On Friday Jessie made us real Jamaican Akee and Salt Fish. It was fantastic.
One particularly interesting thing about meeting Jessie (especially since this was the last webisode–for now), was that she was part of the WTN cooking show Lovin’ Spoonfuls that aired in the early 2000’s. Hosted by fabulous David Gale, the show was a definite inspiration to us as we considered how to bring Fiesta Farms’ ethnic dimension (it’s history and product) to life on the site.
Lovin’ Spoonfuls focused on grandmothers and their recipes. And, like the Fiesta Farms series, it featured grannies from around the world. In the episode that featured Jessie, she made Peas and Rice, Jerk Chicken and Christmas Cake.
Plainly said, Lovin’ Spoonfuls was way (way, way, way) ahead of it’s time. As producer Allan Niven says about the grandmothers in the story of Lovin Spoonfuls:
These are people who are not often portrayed on television. The tend to be seen as irrelevant…they were really not portrayed for who they are, which is people with a real body of experience.
Remember now, Lovin’ Spoonfuls predated YouTube. In other words, it came before the mass democratization of video content. Before YouTube, there were only 2 kinds of video you could watch in your living room; video filmed professionally (TV, film, etc.) that tended to include rather conventional characters, and home movies which only you could see, in the privacy of your home.
Of course YouTube and other sites like Vimeo have made the line between professional and home movies virtually invisible.
Nowadays anyone with a Flip or an iphone can make a movie that anybody can watch in their living room. And, like everyone else, seniors now have new opportunities to express themselves online.
Have you seen the Ottawa version of the Raging Grannies taking on Stephen Harper? Or the original Raging grannies slamming CBS for running pro-life ads on the Superbowl? Well, say no more.
There are a few Grannys whose cooking has taken the internet by storm:
- Clara’s Depression Era Cooking where Clara cooks affordable food and tells stories from the Depression era
- Feed Me Bubbe Kosher cooking set to Klezmer
- Geriatric 1927: Peter Oakley’s response to Gordon Ramsey’s Cookalong (watch for the nose picking)
There are actually fewer seniors cooking shows than I would have imagined. Perhaps that’s because not enough have access to the “means of production”– your basic video camera. It’s incumbent upon younger folks to film their grannies, bubbes, Omas doing their thang. As we all know, when these folks go, their recipes often go with them.
Do you know of other great seniors’ cooking shows? I’d love to hear about ‘em.
