It is no small wonder that we Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are as unhealthy as we are. It is the way we were raised and our diet. Our food upbringing was not that good, at least when I grew up. I was reading the other day about the incidences of heart disease in these parts. Newfoundland and Labrador doesn’t do well at all when compared to the national average and I’m not a bit surprised. We don’t have a history of eating properly.

Fried foods and fatty foods were the order of the day. I myself was a good 40 years of age before the wagging finger of my doctor began to take any hold on me and it began to dawn on me that I should pay some attention to what I shoved in my gob. My doctor said if I didn’t, I’d soon find myself in the ER with someone putting electric paddles on me.

When I was growing up a “townie” in St. John’s there was little information available at all about diet and what information there was kicking around was generally wrong. My grandmother who used to give me home-made bread always covered it with about half an inch of butter. That was mostly margarine mind you, but butter once in a while! In the summertime you could buy butter at some places down the Southern Shore. It was known as “fresh butter.” It was homemade and so salty it glistened in the light. A “print” of fresh butter, it was called, and I think “print” came from the machine that shaped the round cakes of butter. It sort of printed them.

“Butter is the oil of the heart” my grandmother used to tell us. She obviously wasn’t a doctor. It was a cute expression but not well grounded in medicine and when grandmother finally went to glory and her eternal reward it was probably from a bad heart. By the way, another healthy offering from her as a snack was a slice of bread with butter and sugar.

Another fabulous thing we used to eat on a Sunday was salt beef. Four or five pieces of salt beef with cabbage, turnip, potato, and carrot. “Cooked dinner” it was called in some circles. I didn’t eat the turnip or the cabbage. I just had the potato mashed up with lots of butter and ate the salt meat. Five or six glasses of Freshie would be in order then because after a meal like that you would have a thirst like a camel.

Toutons was another staple in our horrid diet. That is bread dough flattened out and fried in a pan in fat. Fried bread is something that appears in so many cultures. The first time I was in China in the city of Ningbo at six in the morning I bought a treat from a street vendor. It was dough fried on the inside of a barrel over a fire. As soon as I tasted it, I murmured; Toutons!

Back to diet. In every pantry in our homes was a fat jar which was the drippings from everything fried, from bacon to sausages. It was saved and put away in case more fat was needed. People still do it, but they don’t talk about it. Sometimes bits of fat pork were served with toutons or in some parts of the province pork wasn’t used but the toutons were smothered in butter and /or molasses. Don’t tell me that isn’t good for you. Yummy!

Another favourite meal, and part of heritage, is salt fish and brewis. Again, there were two distinctive styles of that one being big bits of salt fish with fried pork on it or again, depending on geography, the fish might be all mashed up with the hard bread and nice dollop of molasses flung down on the whole thing. I think the pork thing with both the toutons and the fish and brewis might have been a Catholic thing and the molasses thing might be Protestant. I’m not sure about that.

Now all of that has had a lasting effect on me that manifests itself once in a while. I do eat better and I’m careful at least to some extent about what is for dinner. Once a year, or maybe once every two years, I break out and have what is still my favourite meal of all time. It is usually breakfast on a Sunday morning, and it is a bacon sandwich. Bacon by definition is no good for you. It’s the back of a pig. It is like fried strips of fat. I like to buy a package of those cheap bacon ends that they sell in the supermarkets. It’s about two pounds and is all the uneven parts left over from packaged bacon. It is cheap as dirt. Anyway, I like to put on a package of that and cook it in a big frying pan on the stove. When it done, I take up the bacon and drain some of the fat but not all of it out the pan. Then I get two big slices of homemade bread and fry that in the fat until its nice and brown. Then I make a sandwich with the bacon. A little bit of mustard, a tall glass of milk and that is about is close to happiness as I’m going to get. After that, a little nap on the sofa and you have all the keys to a long and happy life. Well, maybe.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]