Memorial Day and memories we didn't know we had

Warning: Don't read this post if you're hungry!

So this is Memorial Day weekend, and we have a family tradition on long summer weekends of making an enormous cook-out so we can have leftovers for several days. That's why I found myself in the kitchen this morning making side dishes and thinking about the episode of Unwrapped that I saw last night. Unwrapped is a food network show about how various food items are made, and it alternately inspires me with American ingenuity and depresses me about American laziness and our disconnection from the food we eat.

The episode last night covered a new business concept in which people come into a store to choose from several dinner recipes, all of the raw ingredients of which have been chopped, peeled, etc., by store employees. Customers dump the raw ingredients into a pail that looks too much like our compost bucket and then into a Ziplock bag, which they take home and freeze. Then when it's time to make the entree, they dump the contents of the bag into a pan and heat it up.

They do this to feel like they are actually cooking for their families (as opposed to, say, buying processed food in the grocery store and heating it). I sat there and wondered how much time and effort it takes to drive to the store, dump your ingredients, pay an exorbitant price for them, drive back home, and plop your Ziplocks into the freezer. If you're going to go to all that trouble, why not just chop your own onions and peppers?

I just don't get the concept, I guess.

That's what I was thinking about this morning as I prepared sides for today's cookout. I had taken requests, and each of us had chosen a favorite. For most holiday dinners, we share the cooking because I want to make sure our kids know how to prepare their favorite holiday dishes in case they ever find themselves far from home, hungry, and homesick on a holiday. But with cookouts, I "call" sides, and others do the grilling, make appetizers, etc.

I made green Jello with cole slaw floating in it for my daughter and that nasty stuff with Cool Whip, Jello, cottage cheese, and mandarin oranges for my husband. (OK, I admit: it tastes delicious, but anything with Cool Whip is automatically gross to think about.) I rarely use Jello in anything, so using it in two dishes for the same meal made me reminisce about my childhood when every festive occasion required at least one Jello "salad" (most of those "salads" could rot your teeth with sugar), and many of them featured--you guessed it!--Cool Whip.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, we were the children of convenience foods and mass marketing of highly processed foods. For example, we were the first generation to think of "green bean casserole" (you know, canned green beans, canned mushroom soup, and canned onion rings) as every bit as essential to Thanksgiving as turkey. Processed food appealed to our mothers beyond all reason--or maybe because many of their own mothers and grandmothers had grown up on farms where producing the family's food required huge amounts of time and energy. It was hard and dirty work.

It was easy to convince them that growing, preserving, and even chopping one's own food was too much trouble, especially since more and more of them spent their days in offices, classrooms, and other workplaces. As their children, we never thought twice about the dubious nutritional value of boxed macaroni and cheese, Jello, or canned peas. We ate what was put before us without much thought.

Grateful as I am for the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 70s that opened so many doors for my generation of women, it also presented a marketing opportunity for food that barely deserves to be called food.

Eating has become such a speedy pit-stop of an affair that we rarely think about how many memories food evokes or how it reflects the place and time in which we grew up. I thought about this as I assembled my own favorite cookout side dish--macaroni salad (which bears no resemblance to the stuff you can buy at any grocery store deli and--for reasons I don't understand--tastes like aluminum foil). I always forget that macaroni salad requires relish, and when I thought of it, I panicked because living out here "in the bush" (that's Canadian for "out in the sticks" or "the boondocks" or "the toolies"), you don't just run down to the corner grocery store when you run out of something.

Then I remembered that I have six pints of homemade zucchini relish from last summer's garden. (If you've ever grown zucchini, you'll know how relieved I was to find a recipe for relish when I had run out of ideas for using it up.) I thought about how one of our daughters grumbled incessantly last year that we were spending more time and money growing our own vegetables than just buying them at the grocery store. She demanded to know why we would do such a foolish thing. And her father--in one of those rare perfect moments of parental wisdom--replied, "Because it is a worthy thing to do."

We give our time and energy to what we value. How did marketers ever convince us that preparing and eating food isn't worth the time it takes?

Once I'd taken care of the old favorites, I decided to try something new with a bowl of leftover sauerkraut. I made an Amish sauerkraut salad, a recipe I've been wanting to try for a couple of years. I'm interested in Amish cooking since discovering that somewhere in my family's past, there is "Pennsylvania Dutch" or Amish heritage.

This discovery also came by way of holiday food. Growing up in Ohio, I assumed that everyone celebrated New Year's Day with a mandatory pork roast with sauerkraut. When I moved to Arizona, I was stunned to find that not a single grocery store had pork roast on sale for New Year's. Turns out that pork roast and sauerkraut is not the universal fare to kick off a prosperous new year (in our family we always joked that if what we were experiencing was "prosperity," we couldn't afford not to have pork and sauerkraut for New Year's). It is distinctively German.

Those of us who grew up with only the vaguest sense of our cultural heritage--and let's face it: so many of us Caucasians are really mutts from various European traditions--need to search for clues of where and whom we came from. When I teach storytelling and we're digging for family stories and cultural folktales, I often recommend that people think about their families' holiday traditions, especially foods that are always prepared for certain occasions. These can provide important (and delicious) clues about our family backgrounds.

They are rich memories we didn't know we have. They satisfy more than our appetites.

No amount of convenience or time saved in the kitchen can replace those memories once we've lost them.