Great Depression Cooking with 93-year-old Clara Cannucciari
Clara Cannucciari, Great Depression Cooking with Clara
Great Depression Cooking with Clara is the popular online cooking show. In each episode Clara prepares recipes that her mother made during the Great Depression. Clara shares her stories and wisdom from the Depression as she shows you how to make simple, inexpensive and delicious meals.
On her YouTube Channel, Clara gives her five survival tips (see original for background):
1) Family
2) Have a garden
3) Use and re-use
4) Make your own meals
5) Eat healthy
From ABC News :
How good of a cook is Clara Cannucciari, a 93-year-old great-grandmother and host of her own online cooking show?
She’s so good she claims to have gained weight during the Great Depression, according to her blog.
… Cannucciari was born in Chicago in 1915 to Sicilian immigrant parents. She attended high school but money was tight, and she had to leave after her sophomore year. In 1935, she got a job at a Hostess factory filling Twinkies.
She later married, worked as a secretary, and had a son. She has four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and now lives in upstate New York, enjoying her growing popularity as an Internet chef of a cuisine born of frugality and resourcefulness.
From CBS News:
… Now Clara’s Depression Meals, which on average cost 50 cents a serving, are a surprise hit on the Internet.
The 93-year-old shares a lifetime of savings tricks on her Web videos, along with family memories. In the first episode she explains that for one dish, “We would turn off the gas and let it cook on its own heat so we could save money.”
Her Webisodes include pasta (of course), potatoes and stale bread with water and oil.
Cannucciari says, “We went through a lot of hard times.” She thinks today’s generation is a bunch of whiners in comparison.
(April 2009)
Recommended by a fellow gardener. -BA
Small farms fear bearing brunt of new food safety regulations
Taryn Luntz, Greenwire via NY Times
As salmonella-tainted pistachios and peanuts fuel the latest in a series of foodborne-illness outbreaks, lawmakers are proposing a flurry of bills aimed at strengthening the country’s neglected food safety system.
But while food industry giants that have long opposed new regulations are beginning to change their tune, small-scale producers are growing increasingly vocal about their own concerns.
The problem, they say, is that small farmers, who are most accountable for their food’s freshness and health, may suffer the heaviest burden under proposed new food rules.
(3 April 2009)
Backyard Revolution (video and transcript)
Liz Hayes, 60 Minutes, ninemsn (Australia)
If you’re sitting down to dinner, here’s a question for you.
Do you really know what you’re eating, or where it comes from?
Well, for a start, it’s probably loaded with fat, sugar and other nasties.
Many experts say our food is so highly processed and so full of additives, it’s not really food at all.
In fact, it’s making us sick.
So, if you’ve had enough of tasteless vegetables, fruit that’s been sitting in a freezer somewhere for months and packaged food with less flavour than the cardboard it’s wrapped in, why not join the world-wide revolution.
Grow your own, turn your backyard into a fruit and vege garden.
(3 April 2009)
Upbeat presentation. Wish the U.S. version of 60 Minutes had segments like this! -BA
