Did you eat a balanced diet growing up? Have you altered your diet as you age? Is organic better? Do you eat GMO and processed foods?

Shell, perhaps you should buy shares in Devil's Claw!

NHWM,
It is funny! My hair styler is a friend of mine and she tells me it is not possible physiology, and I know that, but his bald shot is getting smaller and he has fuzzy that he didn't have before.

I swear Devils Claw is a wonder drug!!!

Shell,

That is so funny that his supplement is making his hair grow back!

I agree that moderation is the key to eating less healthy foods.

I grew up eating healthy. We always had a meat, a starch (rice, potatoes, pasta) a veggie and some kind of bread.

I still eat this way. I have found when I was younger and still true to this day, that if I eat to much fast food (having fast food to many times in a week) or to much junk food I feel sluggish and sick. I have never denied my body of anything, but if I eat something that is not really healthy I just eat it in small quantities. It is all about modernization! I will eat a piece of chocolate cake, however, I don't eat another piece for 3 days to a week later!


My sig-other and I do take supplements. He takes "Devil Claw" for his gout and I swear it is making his hair grow back. LOL! I take "Black Cohosh" for my hot flash & night sweats. We both take vitamin D3.

I have cut back on my sugar and caffeine.

I hate exercising, but I love dancing around or kick a bag around & doing yard work. They help with my stress & anxiety!)

Tothill,

I remember those ‘boil and serve’ bags!

My neighbor did those when I was a child because she hated cooking! She loved those and used to joke that when her sons grew up, they would never say to anyone that, “It taste just like my mother made it! 😂 LOL

Your food taste yummy. I love Middle Eastern and Indian food too!

I love home grown tomatoes!

Interesting post.

I grew up eating meat, 2 veg and spuds almost every meal. Occasionally we had mac and cheese. We canned, made jam, baking other than bread was always home made. We only had meat one meal a day. Never for breakfast, nor lunch.

We had a garden, I still have a small garden. I grow tomatoes because who does not like a warm ripe tomato? I grow green beans, only to eat during the summer, I do not can or freeze them. I do not make jam anymore, but I do occasionally can tomatoes.

My parents continue to each that way for the most part, but Dad eats a lot of prepared, frozen meals now.

My mother in law was the queen of prepared meals, she was thrilled when boil in the bag came available. She has no sense of smell and takes no joy at all in cooking. She grew up in a very poor home and no preserving was done, and store bought was considered better.

I am obese. But much of it is due to inactivity especially the 30 pounds I gained this past year. I tend to enjoy Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean foods more than the typical English foods I was raised with. They are full of veggies and flavour.

Most days I have a vegan breakfast, not by design, it has evolved that way over 30 years. Homemade granola, full of nuts and seeds, with 1/2 a banana, berries and almond milk.

Lunch is usually left overs.

Dinner, lots of veggies, some starch and some form of meat.

I do think past generations ate better. They cooked fresh foods.

All of the processed food came out in our parents generation. It was touted as ‘convenience’ foods. TV dinners, packaged mac and cheese and so on.

I did not eat fast food until I was a teenager with friends. My mom didn’t allow it. We didn’t even get pizza! I had my first pizza on a date in high school.

Fast food is rampant now but I have to say that I followed my mom’s example and didn’t serve it to my kids. They only had fast food on very rare occasions.

I do remember begging for the sugary breakfast cereals because of the television commercials but we hardly ever got them.

I love sushi! Never in a million years would I imagine that becoming popular here.

Geaton,

Okay, I did a double take. Eyeballs! 🤮 Yuck! Gross! Disgusting!

To each his own, I guess...

We are supposed to consume less beef. My doctor does say chicken and turkey are a better choice. Fish is very good. A plant based diet is excellent!

What about eggs? Some say it’s fine. Others say limit them. Diet and nutrition can be confusing.

We have an abundance of seafood here in Louisiana and I love seafood.

My cousin in New Jersey did have a mercury problem at one time. I don’t remember how they treated that issue.

Some people don’t like seafood, or they are allergic to it.

I wonder how people started eating liver! It tastes horrible to me. I don’t think I could handle any organ meats.

Some foods are bizarre. I don’t care if they do have nutritional value I don’t want it.

Just think if you had to move to a foreign country with foods that were strange. That would be difficult too.

Americans don’t have the healthiest diet! Hopefully, we will improve.

We don’t move enough either. Many do exercise, but overall not as much as before when people got natural exercise simply by doing chores.

cwillie, I can't believe it: I have the same issue with liver and always thought it was so weird! Smells good to me but in my mouth - blech! However I can eat braunschweiger if it's really cold, with very thinly sliced raw red onion, on a good cracker. I could eat that all day. My family used to eat tongue, tripe and head cheese. My mom told me that as a "treat" for Easter each of the 8 children would get a roasted lamb's head. Yes, they ate the eyeballs, or so they said (retch, faint).

MS,

I love all of your posts! I agree with not overeating. Not worth it.

I have blanched veggies for certain recipes but usually don’t take the time to do it regularly.

Margaret,

You are way more brave and adventurous than I could ever be! LOL

Willie,

Yep, it smells good but when I tried it as a child I nearly threw up! The taste and texture were awful. My daddy loved it. Yuck!

Liver smells good, looks good, but when I put it in my mouth 🤢🤮.... I can detect even tiny amounts supposedly hidden in things like sausages too, and it's why I never trusted head cheese. So no to liver, and basically any organ meat except heart, which doesn't taste like organ meat. Mom used to like tongue too, but I could never bring myself to try it.

I grew up eating liver, but unfortunately in the last few months it now upsets my bowel if I have too much of it, including liver pate (which I’ve cooked for years). I still eat kidneys, deviled (but without chili!). I’ve tried slices of sheep testicles when we slaughter sheep (known in the USA as Prairie Oysters). OK, but not that great to repeat. Better for dog food! The fact is, it depends on how hungry you are...

Definitely NO on the liver. My mother used to make us eat it and I found it disgusting - and that was before I knew what a "liver" actually is. I can still taste it and feel the texture if I think about it. Since being out of the house, I have never purchased, nor eaten, nor prepared liver. When my parents told me "You can eat whatever you want when you're an adult" I took it literally.

That said, I do believe that you are what you eat to some extent. I might not make every meal perfectly balanced, but I'd say that it's balanced over the course of a day. Lots of protein at lunch? Well then maybe I'll have a much lighter dinner. That type of thing.

I have never done any canning. I remember having to throw out many glass jars that my grandmother had canned because she was gone and we didn't know how old the canned items were. (Actually, I think we just threw the food out and then boiled the jars and gave them to someone who could use them.) I could only imagine the amount of work that went into canning all that stuff. More recently, a former coworker used to do canning every year and I could only get out of her that canning was a long, hot day with her elderly mom!

I have also stopped viewing corn as a vegetable and started looking at it like a starch. I am somewhat more mindful of starches in general as well as foods that we used to call "empty calories." I can't burn it off as fast.

I serve dessert much less often than I used to do.

I try to end each meal while I'm still a little hungry. I try to go to bed slightly hungry as well and that seems to help me not feel so stuffed.

I used to garden as a child while living with my parents - who had a large yard. My current home has almost no yard and what I do have is shaded by a large tree and large trees at my neighbor's houses. Not to mention the deer and other critters who get hungry during the night. I wonder if the container gardening someone else mentioned might work for me. I'd like to grow some chives or basil or something like that. I remember the story of Peter Rabbit as well - I loved it.

One thing I didn't see mentioned is blanching vegetables. I did this for the first time during the summer of 2020. My neighbor (with a similar yard to mine) somehow had great success with zucchini and gave me so much I didn't know what to do with it. Blanched it and froze it. The only other time I'd even heard of the process was when one of my high school teachers (who liked to talk off topic, bless her heart) mentioned it because she was sure none of us had heard of it. She was great with telling us interesting things in addition to her assigned curriculum.

We don't go out to dinner often, but we use portion control when we do. Restaurant meals are huge nowadays, but it's presented as being a normal meal!

I raised my kids not to view certain foods as "bad" but rather certain foods should be enjoyed in moderation. Every once in a while I still buy a box of Lucky Charms cereal (something I was not permitted as a child). With portion control, it probably takes me a week of breakfasts to finish the box. It's good for the soul sometimes to just enjoy something.

cwille,

Oh my gosh! That food could have gone into a museum!!!

Thanks Bridger. Will check that out.

I was thinking of using my instant pot that I got recently.

Maybe I will do what Elaine and NGI did. They look up Instant Pot recipes on YouTube. I looked at food blogs but I am going to view some videos too.

They most likely have a few canning videos.

Margaret,

I love stir fry dishes. Always yummy!

That’s a great point about breast feeding. Nutrition starts right from the beginning of life.

Allergies are inherited and my pediatrician told me to consider breast feeding to help fight allergies from occurring in my baby.

Need, Call your Cooperative Extension Agency, They have good publications on canning. Or buy the Ball canning book. I can and freeze many things. At this time of year I’m using many canned goods.

I now cook many meals that use less meat, like stir fry. I don’t eat between meals. I dish the food in a central dish – you take what you want onto your plate, and eat the lot. It avoids food waste, because the remainder is clean to reheat. God bless Pyrex casserole bowls! I don’t get a lot of exercise now, but I’ve never dieted or been overweight – I always use the calories that I do eat.

Yes, diet can change dramatically – like the huge shift away from breast milk for babies in the 1930s, when ‘you knew what they are getting’ with formula that listed the newly discovered magic vitamins. There’s less food fraud adulteration now, but more sugar, fat and flour. I don’t tolerate chili, so I am very good at reading ingredients lists in super-tiny print. We all do what we can!

You asked about shelf life and I stated laughing.
We tried to finish up one year's batch before it was time to make more but there were always some things that might be eaten in the second year, anything older than that would get pushed to the back of the shelf until somebody got around to dumping it out. The laughter comes from a story about my bachelor uncle. Uncle J lived in the home he grew up in and never bothered to clean out ANYTHING. A year or so before he died he mentioned to my mom that he had opened jars of something or another in the cellar that his mother had canned and "they were da**ed good too". I'd never recommend eating 40 year old food but it didn't seem to harm him any 🤣🤣

NGI,

Wow! You have grown a lot of good veggies.

Chipmunks? They are so cute! The last time I saw those were in Colorado many years ago.

Yeah, the animals will invade a garden.

I loved reading Peter Rabbit as a child. It’s a charming story for children to read about gardening. I was intrigued by Mr. McGregor’s garden!

NHWM - I love to garden, I've been gardening since I'm a little girl. As I said, my grandparents had 2 huge gardens, and we had a backyard one in Queens where I grew up.

Unfortunately, until recently I had no real way to garden at my house. I have a large yard, but it's rather steeply sloped, and where I get enough sun - at the bottom - floods after heavy rains. The top of my yard is wooded and doesn't get enough sun - not to mention if I tried to garden in the back, I might as well ring the dinner bell for all the critters who live in the woods behind my house.

However, I do have a large deck that wraps around 2 sides of my house and gets sun in the summer for almost the entire day. About 4 years ago, I started container gardening - with the containers on my deck - and I haven't looked back. I even bought some cheapie fold-up tables to put the containers on, so I don't even have to bend over to do any work!

I have grown spinach, lettuce, cucs, zucchini, yellow squash, green beans, tomatoes and potatoes with great success. Peppers, carrots, radishes and beets haven't done as well. Eggplant does really well - until the chipmunks come along and snatch them right off the vine and scamper off with them!

The only real difference is you have to be vigilant about watering, because the containers will dry out sooner than the ground will. Other than that, I have really come to love my container garden!

cwille,

Your mom was quite resourceful! Lots of good food canned.

I love the variety and the fact that we can share products that we can with others.

Do you think people can much less than years ago?

Grandma and grandpa had a fig tree in their yard so grandma made fig preserves. They were delicious!

My mom did not do any canning. I am sure that my dad’s mom must have. They were a farm family. They died before I was born.

My husband’s grandparents grew up in farm families so they must have canned as well.

How long is the shelf life of most products?

Mom was leery of canning anything that wasn't acidic because legend has it when she was young a local family died from botulism poisoning. Fruit was canned. Green and yellow beans were canned with added vinegar for bean salads (a german thing), and beets and of course cucumbers were pickled. Mom made relish, chili sauce and jams too. All the other veggies were frozen - before we had our own deep freezer there was a community locker. Potatoes, onions, carrots and beets were packed away in the basement.
Our canning methods undoubtedly wouldn't meet modern standards. It's simple really, fruits were packed into jars and covered with syrup, then processed in a canner for the length of time needed depending on the fruits and size of jar (I still do peaches this way). We had a lot of older "crown" brand sealers that had a glass lid and needed a rubber ring, as well as newer jars with snap lids - with them you are more certain you have a good seal. One entire wall of our "fruit cellar" was shelves filled with jars. They were mostly all still there when we sold the farm, I figured the next owner might want them😉

NGI,

I agree that cost prohibits everyone from eating fresh. It’s sad.

This is why we need to have more community gardens so everyone can enjoy.

Kids could help too. I loved helping my grandpa in the garden. Gardening teaches valuable lessons to kids.

Gacy,

Haha, have you always eaten liver? Some people love it! I can’t wrap my head around eating liver.

Daddy ate it and I always had to have everything that daddy had.

So, I asked for some. I thought it was steak. She tricked me into trying it. LOL, Mom didn’t tell me it was liver!

cwille,

I have always wanted to try canning. Is it easy to do?

Bridger,

I am impressed! Sounds great!

I loved gardening with my grandfather. Wonderful memories and fantastic produce. He also had, chickens, ducks and turkeys in his yard. I helped collect eggs from the hen house.

Totally agree about salt. I actually hate the taste of overly salted food.

I love spices.
Lemon also adds flavor without added sodium.

I eat a balanced diet. Both of my parents did as well. My husband and I eat no added salt. We live in an area where garden produce is readily available and we plant a large garden. We butcher our own beef, pork, and chickens; have our own eggs. We buy seafood from a vendor from coastal NC weekly. I purchase cream and butter fresh from a local dairy farm. We don’t regularly eat fast food. At least two meals a week are meatless.

We walk 2 miles everyday - sometimes more - outside any weather. Daily fresh air is the best.

We do not smoke. A glass of wine if we’re out somewhere special, but never beer or hard liquor.