Feeding People

by Deepti Babu

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As a genetic counsellor, a main part of my job is to study family histories. I’m responsible for looking at them with a highly specific lens, trying to determine whether the traits I see establish a pattern that might solve the medical puzzle put before us.

So when I started noticing a curious pattern of traits in my own family, I began collecting facts and came up with a theory to explain them. You see, my maternal family contains five generations of foodies. And I’m now convinced that a foodie gene exists in my family.

By the way, let’s get this over with – I will be using the word foodie repeatedly. That word seems to raise the blood pressure of some. I’m not exactly sure why, but maybe it is too simple or cute a word to explain a passion for food that is more serious. Truly, I have yet to find a better alternative.

To me, foodies are those that always have thoughts of food simmering in the backs (and happily, the fronts) of their minds. When a foodie’s head is cleared of all requirements, he or she returns to thoughts of food. And I don’t think a foodie has to like cooking or be a good cook. Instead, he or she might enjoy reading about food, taking photographs of it, studying it… the baseline passion for food is the same, but how one expresses it varies. Lindsay Finnie-Carvalho, a foodie gene carrier who teaches Nourish Me cooking classes for children and adults in St. Albert, offered this:

“A foodie is somebody who makes the enjoyment of food a priority.”

Beautifully put, so let’s go with that.

Whew, that’s settled, let’s move on.

I’ve had my foodie gene theory for a while. In 2005 I met with author Judy Schultz about this idea. She wrote an article about my mom and I after we had spent a July day salivating at the City Farmers’ Market. My mom recounted being raised with her foodie grandmother and mother, but not actually learning how to cook until she immigrated to the U.S. Since then, she’s never looked back. Dinners growing up in the Babu family were an experience, requiring a minimum of five plates. And the prep and post-mortem analyses were all part of it. My brother and I both have the foodie gene, and we come by it naturally.

In 2005 I only had four generations of foodies in my family because my kids weren’t born yet, but observing them has cemented this idea for me. I suspected the foodie gene in my sons early on — by the age of three. Ari, our eldest, applies his curiosity to food. He wants to know exactly how something is prepared and tastes subtle notes in food. He’ll be a great food critic because it seems his sense of taste is keen; he notices if I’ve made a subtle change to a recipe (something I often do) or adjusted a dish.

Ezra began cooking with me shortly after he could stand by himself. By age three his favourite TV show was Bake with Anna Olson, and he pored over cookbooks for weeks in advance to research his fourth birthday cake. He finally settled on a dark chocolate cake with buttercream frosting.

My family is not unique. I first met foodie Kristine Kowalchuk at the 2013 Food Matters event at LitFest. She presented her English Ph.D. dissertation, for which she studied 17th century Englishwomen’s household recipe books. After listening to her, my foodie gene radar was firing non-stop. Who else but a foodie would dedicate her graduate thesis to this subject?

My radar didn’t let me down. Kristine spoke of her mother’s family as having generations of foodies and storytellers. She spoke about how, after a long school bus ride home in rural Alberta, she would sprint to her front door when she knew her grandmother was visiting. Why?

Because she knew her mother and grandmother would be making their family’s German-Russian doughnuts, which they call krebble (the exact spelling is a mystery). “They were all you could smell. They’d come out of this vat of hot oil, and then we’d put them in a plastic bag and shake them with icing sugar, making almost a powdery glaze. And they’d still be warm. You’d wash it down with a glass of milk. Just delicious.” And like a true foodie, Kristine has been collecting her family’s recipes and preserving them for future generations.

Turns out Lindsay Finnie-Carvalho can trace the foodie gene in four generations of her family. She and I riffed on my theory because she has a degree in molecular biology and genetics.

As a young child, she’d look at cookbooks like they were children’s picture books. In her early teens, she wowed her grandparents by independently making crème caramel, inverted ramekin and all. As she recalls, “I was so proud of myself. I still get such a sense of fulfillment watching others enjoy what I create.”

She now sees signs of this in her culinary-minded children. She’s looking forward to a family vacation she has planned to the Okanagan. But is it any surprise that she’s scheduled the trip for the height of peach season, her favourite food?

As I learn more about the genetics of taste and smell, I really feel like I’m on to something with my idea. Sure, the environment plays a part. But families out there are like my own. For every story here there must be others, and I’m determined to find them.

Deepti Babu often weaves culinary themes into her genetic counselling sessions, which she explores further in her blog at deeptibabu.com.