While fun to read, this is not the norm!
My Unhealthy Diet? It Got Me This Far
By HENRY ALFORD
Published: February 28, 2011
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SOMETIMES I can’t believe what my 82-year-old mother has been eating. Living now in a retirement home in Durham, N.C., she told me she recently had cherry cobbler for breakfast. Apparently she’d had French toast stuffed with bananas and Nutella for lunch the day before, and after lunch had gone to dessert theater (“You know, like dinner theater, but with desserts”), where she’d gobbled down a lot of cookies. “So when they served cherry cobbler for dessert that night in the dining room, I thought, I better take this back to my room and eat it tomorrow. For breakfast.”
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Noah Berger for The New York Times
Now 75, Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panthers, cooks and eats barbecue 10 times a year.
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Rex C. Curry for The New York Times
Mary Pyland, 92, of Abilene, Tex., continues to eat fried chicken and caramel pie.
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Nancy Cardozo shares a house with her friend Aileen Ward in New Milford, Conn.; both are writers in their 90s. “We eat everything we like,” Ms. Cardozo said. “Any kinds of eggs, blini, any good red or beluga caviar with crème fraîche, cheesecake, chocolate soufflé with whipped cream, crème brûlée, filet mignon, pasta with pesto. Aileen drinks Lillet, and I’m vodka and tonic. We drink as much as we can.”
The cartoonist Mort Gerberg, now in his late 70s, went to a bat mitzvah in Denver last year for his great-niece. “Usually at these things they have a table with desserts or chocolate, but at this one they had a sour cream table,” Mr. Gerberg said. “They had all these cockamamie things to put on the sour cream: candies, chocolate. I had heaping portions. It was thrilling. And all I could think was, where are the potatoes?”
It’s a common belief that life as we know it ends in old age. Gone are the little joys that make existence worthwhile — béarnaise sauce, pancetta, cake batter — all subsumed under a banner reading, “Doctor’s Orders.” For older people, the irony of eating is that your metabolism slows down, so you need less food, but your body needs just as many nutrients, if not more.
Declining health and the voices of authority only dampen the proceedings further. The latest dietary guidelines from the federal government recommend that people older than 51 (along with African-Americans, children and adults with hypertension, diabetes or chronic kidney disease) eat only 1,500 milligrams of salt a day. Everyone else can have 2,300.
Constantly badgered by the medical establishment, family and friends to adopt a healthier approach to food, the older gourmand soldiers on anyway. Why? For my mother, it’s the thrill of transgression.
“I’m a sneaky eater,” she told me. “Inside me is a very naughty girl. I like to eat in the privacy of my own room — sticking my spoon deep into the jar of Mrs. Richardson’s caramel sauce so it sticks straight up, maybe sprinkling a little salt on it — and not telling anyone.”
For others, eating well is a way to keep traditions alive. Mary Pyland, 92, of Abilene, Tex., was raised on a ranch. “We had a fried chicken dinner every Sunday,” said Ms. Pyland, who ran a cosmetics store until she was 84. “I lost my husband 16 years ago, and I try to keep up everything we always did. Honey, I just had fried chicken with cream gravy and biscuits and mashed potatoes for dinner last night. And I made a caramel pie that was just about the best thing you ever put your lips around.”
One trope that comes up often in conversations with older gourmands is that eating what they want is, at their age, a right or privilege. For some of these privileged or righteous folks, it’s a question of not curbing one’s impulses.
Larry Garfield, 95, of Key Biscayne, Fla., worked in the carpet industry until he was 83. Asked why he recently ate a rare calf’s liver with mashed potatoes at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Miami Beach (even though he shouldn’t have, given his diabetes), Mr. Garfield said: “You ever walked down the street and seen a pretty girl and thought, ‘Mm! That’s for me!’? Well, I looked at the menu and thought, ‘Mm! That’s for me!’ ”
For other righteous or privileged folk, eating is a reward. Barbara Hillary, who reached the South Pole in January at age 79, making her the first African-American woman on record to stand on both poles, said she ate too much milk chocolate during the trip. “If I had frozen to death down there, wouldn’t it be sad if I’d gone to hell without getting what I want?” she said.
In some cases, this same right or privilege seems to stem from having lived an exalted life. Nancy Cardozo and Aileen Ward met at Isadora Duncan’s school on Nantucket when they were 14. Ms. Cardozo said: “We did Duncan dancing. We flitted on the grass in little Greek dresses.”
Both went on to lead vivid lives. Ms. Cardozo wrote fiction and poetry for the New Yorker in the 1940s and ’50s; Ms. Ward won the National Book Award in 1964 for her biography of Keats, and used to car-pool with Vladimir Nabokov when she taught at Wellesley.
Now, despite some technical difficulties (“There are chewing problems,” Ms. Cardozo said. “That doesn’t sound very attractive, does it?”), they eat luxuriant foods, albeit in small portions. “It feels like entitlement,” Ms. Cardozo explained. “We deserve it because it’s the way we’ve always lived, and we don’t want to change.”
