Learning to hear our heritage

Today I was speaking with a friend, I'll call her “Sarah”. 
“Sarah” was saying how she’s not been able to pick a watermelon this year that was really ripe and tasted good. I was telling her the way my grandpa (God bless his soul) taught me how to pick out which watermelons to buy because he rarely picked a watermelon that was not super sweet and beautiful. “Sarah” told me that the information I gave her wasn’t what the produce stocker at the grocery store told her and he’d been in produce for 15 years so he knows better than my grandpa would have. I thought “Wow!! Seriously, you’re going to reject the advice of a man who’d been picking produce since he was very young and lived to be 80 years old picking his own produce.”  My Grandpa lived a very healthy life-he had to. When he was 18 he tried to join the military for WWII but during the physical they found he had an enlarged heart. He was told he would not live past the age of 21. Again, he lived to 80 years old being active up until 3 weeks before he passed. He taught me to love homemade, non-processed food and I’m so grateful.

Today I’m reminded of how often we reject the ancient knowledge, the information passed on from generation to generation about the foods we eat and how to pick them and prepare them. We reject that information for the new information science has just come out with or the latest and greatest fad because it worked for Suzy down the street.  But the truth is that in doing so we’re killing ourselves. I too chased that new scientific information for more than 30 years and at the end of that wild goose chase I ended up sicker than I ever could have imagined with a bunch of doctors telling me they couldn’t figure out why I was so sick.

I finally rejected the “proven” way developed by the scientists and went back to the ancient knowledge I learned from my Grandpa and those before him and my body started healing itself.