"Never criticize your mother's cooking"

In the house I grew up in the 1960s my father left for work every weekday morning and returned home just after 5:00 every evening.  During the day, it was my mother's job to take care of the four children and the house, shop, and prepare meals.

The main meal of the day was dinner, served at 6:00.  We all sat down together.  No television. There was always a meat dish, rarely fish, salad with Wishbone Italian dressing, often potatoes and/or some kind of vegetable.  There was always ice cream for desert, sometimes pie or cake.

Dinner time was a time of rules:

• Be on time to supper.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Don't eat before the blessing and hold hands during it.  
• Elbows off the table. 
• Don't talk with your mouth full.  
• Don't take more food than you can eat.  
• Don't play with your food.
• Give new foods "a college try." 
• Eat everything on your plate or no dessert. 
• Ask to be excused from the table.
• Above all, "Never criticize your mother's cooking."

Reflecting back, I grew up in an orderly, rule-following, white middle class household with stereotypical gender roles. What we ate was, more or less, what everyone in our neighborhood ate.  As far as I knew, what everone in the world ate. We rarely went out for dinner.  Our diet was high in animal fat.  Chicken, and everything else, was fried in bacon grease.  We drank whole milk, used lots of butter, and ice cream was a constant.

When I was 16 and my siblings 14, 11, and 8,  my father, 53, died of heart disease.  Smoking and high cholesterol. My parents were wise, thoughtful, well-educated people making intelligent choices yet the diet we ate was, in fact, deadly.