Time to remember: memories in old age about food from childhood and youth

Abstract

This article deals with the memory of food from the past through reports from people classified as old/elderly in Brazil, those over 60 years old. They involve memories of what childhood food and nutrition were like. All 14 people we spoke to chose to talk about memories linked, above all, to affection and good times, even when some difficulties of food scarcity or poverty were interspersed in the story. Elderly people aged between 65 and 84 years old were interviewed. All of them residents of the Southwest region of Paraná, the majority are of Italian, German and Polish descent. Almost all of them were born in Rio Grande do Sul or Santa Catarina and moved to that region after adulthood, during the Marcha para Oeste policy, by the Getúlio Vargas government in the early 1940s. The memories brought up curiosities about practices food, ways of doing it and use of terms about food where they mix the original language of their grandparents/parents, settlers, with the Portuguese language, creating dialects. The statements were emotional at various times, bringing back many pleasant memories, and others not so much, but they were considered by the elderly who were willing to tell an important moment, seen as an opportunity to talk a little about the past to people interested in listening to them. The method was qualitative, using the main technique of oral history.