Yesterday morning I awoke to the roaring claps of a New Orleans thunderstorm. Down here in the Big Easy where it seems nothing they do is conventional, I dare say their storms follow suit!
Now I’ve experienced my share of thunderstorms growing up in rural Ireland, and I’d go as far as saying I enjoyed them on most occasions, but the monstrous thunder that dwells in Louisiana skies is enough to rattle every cell of my being, and leave me cowering under my blankets, praying for it to pass.
And as it eventually tapered off, leaving just a downpour in its wake, I mustered the courage to get out of bed, and make my way to the kitchen in hopes of quietening the equally noisy rumblings of my hungry stomach. I flicked on the light switch. Nothing. Flick, flick, flick…nothing …only the darkness of the morning. Uh oh! I rushed to the fridge, noticing the lack of its usual buzzing sound, and opened it… to more darkness. Freezer, same. Uhhh seriously? No electricity!!! What the hell was I supposed to do now? What would I eat?
I couldn’t make my usual morning eggs, no damn power for the stove, I couldn’t make a smoothie with a dead blender, and no oatmeal without hot water ( because I just don’t fancy eating it cold). I was doomed to starve! I had to eat something as the grumblings of my hunger grew louder in recognition of threatening starvation. My mind raced with possibilities..could I run across to Smoothie King? No, they wouldn’t have electricity either. What about Walgreens? There’s nothing edible for healthy girls in Walgreens! Plus the street is flooded so how can I even get across!! Darn it! I would have to improvise! I reached for the block of cheese and the last half of the avocado, the butter and my box of flax crackers and after mashing the avocado up, I headed back to my bed with my makeshift breakfast.
I jumped back under the covers and chowed down on my picnic of crackers topped with butter, avocado and cheese and seriously wondered between my munching…what the hell did we do before electricity??
My answer is, I really don’t know, because I was born long after the genius mind of good old Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity and turned us all into complete electric dependent delinquents. Can you imagine if we had to wake up every morning, build a fire, boil the water to even take a hot shower, before boiling more water to cook our food? We’d probably have had to prepare our food even before that, seasoning meats, storing them properly so they didn’t go off, we’d have to wait if we wanted a cup of coffee or tea until our oatmeal was cooked because unless we had two fires it was one pot at a time, and I definitely would not have been able to make my delicious berry smoothie!! No wonder women spent all the time in the kitchen. Cooking was one hell of a time consuming job!!
We have become so spoiled with advances in technology. A machine with a timer can make your morning coffee, throw a few fruits in a blender you have a smoothie, pour some milk over a bowl of store bought cereal (that was processed by machines, run on electricity), scramble up a few eggs on the electric stove in the same time it takes to toast a slice of bread. But you know what the real sad part is, most people can’t even find the time to do that.
Most people make a mad dash to the nearest Starbucks or McDonalds for their morning coffee (that they just didn’t have time to brew) and grab a breakfast sandwich while they’re there because it’s more convenient, than throwing an English muffin in the toaster and scrambling an egg, but the truth is the stop at the coffee shop probably takes you the same amount of time it would take to make your own breakfast at home. Or worse than the coffee shop stop, is the no stop at all, by the breakfastless individuals of the world! How can you just not have time?? How did we get from our ancestors spending hours, days even, preparing proper nutritious meals for their whole family, to us, nowadays not even taking time to eat a yoghurt with some fruit for ourselves before leaving the house?
Just alone, the lack of choices I had for breakfast when there was no electricity goes to show how much raw food I have in my diet. Obviously, not enough! Even when I thought I could possibly have a can a tuna, I couldn’t open it because I have a damn electric can opener!
The less time we spend in the kitchen, it seems, the unhealthier our nations have become. While the working woman is wonderful and all, and the advances feminist right leaders have made in the last century is marvelous, I can’t help but fear that completely shunning the kitchen, the place that endowed us with the title of the more “nurturing” of the two genders, the place that once was a symbol of home cooked love and hearty health, has done nothing but leave us overweight and riddled with diseases that have mysteriously only appeared and increased since good home cooking has become almost a thing of the past.
You’re never going to find the same nutritional value from a restaurant meal that you would obtain from fresh, quality ingredients used to make a meal in your own home. Not to mention the added bonus of TLC that goes in to homemade foods. It really is the magic ingredient missing from our staple diet these days. The love and care for what we put in our bodies, and nourish our cells with is gone! We need to bring it back. We need to find time for those extra five or ten minutes in the morning, or that twenty minutes it takes to chop up a load of veggies and some chicken and throw into a slow cooker so we have dinner when we get home.
We should be grateful for the benefits electric has brought us in that we do have such things as slow cookers, and blenders and food processors and ovens and use them to our advantage to make the best kind of foods for our health and bodies. Be grateful we have what our ancestors never did, and show that proper nutrition is still made in our own kitchen. And have lots of cheese and avocados and flax crackers around for when the next thunderstorm hits!!
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