Granny knows best with skills and wisdom to pass onto grandchildren

Grandmother’s Day, September 30, is a fun way for older people to pass on their life skills and wisdom to their grandchildren, says Joe McNamee.

Slow Food was founded in Italy, in 1989, as a response to the decline in Italian food culture. The activists’ aim was to defend regional culinary traditions and gastronomy, and to encourage a ‘slower’, healthier approach to food.

It is now a global movement, in over 160 countries, and Grandmothers’ Day, originally conceived by long-time Irish Slow Food champions, Darina Allen and Alice Waters, the iconic US chef and proprietor of Chez Panisse, in California, is devoted to encouraging children to share time with their grandparents and access a huge and too-often neglected trove of memories, skills, and traditions, which are in danger of being lost forever to history, in our headlong race into the future.

“It is not just to celebrate the bond between grandparents and grandchildren,” says Darina, “but to encourage them to pass on skills, anything from changing a bicycle tyre to cooking to anything at all, not just food.

There are so many life skills that you can learn from grandparents, who sometimes have a little bit more time on their hands and you can spend time together, not just chatting, but actually doing something while you’re chatting.

It’s as much about relationships and building bonds, while passing on skills and telling stories. Storytelling and memories are really important, creating lovely mental images.

“On the day (September 30), we will have foraging walks and seed-sowing demos. Maria Walsh, our ‘Dairy Queen’, will be doing demos on making butter, buttermilk, and kefir, as well as showing how to use blackberries for teas, tinctures, ink and natural cleaning products.

We’ll be doing fermentation, hatmaking, farm walks, making butter, feeding chickens, collecting eggs. We’ll be talking about heritage apples and demonstrating an apple press, and Helena Walsh, of Greenfield Farm, will talk about planting trees.”

Darina is also launching a competition (see panel on right), inviting Irish Examiner readers to submit their favourite recipe from their granny. Winners will be invited to cook their dish with Darina, at Ballymaloe.

Ironically, Slow Food is a victim of its own successes.

Once a radical antidote to a broken international food system, it made huge waves in the beginning, and a trip to the biennial Terra Madre event, in Torino, Italy, still remains a truly inspirational pilgrimage for food activists from all around the world, gathering to share ideas, experiences, and their own food cultures.

But a certain ‘compassion fatigue’ has set in, hence the softer, gentler approach of Grandmothers’ Day.

“It was very active and visible, when it began, with a lot of write-ups in the papers, all about the philosophy and values, which seemed new at the time, but a lot of people are now living the slow food life and the philosophy,” says Darina, “so it’s hard for them to then see the logic of shelling out money to join... I would love to see new young blood coming in. The challenge is to get young people really actively involved.

"We need an army of people to embrace the philosophy and create events around that.

"There is a power in getting people together and enthusing them, especially about values that we take for granted and would never have thought they are of value, so even if we can get excited about sowing seeds, or maybe deciding to have a few hens at home, or making butter, we are immersing ourselves in a living experience of those values — it’s amazing how even country people now love to see chickens and hens, we have become so disconnected from our food.”

One of the star turns will be Australian Rebecca Sullivan, who spent many years working with Slow Food and completed a masters in international rural development and sustainable agriculture, at the Royal Agricultural College, in the UK, before returning home and launching the community-supported Granny Skills Movement, which protects the skills, heritage, and traditions of previous generations.

Her first book, Like Grandma Used to Make, came out in 2013 to huge acclaim. She was dubbed ‘a veritable modern-day Mrs Beeton.’ “To me,” says Rebecca, “Grandmother’s Day is a celebration of our most important people, our elders. It’s about celebrating the skills, stories, knowledge, and love of our grandparents (grandmothers), in particular.

“When my great-grandmother Lil passed away, at 100 years — a great innings — my mum saved me a box of her things and in it was some medals and certificates and it turned out she was an award-winning baker in the 1930s, for her Victoria sponge cake in the Woman’s Own cookery competitions.

"I had never seen her cook and couldn’t believe I didn’t know that about her. I knew I couldn’t be alone in regretting not asking my grandparents questions about their past, or learning from them, so, ever since, I have been on a mission to protect our granny skills.

“We have made too many mistakes to not learn from our past. Our grandparents were the healthiest of anyone so far that has existed and we all crave a slower, simpler existence.

"Also, if we don’t start living like our grandparents, environmentally speaking, and having a ‘no-waste’ attitude, like they did — admittedly, they had no choice — if we don’t do it for the sake of our planet, we are in dire straits. In the words of [highly influential US food writer] Michael Pollen, if your grandmother doesn’t recognise it as food, it’s not.

“My Nan didn’t eat strawberries in winter, nor did she throw a carton of milk out because the use-by date said so. She used common sense.

"We could all take a leaf from her book, using our intuition. We have a serious food waste problem and Granny Skills can fight that.

"We currently place grannies in schools [in Australia], teaching kids how to use granny skills: use leftovers, eat everything, make things from scratch, pickle, preserve; you know, all those things.

"I’ll be doing a few different workshops in Ballymaloe, lots of amazing natural things, just like granny would have made! Darina has been my absolute food hero for over a decade, so I feel honoured to be a part of this.”

Ballymaloe Cookery School will celebrate Grandmothers’ Day with a series of events on September 30. See www.slowfoodireland.com for details.

Darina is also launching a competition, right, inviting readers to submit their favourite recipe from their granny. Winners will be invited to cook their dish with Darina.