My mother had her own ideas about food and feeding her husband, herself then her children. That was the order of importance although she would have liked to put herself first however she couldn't as mum wasn't the bread winner of the family. I think my father was quite easy to please. He knew mum couldn't cook so he was happy with meat and 3 veg every night at 6pm and eggs and bacon on toast each sunday morning.
Hmmmmm eggs and bacon smell delicious. Of course we were never allowed to eat them. "That is for your father not you kids" was the reply when asked where ours was. So I dont think I ever ate bacon until after I left home which was at 18. Today I just adore eating bacon and mushrooms for breakfast.
The sad thing is my father was an excellent cook but very rarely ever cooked for his family.
So abviously from having sugar on all my food at such an early age lead to a very sweet tooth.
For my mother there was a definate division between adults (her) and children (us) when it came to food. Quite simply adults got all the yummy food and we got the left overs or plain boring food.
For example: Biscuits
Kids love biscuits. Every kid loves biscuits of some type. We certainly did. Now I am talking about the 50's where there were no supermarkets with biscuits in packets, I am talking about grocery shops and fresh loose biscuits weighed up and put into brown paper bags. I bet that brings back a few memories for some of you!
Mum kept her biscuits in a specially made (plastic of course) container with 4 layers, stacked on top of each other, each a different colour and in each layer she would have a different type of biscuit.
These consisted of: 1/2 pound each of Yo-yo's (my sister's favourites) Ginger snaps, Scotch fingers (my favourite) and then a cream variety.
So each week I would go up and get her standard order and a pound of plain 'family' biscuits of us kids. PLAIN FAMILY BISCUITS for us. Not only were they boring they lasted 2 days between 4 hungry children....well apart from the last few broken biscuits that no-one wanted to eat. My mother's lasted all week because she bought so many and never shared them.
So what I did was try to memorize where the Scotch fingers were so I could sneak out in the middle of the night to get some. Now this was really scarey as my mother had eyes in the back of her head plus excellent hearing to match. I would have to stay awake then sneak out of bed and creep into the kitchen then try very carefully to take the layers of biscuit trays off without waking the person I most feared in life to get a biscuit. How exhausting was that. Honestly, I thought about doing it more than I ever did.
This then developed into an eating disorder later in life. But more about that later.
That made me laugh right out loud! Hahaha! Yes - the crazy things parents do - but they are just people do the best they can with the information they had at the time. That must have been torment though! In my house my mother never has anything interesting, it was just the two of us and she was a feminist grad student (that means she was too cool to cook or bake) - all she did was throw things in a pot until they got hot essentially, no sauces, no spices, nothing interesting. We never had anything sweet in the house and no junk food was allowed except peanut butter, just meat, vege and starch - we rarely even had fruit or dairy (too expensive) but every once in a while we had oatmeal and raisin cookies. The result for me was going crazy with food when I moved out and the idea that I better eat it ALL NOW 'cause I won't ever get any ever again! hahaha when this dawned on me one day I realised my brain still thinks I live with my mother! So now I have to remind myself that it is okay - I don't have to eat it all, I can save it for later - or that I can have whatever I want, whenever I want now (from what is available at the shops obviously) and I try to be mindful when I eat too - without any other adjustment to my lifestyle or diet - just doing that alone helped me to eat less and to eat beter and I dropped FIVE dress sizes! last year
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