I don’t know about you but I got surprised and annoyed when cozy things like avocado toast and quinoa and almond milk and DIY kefir started becoming trendy. Around the 00’s they started becoming associated with California, cities like here in San Francisco, my hometown Los Angeles: Articles made fun of $15 avocado toast and called kefir the ultimate Goop trend.
Here’s the thing: These habits have been helping and guiding our ancestors self-care for centuries. They had their own version of “hygge”. I think it was just called trying to survive life.
Our Latinx ancestors were the original health and wellness influencers!
Here are some cozy habits they used to survive, protect themselves, and focus on happiness, that we can all use right now:
Once – Elevensies
South Americans have been eating pan con palta (aguacate) during once forever. Don’t know what once is? It’s the equivalent of “high tea” for the Brits. And it was created by our sorta Latino (?) primos in Portugal. Here’s what NPR has to say:
As we’ve reported, Portugal’s Catherine of Braganza is credited with introducing tea to England after marrying King Charles II in 1662. That got people curious about this new brew, but it wasn’t until the 1800s, when tea prices dropped dramatically and it became affordable for everyone, that the culture of tea really took root.
Afternoon tea — the kind of fancy-schmancy affair where we might spot Lady Mary of Downton Abbey — emerged as a social event sometime around the 1830s or 1840s, Richardson writes in A Social History of Tea. And Anna Maria Russell, duchess of Bedford, led the pack.
For us, it was the original old school miners that brought it to our country, and the routine just stuck around. Nowadays, during once in Chile (and other surrounding countryes), one often has avocado toast, with tea and maybe some goat cheese. In fact, I remember this was my favorite treats after coming home from el colegio in my stinky school uniform.
So, no, Avocado Toast isn’t the creation of Katie’s Zen Room in the Mission or Chad’s Boho Bar in Silverlake. Us Latinos were doing it looong before it signed with a major record label. When we were literally 8.
Kefir
Making your own kefir has a long history with American hippies and hipsters. It’s associated with health food restaurants and your cool hippie parents from Berkeley. Now, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a homesteading influencer making her own yogurt or kefir. Of course, everyone’s ancestors made their own kefir (I am looking at you, descendants of pioneers from Eastern Europe), but our ancestors – our own grandparents – were often elbow deep in it every Sunday. Kefir grains are known to us as pajaritos – which means birds – and were used and passed around in their neighborhood by our grannies in our home countries. If you’re Latina, ask your parents what a pajarito is. It’s very likely that a lovely memory will visit them, and they will smile and tell you a story. Now, we weren’t they originators of kefir – that honor goes to the ancestors of our Russian friends – but they took it seriously. (I am starting to sound like My Big Fat Greek Wedding” dad Michael Constantine. We invented eeeeeverything).
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