The list goes something like this: avocado, onions, garlic, tofu, berries, walnuts, almonds, red kidney beans, olive oil, yams, broccoli, green or black tea, ginger, flax, oatmeal, salmon, spinach and barrels of fine red wine.

O.K. I added the 'barrels' part.
It's a list of scientifically-studied superfoods touted in about a billion books aimed at us Boomers, a list that promises to let us live long productive lives (to the horror of our children) well, into, say our 11^th decade.
It's a list I can really sink my teeth (and willpower) into because I already eat most of the foods on this list, for the most part, components of a delicious - and oh so sane - Mediterranean diet.

It may sound a bit smug, but I can safely say that I must be one of the few people I know eating sensibly.

Take Easter 2007. It was my turn to host a large group of family and friends.
The group included vegans and (to varying degrees)vegetarians, mostly in their teens and twenties; some carbophobic middle-aged women; golden agers with digestive issues; people with allergies, perceived and real; the lactose and wheat intolerant; ethical eaters (who prefer their meat humanely hacked from 'happy' animals); people who only eat 'organic' or 'fair trade' or 'local'; people who eat free-range chicken but no fish (the mercury!) and people who eat fish (not farmed!) but no chicken (the hormones!) Not to mention the man of the house, my husband, who suffers from migraines caused by vinegar of any kind, especially balsamic, and who waxes romantic for his suburban sixties style childhood diet, and plastic foods like stove top stuffing that "isn't all complicated and filled with nuts."

My mom's favourite line, "I'm not running a restaurant!" simply wasn't good enough for that occasion. Indeed, at 86 my mom is one of my pickiest guests. "No rice or spicy food, just beef - blue, I don't eat shoe-leather, fried in butter, not olive oil, remember."
I wisely decided on a bring your own bbq and I supplied a wide variety of salads.

Alas, all went smoothly. Still, I asked myself afterward the event..What's wrong with this picture? Is it a case of too much money, too much choice or simply too much information?
Then I happened upon a very old book on a high high shelf in my kitchen, the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer, 1912 edition, an American classic.
The sturdy beige volume once belonged to my husband's grandmother, Marion, a Montreal teacher who took the brave step, in 1913, of moving into her own flat (after months of looking for one) with three female roommates, all teachers, too. I have some of her letters. To land the apartment in the Mile End district of Montreal, the twenty six year old dynamo and future union leader had to promise the landlord that her middle-aged mom was coming down from the country to keep house for them. In that era, unmarried middle class women were expected to live in rooming houses with matrons to keep an eye on them. Only prostitutes shared living quarters. (There are still some US states with laws on the books forbidding women to live in groups, I believe.)

In another letter, Marion mentions roasting her very first chicken, a relatively expensive meat in those days, available only half the year. It's a success: Here's Fannie's recipe. "Dress, clean, stuff, and truss a chicken. Place on its back on a rack in a dripping pan, rub entire surface with salt, and spread breast and legs with three tablespoons butter, rubbed until creamy and mixed with two tablespoons flour. Dredge bottom of pan with flour. Place in a hot oven and when flour is well browned, reduce the heat and then baste. Stuffing 1: I cup cracker crumbs, 1/3 cup butter, 1/3 cup boiling water, salt and pepper, Powdered sage, summer savory or marjoram."
The legendary Farmer ran a cooking school in Boston, where the specialty was a course for nurses in sick-room cookery. According to info in the back of the cookbook, the training course offered one lesson weekly for ten consecutive weeks, by appointment. The cost: $65.00 and travelling expenses if given at a hospital. Lessons were on the chemical composition of food; correct proportions for well-balanced dietaries; proteids; starch; gelatin; fats and oils; alcohol; fermentation; fish classification and preparation.

Living in an era where a healthy person could catch pneumonia "The King of Death" one week and drop dead from it the next, (in the US almost 200 cases per 100,000 population in 1900 according to a 1912 article in Technical World Magazine) Fannie Farmer believed in the healing power of food.
So did a lot of people. This was the era of the "white peril" of contaminated milk, sky high infant mortality in the cities (St Henri, a borough of Montreal had the highest incidence of infant mortality in the entire Western World caused by a record tide of immigration), and where TB was second only to pneumonia as a killer in the US. This was also the era of the New Woman that spawned the regressive/progressive Home Economics Movement that devolved into the very lame Home Ec classes women of my generation took in the 60's, and the time where Homemaking was first described as a very noble and important 'profession' for marriage-bound women (requiring specialized training in schools set up for the purpose) partially concocted, no doubt, in an effort to quash the suffrage movement and still all 'those restless women' agitating for the vote.

Like many of the other pioneering forces of this post-Victorian era, Farmer trusted in the supremacy of science. "During the last decade," she writes in her prologue "much time has been given by scientists to the study of foods and dietetic value."

The book contains a lengthy section explaining the chemical composition of food, a section, no doubt, passed over by most readers.
The recipes were clearly the book's big draw: hundreds of them, carefully categorized, and like the earlier recipe for stuffing,short and simple, butter and flour based, with a very few herbs and spices (parsley, cayenne, cinnamon, cloves). Imagine, no garlic! In fact, nary a 21^st century superfood to be seen. I couldn't help but wonder what Fannie Farmer, the health-food pioneer, would have thought of this information-rich, science-saturated, fusion-mad day and age.
"At the earnest request of educators, pupils, and friends, I have been urged to prepare (sic) this book… and sincerely hope that with its condensed scientific knowledge it will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat."
Hmm.

.And what would she have made of the aisles and aisles of books on cookery and health and self-improvement available in today's bookstores or online?


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