What would Grandma say?

Rule #2 - Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

I never had a great-grandma (not even a grandma -both were deceased before I was born), but I DID have a great-aunt who assumed that role. MP notes that “if your great grandmother was a terrible cook or eater, you can substitute someone else’s grandma...a Sicilian or French one works particularly well.” I wouldn’t call my great Auntie Anna a great cook, but she wasn’t a bad eater. I remember a lot of fruit and yogurt, and she was always making marmalade. I also remember there not being a whole lot of food in her Greenwich Village apartment, probably because she bought fresher things as she needed them. That’s a luxury to be able to do that nowadays...at least to me, it is. Regardless, the idea with this rule is to eat “old school” meals, with real food, and stay away from anything that would be foreign to Auntie Anna.

The phrase that MP uses for processed foods, which basically your great g’ma wouldn’t recognize, is “edible foodlike substances”, his example being yogurt in a tube, but as you can imagine, that term encompasses WAY too many things . Even though I cannot imagine anyone from my Auntie Anna’s generation even GOING to a modern day supermarket, I am picturing shopping with her and having to explain what all these edible foodlike substances are, which is stressful, especially considering she never had her hearing aide turned up high enough. She would be 116 if she were alive today. I feel embarrassed even imagining all the ‘splaining I would have to do, and I know she would give me a look as if to say “you are messing with me, right?” Maybe we should pretend that someone from two generations ago is with us, next time we shop at a mainstream market, and without even having to think too hard, it will help “keep a lot of bad stuff out of the cart,” as MP says.

It also has me seeing products that are already in my house, that my Auntie Anna is haunting me over. Yesterday, in her honor, I threw out a container of lite chocolate syrup, hot dogs (that were in the freezer leftover over from last summer’s BBQ) and the remaining lo-cal mini cakes and cookies that I had already grown tired of, but had felt the need to hang on to “just in case I want one.” Again, those were easier things to let go of, because when I really thought about it, I didn’t even think tasted all that great to begin with....so who was I kidding?