My father died last winter at the age of 97. There had never been anything really wrong with him until he had a heart attack the week before Christmas and went into the hospital. When I drove down to visit him I saw the doctor had put him on a salt-free diet.
“Really?” I said. “He’s been eating at Swiss Chalet since it opened in 1954.” The nurse shrugged. “We do it for all heart patients,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to say anything if you bring him a quarter chicken dinner.”
My dad had outlived more than a few doctors by that point and several re-writes of the Canada Food Guide. Not that he would have read it. His beverage of choice was a vodka tonic, he smoked until his 60s and I think the last time he broke into a trot was sometime during the Second World War.
You would think someone like Pop might have made a natural recruit to the health food movement. He was fascinated by every gurgle his body made and the only hobby he ever had was going to appointments with specialists to see if they could figure out what was wrong with him. You see, he never really felt entirely well, in his whole life. He owned a well-stocked medicine cabinet and was always in the middle of some prescription he had brought home from his doctor. But his ailments moved like the news cycle for healthy eating. He would stop taking the pills after a few days when some new ailment captured his attention.
When I pointed out to him that he had done very well to make 97 he said, “It’s because I’ve been vigilant. You never know what can happen!”
He was right. Another heart attack snuck up on him a couple of weeks later and he was gone. At his funeral, the secret to long life was a popular subject. A number of people were talking about the latest news from the U.S. government suggesting saturated fats are not the problem and that cholesterol levels, good, bad or indifferent, are not a predictor of anything. It seems everything we’ve been told by the experts for the last 35 years is suspect. Well, not really. A careful sifting of the literature says that the food writer Michael Pollan probably got it right ten years ago when he told us to eat stuff your grandmother would recognize as food, from around the outside edges of a supermarket, not too much and mostly plants.
In spite of his constant state of vigilance, Pop ate pretty much what he liked and had no political views on food. Local, organic, sustainable, fair trade…it was all white sound to him. He didn’t send away for herbal tonics or watch Dr. Oz. The only two adjectives he ever used in connection with food were complaints that it was ‘slow’ or ‘expensive.’
I think one of his secrets, apart from his sturdy genetics, was that he hated to eat alone. He didn’t cook anything himself, but he always had a house guest who could at least boil soup. And soup, according to the experts, is better for you than a carload of miracle supplements from a shady Kansas City mail-order house.
Here at Larkspur Farm, we gather around a table laden with the fruits of the season, a lot of it from our own garden or the orchard. There is always a platter of beef, pork, chicken or lamb from the barnyard. But the key ingredient is good company, something that the ancients insisted was essential to good health.
Pop once told me a war story about supervising a crew of Kanaks, the original inhabitants of the Pacific island of New Caledonia as they moved logs through a swamp. At the end of each day, they would take him back to their village and sit him down to a meal of fish, rice and taro root. His hosts laughed when he threw his K-rations into the centre. He remembered the laughter and the stories and the songs of those tropical evenings and realized it was one of the few times that he wasn’t homesick or scared.
By now it should be obvious that all this work we do to produce good food from our farms serves us best when it is shared. It may not make us live any longer but it certainly helps us feel better about being alive.
- Dan Needles