Long before I became a nutritionist, I had one. My mother.
She cooked every meal from scratch, and everything we ate was organic, though we never called it that, it was just food. My parents grew it all themselves, so we ate whatever was in season and nothing that wasn’t. We kept chickens, so eggs were always fresh, and my mother used them for the cakes and biscuits she’d make for our snacks. What woke me up for school wasn’t an alarm clock. It was the sound of her cooking before she left for work.
The variety still amazes me looking back. Beans and pulses in winter soups and stews. An orchard that gave us pomegranates in autumn, oranges and lemons and mandarins through winter, cherries by the end of May, then figs, apricots, peaches, and prunes as the year went on. Fish regularly. Meat only at Christmas, Easter, and the odd birthday, porceddu, and treated as the occasion it was rather than a daily habit.
My mother was a genius in the kitchen. She made every kind of pasta by hand, ravioli, tagliatelle, spaghetti, and the Sardinian staples I still love most, malloreddus, fregula sarda, culurgiones, dishes that cost a fortune in restaurants now and were simply Tuesday dinner then. Pane carasau, civraxiu, my favourite, pecorino sardo. In winter, Sardinian artichokes, then broad beans a little later. And her zuppa di pesce, I’ve never had better, anywhere.
On Sundays we’d travel up to the mountains for spring water. While my parents filled the containers, my sister and I would forage wild strawberries, corbezzoli. That’s where I learned to forage, from my mother, long before I understood there was a name for it, or that it mattered for longevity. We just appreciated what nature gave us.
I still eat this way. Organic, wide variety, nothing wasted, nothing overthought. If I see a vegetable or seed I don’t recognise, I buy it. I’m not afraid to try anything, that curiosity is a direct line back to my mother’s kitchen. And where she collected spring water in the mountains, I now distil my own.
The thing modern diets have lost isn’t a nutrient. It’s variety. My childhood in Sardinia had more of it in a single week than most people get in a month, and I think that matters more for longevity than any single superfood ever will.
It’s also the first thing I look at when I build a client’s plan. Not what to cut out, but how much variety is actually missing, and how to bring it back in a way that fits their life, not my childhood. If your plate has looked the same for months, that’s usually where we start.
Prevention rather than cure.
Milvia Pili
Functional Nutritional Therapist
