"Fight Back With Food"

See the present my lovely hubby just got me:

Nice, huh!  It's a book that explains what various foods do what on the health front and is chokka with healing recipes.

But the gift isn't just in the object; it's also in the message. And that message is the best one anyone can ever hear: "You were right and I was wrong!"  Yayyy, Keith! Way to surrender, honeybunch!

Keith and I have always fought about food.  He's from New Zealand so his idea of a meal is meat-and-three-veg - a good cut of steak by choice - whereas I was raised by my mother who always claimed that what Keith called a meal was "murder committed with love."; the very best way to kill someone young. And since Keith was by far the better cook and I was adamant I was NOT cooking what he wanted, he put himself in charge of nightly dinner which meant our dogs always ate extremely well because nightly I baulked and only ate the vegies then helped myself to the hummus in the fridge.

And aren't I grateful now! My doctor here in Hong Kong, Dr Yap, wouldn't believe any westerner didn't have fatty organs - and thus the related health issues - so sent me for a full body ultra-sound to find out what was happening inside me and was almost reluctant to admit that, yes, the organs in my body look like they could belong to a 20 year old; that internally I was in better shape even than Chinese folk my age. "What diet do you follow?" he asked, looking at the pictures, genuinely impressed and deeply puzzled.

"My mother's." was my proud reply.

Looking back on all this, I now realise Mum was speaking from a different place than other folks back then and that there is something very odd about her body of esoteric wisdom and a lot of her strange skills - like being able to ... well, I once saw her put an injured man into a trance just using her voice and then stitch him up without an anesthetic - and, yes, I'm now immensely curious where it came from; all that advice like "Meat, like cakes, biscuits and pastry, should only be eaten in a 'kill the fatted calf' way; something only done on special occasions."  and, most importantly, "Peasants always have the best health so always eat the foods that peasants eat."

And just like Keith and I, Dad and mum also had lots of food wars with dad forever saying "Yes, we'll eat like peasants if it means so much to you, but peasants always ate tripe and offal and off-cuts." to which mum always replied "No, peasants ate PULSES! Peasants ate vegetables. They ate leaves and tubers, fruit and nuts. They had very little meat and virtually no complicated, heavily-produced food, except for special occasions."  ...

... and, most importantly, "They almost always ate fresh" ...

... and so, there on the ridge in the jungle in Tamavua, mum got herself a bete (witchdoctor) for a gardener - Ifarami - and together they built us a magnificent garden, very picturesque, sure, but with fruit trees and food plants everywhere only pretending to be decorative. And Ifarami was amazingly diligent and the produce from our garden was always abundant, and all of it (except for what he stole to feed his own family and let's not blame him for that) daily came straight into our kitchen, and thus we grew up on fresh, fresh, fresh!

And milk and yoghurt and eggs, she had delivered fresh from the Indian farmer just down the road from us in Taverua, who didn't know he was 'being organic' since he was just doing what he did because it's what his farmer-family had always done.

Although the superiority of this sort of diet is common knowledge now, we're talking here about the '60s so mum was very out of sync with the age, and "It's an old Merton family story." mum would often say to justify her own position on various points.

Old family stories!  Oral traditions!  What is transmitted within family lore? What is passed down by word of mouth through the generations? Probably more than we realise. Someone I know quite well once made a bizarre gesture while saying something very adamant that made me think "There's some story behind that gesture that speaks of a great deal of hate many generations ago." and so - as usual, rampantly curious - I tracked down the surname and discovered a very nasty 17th century ancestor who did something particularly cruel that we would now call A Hate Crime that was deeply connected with the remark the friend made; and no, the friend didn't know about the ancestor yet still the hate was there as a fundamental fuel.

And, closer to home, reading an interview with dad's cousin several times removed, Seamus Heaney, when he was here in Hong Kong for the Literary Festival several years ago, I was astonished that every word of wisdom he sprouted I'd previously heard coming from my father's lips!  "Spend your money on your children's education and land on a hill!" was only one of the very many they had in common!



So I wonder what exactly those Mertons once knew that was passed down the generations by word of mouth to eventually end up being sprouted by my mother.

And there was something else mum always said that didn't belong anywhere near 'mainstream common knowledge' which increasingly makes me go "Mmmmm!" and wonder about a lot of things connected with her surname and ancestry ... and, well, after googling the family name and seeing what's out there, even wondering long and hard about the origins of Oxford University and when exactly it started.

I mean, just look at Oxford University, right?. Although it is meant to have started in, what, the 12th century?, there are references to "the ancient mystery school at Oxford" back in 1003, or 1009 or 1011 - early 11th century anyway.  And then there's Merton House for Scholars, which was already there when Oxford began, and which eventually evolved into today's Merton College ... and since teaching is always about transmitting a body of knowledge surely this means these Mertons had a body of knowledge they once thought should be transmitted, so there's our mother most likely sprouting off remnants of what was once known ...


... so I do wonder about a lot of things she said. Like, she was a nurse married to a doctor, and so yes, part of the western medical tradition, yet she always said things like:  "Western Medicine grew out of the triumph of the alchemists over the healers!" and "Western Medicine is about science and not about healing."  and "Western Medicine is like an unscrupulous mechanic who fixes the immediate problem but tinkers elsewhere so things will go wrong in the future." and "Modern medicine has the wrong ph balance for the body chemistry so anything you take will eventually do you a great deal of harm."  ...

... and the biggest thing she was most adamant about: "Stick with only the original medicines: aspirin, St Andrew's liver salts, and bicarbonate of soda, and for everything else ...

USE FOOD!

... and "Food is the best medicine"!  "Find out the foods that heal and use those for healing!"

So, yes, that's what I now think: that The Merton were once a very ancient family of healers! Very, very ancient indeed!  And the world is finally realising their wisdom and returning in droves to what the Merton once knew!

So, you can see why it's so lovely that Keith has bought me this book.  Sure, he surrendered to my diet guidelines nearly a decade ago, but this book shows that he now admits that he thinks my mother was right all along and that FOOD IS MEDICINE.

And let me tell you one final lovely story about my gorgeous chubby hubby:

The latest photo of the two of us.

As you can see, no one can ever accuse Keith of being a slender fellow. However, when we were in Taiwan recently, there was a young Chinese man with a stall on the streets with a sign saying "Free Health Checks", who took one look at Keith, got all excited and raced over to offer him a quick once-over.

Keith and I were both sure the man would follow up with the offer to sell us something very expensive so it wasn't going to be free at all, but he looked like a very fair-minded and pleasant fellow and, besides, I was confident, so I pushed him into doing it.

So the fellow took Keith's blood-pressure and looked very surprised, then listened to his heart and was even more surprised - crestfallen even - then "Your health is perfect!" he admitted and after me insisting he do me too, with the same results, let us both go on our way.

So, yes, sometimes it's very wise to listen to what your mother had to say! So, GO MUM!  And GO GO THE MERTONS!!!