Cows in our pasture last summer.
The premiere of my new film "Carrie Mae: An American Life" went well, with about 70 people in attendance. Most touching for me was the fact that many of her family members came. Her son, an educator himself, remarked that it is nice that his mother is still teaching. Her stories illustrate her personal integrity in a larger, often adverse historical context.
What does that have to do with bone broth? I have been thinking a lot about my older friends and their lifestyles and stories; how close in time the segregation era really was, and yet how far from popular memory. I know seniors in their 80s and 90s who still garden, sharing the produce with their neighbors. One might grow dozens of tomato plants, far more than an individual household needs, while another plants a quarter acre of collards. Then the produce is shared in an informal network, a tradition that goes back for generations and that (I have read) is a hallmark of Gullah-Geechee culture. Yet if you open any homesteading magazine today, you might get an impression that sharing produce with one's community is a new idea!
Another notable aspect of my senior friends' lives is how healthy many of them are. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that most of my older friends grew up without vaccines or medical care. For many of them the only 'medicine' they encountered in their early lives were special teas made by their grandmothers.
Recently, I have been reading about the benefits of bone broth, a soup or broth made by boiling bones (sometimes with other ingredients) for hours. Apparently this is a new health craze, with some gourmet stores and restaurants in New York selling bone broth for $10 or more per bowl.
What's ironic about the current bone broth fad is that for generations bone broth was a staple of foods made by people on the lower end of the income scale. I recall a story told to me by a woman who grew up in a sharecropping family. Her father died young, leaving her mother in terrible circumstances. Her mother had eight young children and a crop to work. She recalled that one day someone gave her mother a ham bone that was covered in maggots, but she said her mother was so glad to get it. Her mother washed it over and over again with salt, and finally cut it open to get to the marrow. The marrow that would give her children nutrition, minerals and amino acids that nutritional science has now come to appreciate.
Something I have learned from spending time with my elders is how much wisdom can be gleaned, and how much grace can be witnessed, if you take an attitude of quiet listening. And when you do that, you realize that much of what we think we are learning today are old truths visited on a new level.
Click here to get the new ebook "Rosenwald
No comments:
Post a Comment