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I announced to Grandma I’m going completely vegetarian, so she had to rethink the week’s meals. She said she had a side of a pumpkin, which was intended for some pork soup, but I persuaded her to do a stirfry instead.

“When the Japanese were here, this is what we ate,” she said, glancing at me sideways as if to ascertain whether I actually like eating pumpkin. “Garlic and black bean paste. We wouldn’t even use oil, oil was so scarce.”

It was quite delicious, though I asked her to put in more black bean paste next time. “Next time? No next time. Your dad doesn’t like pumpkin.” I marvelled on cue at how well she remembers all our favourite foods. There is a running joke that my all-time favourite food and everyone else’s all-time least favourite food is chicken wings, because grandma made it so often that everyone got so sick of it. “You were such a picky eater. Once we found the jackpot food, of course I made loads of it to make sure you would eat!”

A few weeks ago I went on a quinoa binge and tried to get my mum to eat some as well. I gave her a little jar of it. Grandma took a look at that and exclaimed, “That’s the crap rice that no one used to want!”

They called it ‘wild rice,’ though of course unrelated to this wild rice as we know it, and though possibly related to quinoa, not likely the same species. It was a weedy stuff that grew in rice paddies, which gets picked out and discarded. “There was an old woman, poor woman, she made a living patching clothing. But who didn’t patch their own clothing during the war? She made a few pennies a day, and she’d spend it all on a small slice of fatty pork. But she’d pick this weedy stuff from the side of farm roads, and eat it like rice.” I told her quinoa is now considered pretty nutritious stuff. “Hah! And we thought it’s junk. Would explain why she was so healthy!”

She went on to give some tips on cooking rice. “If you grind up the rice into rice flour, it cooks faster and is more filling. It’s how we saved on both rice and fuel.” Of course, nutritionally it probably made little difference; the ‘more filling’ part was likely just bloat from more water. But then I thought, if all I had was two kilograms of rice, per month, and I had to feed a family of seven, I couldn’t really care less if it was water or unicorn feces I was eating, so long as I wasn’t going hungry.

OK so clearly the “next” indicators don’t work very well. I’ll just, um, say that there is more.