“We don’t need that!”

My Zaidie glares at my mother and puts the second of two (yes, two) containers of homemade cookies back in the cardboard box from whence they came.

This ritual is repeated over and over with a multitude of food products—salad dressings loaded with fat and sugar, packages of crackers and other highly processed foods that have no chance of finding a home here. Friends have always looked at me in shock when I explain that we have never kept junk food in the house. My mother is a former Weight Watchers group leader, my father is an endocrinologist, my siblings both need to watch their weight for health reasons, and I, the vegetarian of the family, prefer to eat healthy. So we felt no guilt in rejecting the high-caloric food products that were trespassing our threshold of health.

Each time my grandparents travel to and from their home in Toronto and their Florida condo for the winter, they stop over in Maryland to pay us a visit. Each time, we are graced with loads of food we never asked for. A surefire way of telling whether my grandparents have come to visit recently is by taking a quick survey of the contents of our second freezer:

Is every available space in the freezer filled?
Are there new items in the freezer that have so many layers of aluminum foil and plastic that it is impossible to tell what these items are?

If you answered yes to either or both of these questions, Bubbie and Zaidie have come to visit. For the next several months, it is quite the reckoning to discover what each of these cocoons of food-preservation contains. I recall one Shabbat when my parents unearthed a lump of foil which they thought would contain sweet potato kugel, only to find that it was actually meatloaf.

What on earth compels our grandparents to give us more food than we could possibly eat on our own? Many cultures use food as a way to bring families and communities together around one table (though none to the extent that Jews do, perhaps). Judaism is famous for its multitude of holidays and weekly Shabbat meals, nearly all of which are celebrated with a hearty feast. For my family, however, the desire to eat well goes deeper than ritual or community.

My Bubbie, who grew up in England during WWII, learned to eat the cores of apples during harsh food rationing. My grandfather, who suffered a year in Auschwitz, yearned for the day when he could hold a loaf of bread in one hand, a stick of butter in the other, and take a bite out of each. They, like so many others who found refuge in North America, yearned to give their children and their children’s children the comforts and security that they did not always have.

So while we may poke fun at our grandparents’ quests to destroy our diets and fill our freezers, their intentions are borne of love, care and concern for their families; and that, more than any Eastern-European dish, is truly characteristic of our Bubbies and Zaidies.