eat, live, philosophise!

We had a bad gene pool. On the maternal side, our grandfather single handedly in a single generation, brought his family to the streets through his liking for culinary excellence. He pawned and leased to his last piece of property to hold feasts to commemorate the flimsiest of occasion. He enjoyed being doused in merriment without a care in the world, living only for the day like there is no tomorrow. He lived to eat. His antics and penchant for gustatory gratification literally brought down a reputable and respectable upper middle class family to its knees spiralling the ladder of social class all within a decade of the demise of his old man.
On the paternal side, the extremely large family with 16 over offspring (give and take, that is excluding many stillbirths and children given up for adoption), food (lack of) was always an issue. They always seem to be drooling for food.
With this background, my mother took it upon herself to put things in perspective as far as her children were concern. Living in trying times, making ends meet with limited wages, she tried to save for a rainy day by inculcating upon us that food was for survival, not something to die for! Food never took centre stage in our day to day living. Mother's favourite quote was, "When you go for a job interview, the interviewer would be asking about your paper qualification, not about what luxurious food you had consumed."
We must have left an unenviable reputation amongst our relatives. In the later years into our childhood, we were sometimes feted to feasts by relatives whom we thought were telling us to enjoy the dishes like we had never enjoyed before! Was that a tongue-in-the cheek statement, we wondered!