Tag: nourishment

1963-70 White bread & Jam: What’s cooking?

Ingredients:
Me
My Mum and Dad
3 Siblings
The 1960’s
Immigration

Method:
My early years of life continued in relative simplicity. By the time I was 2 and a half I had a sibling. These continued to arrive quite regularly over the next 7 years.
Alas, I remember very little of the 60’s and can only reflect upon the decade from hindsight and history. My early upbringing was certainly a White Australian one.
I consider my parents would be classed as ‘old fashioned’ or ‘conservative’ they were certainly not hippies. So my childhood was based more upon the social ideals and mores of the decade prior to my birth than upon the turmoil and new ideas of the 60’s decade.I was definitely a 1960’s child not a child of the 60’s!
Even though I was being nurtured and raised within this cocoon of old Australia; all around me was the bubbling, stirring, mixing and blending of new and old cultures, new concepts, new visions and the beginning of the cultural, feministic and political revolutions that were to change Australia for ever.

So what was cooking in Aussie kitchens? I was certainly still eating some kind of meat and three vegetables, but a mere 100 miles away, there were Italians, Greeks, Dutch, Chinese, etc families eating their own traditional meals.
And so the incubation period of a new way of Australian eating was commencing right under everyone’s noses.
I cannot tell you how fortunate I consider myself to have been part of this transition.
But then that is another recipe!

1963 – 1970 white bread and jam

Dear reader,
Ingredients:
1 White Bread Aussie girl(I cannot help this)
1 Country childhood
1 family of 8
1 large extended and close family
Lots of ‘Good cooks’

Method: I commence my story here, a trip into the back story of Australia’s food history.
My life with food began long ago at my mother’s breast. I fed well and found nourishment and solace early on from food much to my self esteem’s and self image’s chagrin.
All through my life food – the good, the bad and the uneatable has played an integral ingredient within my journey through childhood, parenthood, full-time work, trauma and my social life.
It has been my enemy, my counsellor, my friend and my God.
There are so many parallels between food and my life story.
I ponder how we are so ‘in love’ with food shows, and why? What are we missing? Why do we watch and not ‘Do’?
How did we get so far removed from the basic principal of food as nourishment and survival.
What really interests me is how my life changed through our attitudes to the foods we ate in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
What food ‘Big Bangs’, do I remember that still ‘get to me’ today?
Are Australian’s just a bunch of food snobs? Do we really remember our ‘White bread and Jam’ past?
Many of our Mega chefs had affluent or middle class childhoods – their families could afford ‘flash foods’. What about the average family? Making do and using what they had?
I hope dear reader you will continue through this recipe book
of my life.
This blog will bake for up to one week.