Story by Abuelita Teresa & Granddaughter Zully Morales, 2020
There are moments in my life and maybe yours when we all look at the fridge and stare at it for a long time. Sometimes we stare for a while and say or think, “There’s nothing in the fridge.” In reality my fridge has leftovers and vegetables that I’m foreign to cook with. This whole “there’s nothing to eat,” is not practiced by my grandmother. When she opens the fridge, she’ll find a way to re-cook the food or make something new by combining whatever is in the fridge. Her past experiences and creative mind has led her to have a sustainable diet.
When I asked my grandmother when she began to practice a sustainable lifestyle she didn’t know that it had a name to her past experiences. She told her story and she went on tangents to where it all began.
My grandmother lived on a ranch somewhere in Mexico. She didn't have access to supermarkets or convenience stores. She had to look for vegetation around her ranch such as corn, nopales, and vergolada. It was hard labor to collect but she and her children had fun. To pick out vergolada, she instructed her children to only pick out tender stems that are thin and branch out in abundance. My grandmother mentioned that weather was an aspect of what they would eat on that certain day. If it was raining everyone would hunt for mushrooms to cook later.
I asked her where she learned all her knowledge and she said it was learned by doing all of the cooking with her mother. My great grandmother would recycle any glass jar to pickle carrots and jalapeños, also known as chiles en vinagre. Then they would cook on an ecological stove known as “estufa ecologica.” This stove does not require gas and uses less wooden sticks. My grandmother liked using this because the fumes from cooking would travel through the stove chimney.
When she moved to Chicago, it was hard to adapt to the urban lifestyle. She could not harvest vegetables or exchange corn for other vegetables. The adaptation she decided to take was to use everything she had in her fridge and cook everything instead of tossing food away. Interestingly, she doesn’t like to eat meat often and would rather eat vegetables everyday to remember her lifestyle back home in Mexico.