A Mother and Three Angels....

In all our lives as Little People, it is the Big People, our parents, who are the authors of our experience, shaping the mould that makes us who we are. When our parents fall short in making our experience a good one, others sometimes offset the damage, so that it is not critical, and we can at least go limping into adulthood, where we try and figure out the missing bits of the jigsaw, learn how to be parents to our wounded child-selves and perhaps, if we are lucky, heal ourselves. Some people's childhood experiences of food, or the lack of it, are so damaging that they have lifelong 'issues' with food. For some, food ultimately kills them. A sort of suicide by food, or lack of it.

Others are lucky to have been brought up in homes ringing with the sound of feet answering Mom's cry of Dinner's ready! Of voices resounding from the dining table. Where family meals are cooked and eaten every evening and Sunday roasts are extravagant and ritualistic. Homes where mothers bake proverbial, delicious, nurturing apple pies. In my experience, these are the most rooted, secure people I come across in life, most likely to build constructive lives and develop healthy relationships.

My experience is somewhere in the middle, not all good, not all bad. The four people who shaped my food experience were a mother and three angels…….

E.----
My mother. Before my father's death, we were almost the apple-pie family. Home was my mother's life and her ambition. Home-making was the destiny her whole life had prepared her for. After my father died, it all fell apart. She was forced to be an earner, in an era when only husbands earned and women cooked. When she began to earn, the cooking became scare. Our home had no centre because it had no hearth, no kitchen where someone cooked food for us to eat together. Thus, what I ultimately learned from her about food, I learned through absence-----how important it is to be nourished properly as a child, how children long for routine and reliability at home, how I lacked something important that other children had, something anchoring and sheltering. She was the catalyst to my determination to do things differently for my own child and my yearning for what she could not always provide, fuelled my wish to speak, clearly and unequivocally about the many children in our society today, who are not being nourished, or nurtured as they need to be.

K.----
My grandmother, who rescued me from the deprivations of my mother's house many times and gave me a taste for honest, homecooked food and her kitchen, with the Aga fires always lit, was a place of warmth and refuge for me. She taught me how good it is to know there will always be dinner on the table and how nice a hot meal can be on a winter's day.

A.-----
The dark-haired Demeter of Slievenamon. In the wonderland of her farm-garden, she taught me the pagan pleasures of digging food from the earth and plucking it from the vines, the trees and the bushes. There I grew to know the seasons of the earth, to love the land and to delight in the Neolithic power of cultivating all that you need.

E.----
My aunt. A gracious and generous host, representative of an old world that has now passed. She taught me the sociability and life-affirming possibilities of food shared with our fellow-travellers on the rocky road of life, the ritual nature of feasting and how meals are somehow connected to Time and Mortality.

Who are the people who shaped your experience of food and how did it affect your life? I'd love to know. Drop me a line if you wish....

Blessings on your table!
The Good Food Angel



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