Idea for healthy aging: Honor the cook

Sue Farmer brought up a good point in her response to the previous post. In order to live healthy long lives, people need to know the importance of diet and exercise. If we are plugged into the media at all, we've heard that message often enough to tune it out. But the media put out even stronger messages, driven by some pretty big food companies, which tell us what they produce is somehow better. They tempt us to shop in other areas of the grocery stores than the perimeters where the fresh food is displayed. They even tell us that what we grow isn't as nutritious as what was grown in gardens across the land 30 years ago.

I stopped by an Asian food market in the Twin Cities this weekend. The fresh vegetables were laid out just inside the front door and just beyond them was the very fresh (still alive) sea food. The place didn't care much about appearances. It was all about people buying fresh food to take home and cook that day.

And that brings us to something else our culture has lost: the reverence for the person or persons who put the food on our tables- those who take, or make, the time to cook. In the neighborhood of my youth, it was the mothers who allotted time every day for meal preparation. They were honored for their efforts. Somehow that's been lost. Here's an idea for change: it doesn't matter who does the cooking but we need to initiate a movement to revere the family cook. Is it possible to insert a golden hour in our days, let the lords and ladies of the kitchen work their culinary magic, bow to their status as purveyors of sustenance and reap the health benefits?

What's your idea for healthy aging?

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