Please pass the fried potatoes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been studying a little Latin.  The verb “tradere” means “to hand over.”  We get a couple of English words from it: one is trade and another is tradition.  Tradition is what our ancestors hand over to us. “It’s all yours now, kid.”

I am thinking about this because I’ve been on a diet.  Let me explain.

My mom’s dad was a carpenter, and when she married Dad, Dad was working in oilfield construction.  Her way of cooking was designed to meet their needs.  She suffered from that as she fought weight all of her life.  And this was the environment into which my brother and I were born.

My brother and I have both fought weight issues all of our lives, and have lost and gained hundreds of pounds.  I am not blaming my mother for this because she did the best she knew. I am saying this because during the course of my diet, it has occurred to me that because we as humans have drifted so far from nature that our instincts are no longer a good guide for us in eating.

We eat because we need food to live and to work.  That is why my mom made such huge, calorie-rich meals.  You need a lot of calories to swing a hammer like her father did or to push rod-and-tubing down an oil well like my dad did.  Little did she know that her sons would be a teacher on one hand and a college professor on the other.  

My grandfather needed calories to raise houses; my dad needed calories to raise oil derricks. You don’t need that many calories to raise your voice to a class of teenagers; you don’t need that many calories to raise a question in a committee meeting.

But it is hard to break from what you learned so young.

Because humans are social creatures and food is such a basic need, it is tied up in the fabric of society.  It is tied up in our basic memories.

At Thanksgiving, I insist on canned cranberry sauce.  The kind you slice into hockey pucks with marks from the can still on the sides.  Does it taste better than the wonderful sauce my eldest daughter makes? No.  It reminds me of my mother because that is the way she did it.  It’s the way you do it when you are cooking for construction workers.

But I am not a construction worker.  My needs are different.

This year I turn sixty.  While we are taught about the traditional three-score and ten, the times they are a-changin’. I might live to be 80.  My endocrinologist scared me by telling me I might live into my 90s. If I do, I need to learn a new way to eat.

And I am trying.

But the training of my youth is strong.  The memories of my mother’s cooking are powerful.  While it would be easy to blame tradition, tradition might be a way to skip my potatoes fried in bacon grease and to eat them too.  We don’t eat like Thanksgiving every day.  We set a time for it.

Perhaps I can set times to eat the foods my mom made and have them only then.  We eat to live; we eat to work; but we also eat to remember and love.

If I learn to do that, maybe that is something I can hand over to my children and grandchildren.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )