dumped out in sloppy spoonfuls. I had no idea meatloaf could be sliced.

Not snark, literally how did she make meatloaf semiliquid?  Why?  Was this purposeful, or just horrific cooking skills?  Both? 

[BlackberryGirl]

She was a dreadful cook, didn't take instruction well. For meat loaf  She stretched ground beef with tomato soup, LOTS of tomato soup,  and some oatmeal.  Once I had stuffed green peppers at a friends house when I was 11. You know, ground beef, seasonings, rice, tomato sauce baked in green peppers... I came home and told mom about it.. She said, here have a stuffed pepper and put a spoon of  cottage cheese in a pepper.. Cold and raw.  Fried chicken? Take raw chicken, plop it in COLD oil, turn on the heat to barely medium, and just barely simmer it  til the skin is rubbery.. (You dont want hot oil to splatter and dirty the stove..) 

she put no seasonings in anything, we never had mustard or ketchum. Or..orange juice. Once a brother came in from wrestling practice, went to the fridge and saw what he thought was oj in a mason jar. He chugged half of it before discovereing it was rendered chicken fat.

I took over cooking when I was 17 and got electrocuted in the manure pile. She could shovel actual shit as opposed to the semi nutritous shit she'd been shoveling.

 

[Phoenix]

13 hours ago, FeministShrew said:

@CrazyLurkerLady, ... All those fresh veggies boiled to mush or fried to a blackened crisp! 

Boy can I relate to the veggies boiled to mush! I couldn't understand why my Mom did that to vegetables, especially since half the family was Italian and my grandmother and aunts cooked flavorful food all the time. I expected the bland stuff from the other side of the family. Turns out Mom was raised with tasteless and mushy veggies because my English grandfather had an ulcer and couldn't digest seasoned food. When I got married one of my first purchases was a Williams and Sonoma cookbook exclusively about how to cook vegetables. 

[Phoenix]

7 hours ago, BlackberryGirl said:

BlackBerryBoy has always said that my mother had a war with food. She was raised dirt poor, we were Catholic and she had this weird attitude that nothing should taste good.

Since you mentioned your family was Catholic (as was mine) I wondered if maybe the reason for your Mom's weird attitude that food shouldn't taste good could have been an extension of viewing our earthly lives as a "vale of tears"? I noticed that phrase in some of the prayers about the Virgin Mary growing up and a similar sentiment in some of the Willis Clan lyrics from their "Heaven" album. I think it is in the first song about experiencing God or maybe human love, could be interpreted either way, "...in this broken world..."

Could your Mom have possibly thought it was part of her duty as a good Catholic matron to extend the suffering of the world into her family meals? Pre-Vatican II or Latin Rite Catholics could sometimes be seriously into corporeal suffering as an offering to God. 

[BlackberryGirl]

20 minutes ago, Phoenix said:

 

Could your Mom have possibly thought it was part of her duty as a good Catholic matron to extend the suffering of the world into her family meals? Pre-Vatican II or Latin Rite Catholics could sometimes be seriously into corporeal suffering as an offering to God. 

she had a lot of weird catholic guilt, but I think she just was raised on tasteless food, (think lard sandwiches) and she just didn't care. spices, ketchup, mustard were extras that cost $$  we did have big vegetable gardens most of my childhood, but  she never did anything except  serve veggies raw or maybe boiled..  She mocked our neighbors who stewed zucchini with tomatoes and onions and  melted  mozzarella. " They think they're so fancy."

[acheronbeach]

I hear people (cough cough FUNDIES) rant about how ladies today don't know how to cook, and all the responses here make it clear why that's bullshit.   There's a whole generation or two from the advent of the industrialized food system who can't cook for beans.  Just like my mother, who believes that a vegetable's not ready until it's gray, and canned is definitely preferable to all other forms of veg.  

I think a growing percentage of the population from the 70's onward have taught ourselves to cook well.  There's a whole emphasis on cooking fresh food properly that didn't exist when I was a small kid in the late 80's - TV shows, blogs, books.  Last year, Angela Liddon's two vegan (and fairly labour-intensive) cookbooks topped the Canadian cooking bestseller lists in #1 and #2 spots. 

[Jucifer]

I grew up SDA but my dad was a foodie, thank god.

When my parents traveled we had to stay at our SDA aunt's house. We ate her food but it was an ordeal.

There is a whole industry devoted to making SDA approved food products.  It's mostly soy masquerading as meat and it tastes as good as you can imagine it does. 

Loma Linda Linketts still haunt my dreams

 

[Red Hair, Black Dress]

In praise of mothers who could cook, I give you mine.

I grew up in the South in a time when being a great cook was a point of pride with women -- at least in my little rural town. Women outdid themselves for church suppers, pot lucks, buffet parities, cook outs, bake sales etc,

Even though we were part of what was considered the leading families, we had a huge vegetable garden as did nearly everyone else .  Gardening was my father's passion and he had a green thumb. He could make anything flourish. We ate out of the garden as long as it produced and canned, froze, made jam, jelly, applesauce, chow chow, chutney, pickles, from what we didn't eat.

My mother in her day was a great cook -- although she didn't like doing what she referred to as "plain cooking", She loved fancy party cooking and had some dishes people asked for every time there was a function. That being said she cooked every night and put a meat and 2-3 veg on the table for us, plus a platter of sliced tomatoes in season.

My mother is English and my father a southern foodie so we ate the best of both worlds cooking -- think Sunday roast beef, yorkshire pudding, collards. black eyed peas. Interestingly she didn't cook vegetables to death. probably because she married without knowing how to cook anything except make toast.  My father couldn't cook either, but knew what was in things and how they should taste. So she became a good southern cook with English overtones,  Her fried chicken really was fabulous. Fried in a mix of lard and bacon grease it was never greasy as the lard seals the flour crust. She drew the line at bacon/fatback/streak o' lean in vegetables though.

She was an instinctive cook, hardly ever following a recipe unless she was trying a new dish, and never measuring anything unless baking a cake or making pie crust. I learned to cook watching her and helping in the kitchen as did my sister and brother. All 3 of us are great cooks who love trying out new dishes (she says modestly).  My father never did learn to cook, but was the veg prep guy -- peeling veg, shucking corn, shelling peas/ limas, snapping beans -- then cleaning up and composting all the scraps,

My English grandmother always said "food is love" in that when you make good food that people like you're showing them you love them in a very tangible way. I think this is true, at least in my life -- I love cooking for family and friends.  Besides, I have to eat my own cooking and life is too short to eat bad food.

 

 

[louisa05]

I come from a long line of great cooks on my maternal side. They all even cooked in the 70s and 80s. 

As for Catholics being too guilty to love food...our priest was a professional chef prior to the priesthood. He cooked the appreciation dinner for the religious ed teachers. We had fresh green beans sauteed with garlic, mushroom risotto, pork roulade stuffed with apples, basil and I don't remember what else, fresh bread rolls, and dessert was homemade ice cream cake--even the ice cream being from scratch. 

If that ever was a thing, it is over. 

My husband's Catholic family can't cook--at least his mom's side. But that seems to be because they can't cook, not anything related to church. His dad's sisters are all great cooks, based on the stuff of theirs I have had which is admittedly not much as it has been pot lucks. And his dad's family was far more "Catholic" than his mother's. 

[Red Hair, Black Dress]

Catholic here too (daddy converted) so I'm not sure about the Catholic guilt/ be a martyr to bad food thing.  We did the whole meatless Fridays year round, and 2 meatless days during Lent but it was a reason to get creative with veg, pasta, cheese, eggs, fish.

Great cooks on both sides of my family.  Mr. Dress comes from a family in which both sides produced really good cooks, but his mother is an awful cook.  Mostly I think because she doesn't eat and is obsessed with controlling people's weight. She eats because she has to - to stay alive - but that's all.

She is and always has been very tiny, but is obsessed with everyone's weight.  I think she figured that if the food was bad no one would eat. And if no one is eating it's easy to control portion size.  For example -- we had baked spaghetti and salad for dinner last night. I asked Mr. Dress if his mother made good spaghetti.  He said no -- watery sauce made with 1 can tomato soup and about 1/2 lb hamburger  (for 4 people)  no onions, no seasoning - served over  a scoop of Minute Rice.  Minute Rice!! I said.  Yes he replied because boiling pasta took too much time and effort. She only ever made Minute Rice, regular rice took too long, and she only rarely made MR in any event.

Mr. Dress went off to college 6 ft tall, 120 lbs. Gained nearly 15 lbs his first semester.  His mom put him on a strict diet over Christmas break because he'd gotten "fat".

[samurai_sarah]

9 hours ago, acheronbeach said:

I hear people (cough cough FUNDIES) rant about how ladies today don't know how to cook, and all the responses here make it clear why that's bullshit. (snip)

They also forget that some people who can cook, just don't want to! My older brother is an excellent cook, when he wants to be. But inspiration strikes him once a year, or so. If he weren't married to a foodie, he'd be living off cereals, fruit and ramen noodles.

It's like me and ironing. I can iron perfectly, but I don't want to! And I imagine there are a great number of people out there who possess one skill or another, but just don't want to use it.

I'm convinced that what fundies are seeing is distorted by their own "better than thou" complex, which to a certain extent we all share. But if you don't live an isolated life, but live in the real world and interact with people from all walks of life, it's easier to learn about the various reasons people have for doing things their individual way.

That's what I see lacking in most fundies - the willingness to try new things, to understand and learn. What I see instead is the determination to condemn the secular world and feel superior about it. And that is the antithesis of what I love about FJ. Here I get to meet people from all over the world, and learn about things like "Tim-Tams", the differences between Canada and the US, etc, and love hearing all the different voices and experiences!

But no, I won't iron. Doesn't mean I can't. And it certainly doesn't mean that "women today" can't iron!

[lawlifelgbt]

19 hours ago, Bad Wolf said:

We had a couple of foster kids once who had been badly starved. Age 16 and weighing 40lbs. We had to keep the refrigerator and pantry locked, because their bodies couldn't handle too much food. Their organs had begun to shut down. We did keep out any snacks approved by the dietician. It was hard. I used to keep butter on the counter for easy spreading until we noticed its rapid disappearance.

PS. They're grown and healthy, now.

From scientific curiosity, how is that even possible and how does one rehabilitate a kid from that level of starvation? What did you have to do/restrict? Did they eventually catch up fully? Did they have delays or brain damage?