The powerful thing about a good story well told is that it will make a connection with just about everyone.  Scotland has a reputation for poor nutrition, affecting communities in different ways.  The government invests in projects and campaigns to encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle, but evidence shows that people’s habits don’t really change.

So what does food and eating mean to us?  How do our habits form, how do they influence our behaviour as adults and why are they so difficult to change?  This story postcard – Example 2- was designed to stimulate people to share their own childhood memories of food and eating with a view to answering these questions. 

Initially it was used in a very specific context – care homes for older people – where a priority is to raise standards of nutrition.  This kind of community does not have a uniform culture around food and eating.  For example, in a care home based in the North East many of the residents may have been involved in the fishing industry, with fish central to their diet and local recipies.  They might be being cared for by staff from India, Nigeria, the Borders of Scotland, from cities or from rural areas.  They might be being cared for by people in their late teens and early twenties who are used to eating on the hoof and don’t understand that importance to someone else of having time to enjoy the experience of eating.  This postcard is used to get people talking together about food and eating with a view to developing understanding and improving care practice.

However, it has also been used generally to encourage people in Scotland to share their memories.  Below is a selection of the stories people have sent back to us.

“After morning mass on a Sunday morning, we used to go to grandmother’s house where we would all sit round the fire.  My grandmother would be in the kitchen preparing a large bloomer loaf.  She used to remove the top and inside she would place smoked bacon and a tin of baked beans.  She would then put the top back on the break, wrap it in tin foil and place it in the oven.  While waiting on the bread, we would all discuss what we had done during the week.  This became a weekly gathering.  The best bit was biting into that hot bread.  The smell and the taste have never left me.”

“I was brought up by my grandparents.  I was so hungry that I ate the pig’s food.  Not out of the bucket, but I had to fight the pigs for scraps in their pens.  Now I can take or leave food but I do enjoy a good dram.”

“I have many memories of food in my family.  I was born in 1946 just after the war ended.  We were quite poor, but a very happy loving family.  My mother was not then the greatest cook in the world, but with little money she kept us well fed and healthy.  In particular I remember my mother, father, brother and I all sitting down together each day to eat.  We all ate the same food.  Midweek my mother would cook beef stew.  I hated it and would always say ‘mam, I don’t like it because it has puddles on the top’.  In later years I realised that this was the ‘fat globules’.”

If you’d like to hear more, then please get in touch with us.  As well as looking at the postcard you can download the workshop outline to see how you could use this resource yourself.

You could share your own childhood memory by using the blog here.  You can view other story postcards at Example 1 and Example 3.