by Ralph Nader
Mother paid attention to the flavor of food, and to its taste, texture, aroma, and appearance—attributes that, to her, added up to its “bouquet.” Her blend of tasty nutrition calmed us down and made us more receptive to the challenging conversations and stories that garnished our dinner table. Years later, when we persuaded her to write down some of her thoughts about family and child rearing—along with some nuggets of wisdom and insight from my father, and a selection of recipes from our childhood—the result was a volume called It Happened in the Kitchen. Phil Donahue invited Mother and me to talk about the book on his show in 1991, and we were pleasantly surprised by the response, both in the studio audience and from around the country. They loved the show’s old-fashioned tempo, its plain talk, and the authentic common sense born of the experience of generations. Within days, the book had sold fifty thousand copies.
This connection was further strengthened when Aunt Angele, my mother’s younger sister, immigrated to this country shortly after World War II. She brought with her the history of the twenty-five years since my mother had left Lebanon, and shared it with us at her new home near ours in Connecticut. Her hospitality and sumptuous tables were a centerpiece of our lives throughout the thirty-four years she lived there; it was there that we witnessed her love of the Arabic language, and the fondness for Arabic poetry, songs, and proverbs that she shared with her sister. At family occasions, such as weddings and birthdays, she demonstrated a distinctive talent for poetic expression herself, and further enriched our appreciation for the beauty of language.
It occurred to us that families all over our country could do the same thing we had done—to collect the stories and wisdom of their parents, grandparents, and even their great-grandparents before they are lost forever. The resource of generational history is accorded little attention in our society, which seems ever more obsessed with making “new” and “better” synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generation to the next. Yet despite the increasing proliferation of digital recording and other communication technologies, we’re passing on less knowledge today than our parents did through the oral tradition alone. We’re drowning in photographs and videos, capturing every mundane moment of our birthdays, holidays, and vacations. Yet these can be no more than pleasant distractions, only scratching the surface of our real relationships.
I’m reminded of all of this when I think back on our maternal grandparents in Lebanon. My siblings and I have only a few pictures of them. But the times we shared on our memorable visit there—harvesting fruit from their small orchard and garden, sharing stories around their large dinner table—gave us a lasting sense of connection to them, and to each other.
3.
The Tradition of Health
Years after we finished our formal education, we asked Mother how she’d approached the challenge of teaching us about health, which most children don’t take too seriously. “There are key moments when raising you,” she said, and she knew how to strike when the iron was hot. “When you were sick, I gave you your lessons on health. There was no more receptive time than when you were in the middle of chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, and measles.” As we struggled to fight off our childhood ailments, Mother’s gentle admonitions about the importance of eating well and getting enough rest and exercise—and “not doing anything foolish that would damage your health”—fell on receptive ears.
Taking care of one’s health from an early age was one of my mother’s passions. “If you have your health, you have everything,” she told us. “Without it, you have nothing.” Mother had seen many health-related tragedies during her childhood in Lebanon, and she knew that the effects of neglecting one’s health could appear with a vengeance years later, so she didn’t believe in taking chances. Besides, we grew up in pre-antibiotic times, and our heightened awareness of the contagion of polio—then seen widely as more fearsome than cancer—made her health advice more acute and urgent. We wouldn’t think of drinking out of other people’s glasses, even within the family.
“Better than practicing what you preach,” Mother always said, “is preaching what you practice.” So she did. She ate what we ate, exercised and played ball with us, and made sure to get her daily rest, preferably in the form of an afternoon nap. But she worked hard to earn those naps: Mother used to clean her house on her hands and knees, and when she was done she would go to work in the yard and garden. We got the idea, all right. We all did our chores alongside her.
Mother had an intuitive sense of when not to rush to the doctor. Our parents always paid attention to which physicians in town were most skillful—not just the ones who were more friendly or charming, but the ones who kept learning and which ones stopped learning, which ones encouraged questions and which took queries as mistrustful of their doctoring. She had a general practitioner, Dr. Roy Sanderson, who seemed to know which parents had enough common sense to handle their children’s well-being on their own and which ones needed his closer attention. You can guess in which category he placed our mother.
Though my father owned a bar as part of his restaurant, alcohol was never a staple in our household. When guests came over my parents might serve wine, and my father liked an occasional taste of arak with his food, but that was about it. I don’t recall any beer in the refrigerator until my brother came home from the navy. Smoking, too, was a generic taboo, except for Dad, who often held a cigarette between his lips while managing the restaurant—although he didn’t inhale, much to the amusement of his smoking friends. Nonetheless, he favored heavier taxes on tobacco products, and believed that doctors didn’t focus enough on prevention. Society doesn’t use doctors wisely, he contended, paying them merely to treat sickness, not to help people improve their health or prevent future illness. Doctors should be urging patients to eat healthier foods and conquer their addictions, he said over and over again. When he retired, he quit smoking, cold turkey.
Dad’s most instructive lesson to us was his avoidance of extremes in his daily life. No matter how hungry he was, for example, or how delicious the meal my mother prepared, I can’t remember a time when he said he overate. He used to tell us, especially at Thanksgiving, that the difference between a great dinner and a failed dinner was perhaps two or three mouthfuls too many. He didn’t sleep too much or too little, didn’t walk too much or too little, didn’t try to shovel the snow too rapidly, drive too quickly, or spend too rapidly. He was the soul of moderation, and we could not help but notice.
My parents had a thousand little ways of bringing home the importance of nurturing our health. Even in this they made an example of the birds and squirrels around us, pointing out how they took care of their own. Once Pop made us laugh by reminding us that these animals were more careful with their health than the irresponsible teenagers of our area, who swaggered around as if asking one another, “Hi! Here’s how I’m damaging my health. How are you damaging yours?”
Mother and Father were rewarded for their lifelong healthy habits by living into their late nineties. We never heard them make the merest complaint about aging. And when they could no longer be completely self-reliant, they received our assistance with ease and grace. For them, as well as for us, it was in the natural course of events.
4.
The Tradition of History
Our childhoods were livelier because my parents always put a premium on the lessons of history. Learning from the past, they taught us, was crucial for understanding the present and shaping the future. It was a rich journey Mom and Dad took us on—worldwide, nationally, regionally, and locally. We relished their stories of the heroes of history, though not so much for what side they were on as for the stories of what they did or said—the wise phrases of Lincoln, the gallantry of Saladin in his twelfth-century victory over the European crusaders, the liberational voices of Arab patriots against the French and British rulers, the frugal sayings of Benjamin Franklin, and, of course, the poetry of several long-forgotten poets. Mother
often shared such stories at lunchtime, when we rushed home from school—not just for the food but also for the next installment of her latest historical saga. And this storytelling approach to history whetted our appetite to read more on our own, including historical novels from the Revolutionary and Civil War to the tales of Genghis Khan.
When we children were respectively eleven, nine, seven, and three years old, my mother set sail with us for a year-long trip to visit her family in Lebanon just before World War II. While my father stayed home to tend to the restaurant, we made a voyage into history—both our own family history and the history of our ancestral home. We took in the archaeological ruins of Baalbek, and the history of the Levant under the Ottoman Empire and then under the French colonial mandate. We learned of the struggles of my great-grandparents’ generation, and absorbed the cultural history of custom, myth, folklore, festivities, food, humor, and religion. We learned to see history as geography, its contours mapped in the cities and villages and terraced countryside of our ancestors, and chronicled in the ancient lore of the luscious vineyards and orchards and the very rare small rivers. Along the banks of these small rivers people still sat together, sharing food and stories. Their conversations were sometimes delicate and nuanced, sometimes uproarious, and often full of reminiscences, tapping into the past for insight into the present. Even the local small talk here drew on larger spheres of reference, including colonialism and the rebellions of earlier periods. Even chronic Lebanese gossipers talked politics.
Back in Connecticut, we paid similar attention to our local history. With the imposing Civil War Veterans Monument nearby, and a wonderful library full of history books and materials around the corner, our part of northwest Connecticut came alive with the tales of its dairy, apple, and other farms, of its many factories, and of how the great natural disasters, floods, and gigantic blizzards were overcome. It was the time of the great U.S. melting pot, a time when immigrants came here to become Americans.
As is the case today, hometown history rarely came up in our elementary and high schools. We learned it from the old-timers around us, who shared their stories in town meetings and impromptu street-corner gatherings, in sandwich shops and bars. The bustling sidewalks and the local restaurants—my father’s included—were places for talk and eating; their counters and booths lent themselves to passing conversations far better than today’s fast-food restaurants.
Sometimes knowledge of the town’s history got me into trouble. In the third grade, when my teacher referred to the “Beardsley Public Library,” I corrected my teacher in front of the class. “Miss Franklin,” I said, “The Beardsley and Memorial Library isn’t a public library, it’s a memorial library.” My parents had always stressed the importance of charity, and I knew that our library had been established in the nineteenth century through the generosity of the well-off Beardsley family and other donors. My correction got me a trip to the dunce chair in the corner. It was a valuable memory for me, but not in the way Miss Franklin intended it. It taught me the difference between instructional obedience and critical education, though I did not quite phrase it that way at the time.
The local daily newspaper, the Winsted Evening Citizen, was another conveyor of local history. I was a delivery boy for a time, carrying a weighty 120 copies in a sack I flung over my shoulder. Needless to say, I read what I peddled from door-to-door, and as I did I began to marvel at all the parts of this town that escaped most townspeople’s awareness. Mother once wrote a short article called “Touring Your Own Home Town,” in which she suggested that residents visit our numerous factories, schools, town departments, farms, our reservoir and purification plant, the rivers, streams, lakes and woods, the county courtroom and local hospital, firehouses and local landmarks, and of course, the Winchester Historical Society. Just seeing how all the various products that fueled our local economy—from clothing to clocks, from the common pin to electrical devices and household appliances—were made would be an eye-opener for most residents.
My father, who had a bottomless appetite for political news, viewed the events of history in cause-and-effect terms. To him, wars, tragedies, and elections were the result of preexisting social and historical conditions, and their consequences were all too often ignored by greedy powerful interests in favor of their immediate lust for domination and profits. This mindset led him to a political perspective that ran counter to nearly any prevailing party line. He also saw how the appeal of communism in Third World countries was nourished by callous and colonial corporate capitalism, whose political allies propped up dictatorships while the very rich oppressed the rest of the population. If the governing officials would only give a thought to the workers’ desire for a decent life, he would say, “communism wouldn’t have a chance.” Having been born under the rule of foreign occupiers who wrote the self-serving history books the students in Lebanon had to study, he came to believe that history was written—and revised—by those whose interest it was revised to serve. Whenever he heard people say that Columbus discovered America, he would laugh and ask, “Didn’t the people who greeted him on the shore arrive before he did?”
My father had an interesting take on how to accelerate the retirement of cruel dictators. As usual he started by asking me a question:
“Why don’t dictators ever retire voluntarily, except to let a family member take over?”
“Because they like the power and the wealth and the adulation,” I replied.
He countered by suggesting another reason: fear. Once those dictators were no longer protected by the military cordons that shielded them, they would be vulnerable to the many enemies their rule had created. Their years of brutal domination would make it difficult for them to have a second act.
But obviously there was an advantage to luring such figures out of office. So my father proposed an unorthodox solution. “Why not have the international community establish a retirement island for former dictators?” In exchange for agreeing to release the reins of power, they would get guaranteed security on an island somewhere in the South Seas or South Indian Ocean, where they and their extended families could tend their gardens or write their autobiographies. They would be forbidden to travel except for exceptional situations, and their communications with the outside world would be monitored. Since most dictators are already of an advanced age, the opportunity to escape the constant fear of reprisal might prove incentive enough to accept the invitation. Perhaps most important, scholars would be given access to them, interviewing them to learn just how they had maintained their totalitarian hold over millions of people—a subject my father found critical if mankind were to forestall the emergence of future dictatorships.
Of course, Dad’s idea raised all kinds of questions: Would exile on an island paradise really be sufficient punishment for these often-murderous rulers? How could security be ensured? Who would pay to maintain the facility? But when I tried to poke holes in his “solution,” he waved them away, arguing that such details could be worked out once the general plan was accepted by the proper authorities in the nondictatorial community of nations. Besides, he had to get back to work. Easy for him to say—but such conversations conditioned us to think in unusual ways.
My brother, Shafeek, shared my father’s interest in history, which dovetailed with his own affection for geography. Shaf was convinced of the importance of having a sense of place—so much so that he collected U.S. Geological Survey maps of our county and its towns, which he kept rolled up on his bookshelves ready to use on his regular tours. He read deeply in American history, and like my father he enjoyed pointing out its sugarcoated versions. One day, after prevailing on our parents to buy us a brand-new set of the Encyclopedia Americana (the 1947 edition), Shaf pulled me aside and read a passage from the entry on Hawaii. The article referred vaguely to “external influence” that had caused tumult for “the Kingdom of Hawaii” in the late nineteenth century. “These influences finally caused a revolution in 1893, deposed the reigning queen, Liliuoka
lani, and established a provisional government. A republic was formed the following year with Sanford B. Dole as President. Pursuant to the request of the people of Hawaii, as expressed through the legislation of the republic, and a resolution of the United States Congress approved July 7, 1898, the islands were formally annexed to the United States on August 12, 1898 as a territory.”
Shaf looked up at me when he finished reading. “Do you know what really happened? The Dole family, other Anglo planters, and some missionaries engineered a coup to overthrow the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy. This was no ‘request of the people.’ It was simple colonial imperialism, secured by the U.S. Marines. The encyclopedia is whitewashing history.” At the age of thirteen, I found this an invaluable lesson in skepticism: Even an established encyclopedia, I had learned, could contain a political agenda. By the time I arrived in college and law school, my critical faculties had been honed by years of such exchanges with my perceptive family.
5.
The Tradition of Scarcity
Waste was anathema in our household. Despite their comfortable middle-class income, my parents followed a policy of scarcity that went beyond even the calls for sacrifice that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made during World War II. My parents took wartime measures like rationing and recycling in stride—and found that they provided an occasion to teach us the value of scarcity. My parents planted their Victory Garden and raised chickens during those years of food rationing, and during the war my father kept up his long-standing practice of saving string, winding it into ever-larger balls for reuse. He recycled paper and walked instead of driving, so that he could save his gasoline coupons for more necessary purposes. Mother could get more out of a bag of groceries than nature seemed to permit; she was a very imaginative kitchen manager. My parents kept the indoor temperature in our house between sixty and sixty-five degrees during the winter, to save on heating oil. Father wasn’t shy about saying he didn’t mind denying the oil companies a few pennies. The fact that we lived among thrift-conscious New Englanders didn’t hurt.