Amidst writing an article on Mediterranean grains, the research and reading I’ve been doing has taken places and taken me back in time.

In Mediterranean Grains and Greens, Paula Wolfert, who traveled and lived in homes of Mediterranean families, describes the steps of processing bulgur. She quotes a Turkish food writer who says,

Clifford Wright, in A Mediterranean Feast, tracks where and when certain foods showed up in the Mediterranean. He narrates that couscous was invented by the Berber in North Africa, adopted by Arabs afterward, and it somehow showed up in the Eastern Mediterranean as it was mentioned by a historian, named Al-Maqqari, who wrote in Damascus in the seventeenth century. Wright goes on to add,

I turned to my grandmother to ask her how her mother prepared food. Similar stories. A group of women gathered once a year to make maftool (also called moghrabyeh, which are the Middle Eastern names for couscous) and store it for the whole year. My grandmother, a young teenager back then, and her siblings took sheets spread with maftool to the roof to let it air dry. The storage area of their house supplied maftool, rice, bulgur, and other foods and kept the family full year-round.

This may not seem interesting to all. But for me, combine food and history, and I’m all lost.

Readings and stories such as these triggered my own memories about preparing food. My mom would bring bags of fresh pea pods, lay them on a clean large used-up bed sheet in the backyard, and my siblings and I would participate in getting the peas out of the pods. She used to buy fresh molookhyeh in season, use the same sheet, and we’d help her pick the leaves from the stems so she could store it for the rest of the year. She used to bring several pounds of fresh Nabulsi cheese, set a big pot of boiling water, and flash boil the cheese before storing it in water and salt, again, for the rest of the year.

It suddenly hit me that I have many more memories of food ceremonies–we didn’t look at them this way back then–where all house members got involved. I can remember my mom discussing with her friends or relatives what produce or others they stored:

And it also hit me that my mom now, fifteen or twenty years later, doesn’t do all these things anymore. Why? Modern food systems.

It made me a little sad that my kids won’t get to experience that. But honestly, I wouldn’t want to clean up bags of pea pods. If I had to, I wouldn’t have time to go to school, work, or write this blog.

This brought the National Nutrition Month theme of this year, “Nutrition from the Ground Up,” back to my mind. Maybe “from the Ground Up” is not necessarily all about soil, plants, bugs, and chemicals. Maybe it’s all about from childhood memories to adulthood, from past to present to future, from grandparent to child to grandchild.

Maybe local markets and house gardens are not all about good and sustainable for the environment. Maybe they are our subconscious way to bring love, warmth, and joy to our lives. To create a feeling of home, regardless of what home means to each and every one of us. To bring back memories, flavors, aromas of the past and of those who we love.

I’m confident that regardless of where you grew up, you have memories and stories to tell about your food. Tell us one of your stories. How much are you interested in knowing the history behind your everyday foods?