Grandma Had It Going On - Nutritionwise

Check out this 1965 Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book, complete with nutrition data, calorie counts, meal-planning advice, and sample meal plans

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

I stumbled across this 1965 Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book at the GFC Donation Center and Thrift Store on Hargett Street in downtown Raleigh, NC. (Thanks again to the guy who spotted me the $1.25 cash so I could buy it. Who carries cash these days?)

I picked the cook book up, thinking the it would be good for a few laughs, but was surprised by what I found. It turns out, Grandma had it going on regarding nutrition.

This cook book emphasizes providing nutritious meals for your family and includes a considerable amount of nutrition education, including a table of the 1963 Recommended Daily Dietary Allowances in Chapter 1: Meal-planning and nutrition.

Meal-planning? Granny was into meal-planning?

I love to cook and I have a large collection of cook books. Not a single one of them has a chapter on meal-planning and nutrition. After seeing this, I'm wondering why they don't. Isn't this what we really need to know?

Grandma didn't buy meal plans from an internet nutrition quack.

Grandma used evidence-based scientific data to design her own meal plans for her family. Who knew? And wait a minute.....is that why so few people were overweight back in her day compared to now?

I'm not one of those people who thinks everything was better in the past. But maybe we have forgotten some of the basic principles our grandmothers used to put affordable and nutritious meals on the table day after day. Maybe in our current food hysteria culture, we're making it all way more complicated than it really is.

Enjoyable, wholesome, and nutritious meals are within your power to create - no gurus, fancy ingredients, or internet connection required.