Best memories are at the table

Matt Pearl

There was a blissful time in my life when I had never heard the term gluten-free.

It was a time when diet soda was an off-beat product.

My folks even remember a time when grocery stores were full of ingredients instead of meals. (They still sell all those ingredients, by the way, but most of us get the quick-to-make products for time’s sake.)

I can’t help but think about some of the old-timers I have known in my life.

They were old-timers, by the way, because they lived a great many years.

How many of them grew up eating bacon and eggs for breakfast?

Drinking whole milk and using real butter on their toast.

They ate from the garden all summer, and for most of the winter through use of canned vegetables.

They went to bed when it got dark, and they raced the sun to see which could get up first every day.

And they lived and died, same as us.

They got old, or they died young, same as us.

But they would never have believed in diet food as a means to control their health. They were just happy to have the food on the table in the first place.

At times, we go to great lengths in this day and age to eat the right food to keep our bodies healthy. But hasn’t medical science also taught us that joy and positivity are important factors in the maintenance of health?

We don’t drink skim milk at my house.

I’m no dietician, and I of course offer no medical advice to you or to anyone. I’m just saying Pearls drink milk with the fat in it. It’s a life choice.

Judge us if you must. We use butter.

We eat red meat.

When it comes time to eat sweets, we eat the good kind made with good, old-fashioned sugar.

We just don’t eat them all the time.

To live a life where we are blessed not to worry about having enough food, it would be a real shame for us to rob all of the joy from our table by eating watered-down milk and artificial sweetners and pretending like they taste good.

At our house, we have apple trees and we eat the apples. We eat plums from our plum tree.

I’m a poor gardener for the most part, but even I do enough that we have some lettuce, spinach, tomatoes and other selections during their respective seasons.

Many of your own best memories of family — parents and grandparents now departed, aunts, uncles and cousins — took place around a table.

I’ve joined hands with those folks and thanked the good Lord for the food and the company with which I was blessed to share it, and so have you.

So forgive me for eating cheese with all the fat still in it. Excuse my desire to eat food that tastes good, and somewhat resembles the original natural product from which it came.

Keep your diet cola: I’ve got good, cool water that comes from the tap each and every meal.

And some day, maybe the doctor will say, “Matt, you should have consumed more fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free meals when you were young. You would have added another year or two to your life.”

I already have my answer ready for when that moment arrives: “If it’s all the same, Doc, trading that year or two was completely worth it, because I would rather have high cholesterol while sitting around a joyful table than eat diet food because I was afraid of dying. Life is short, but it’s a blessing.

“Pass the butter, please.”