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“Food is the medicine, everything you need, you can get from what you eat,” says Yiayia Niki as she passes me a beetroot, carrot, and apple juice, nodding to my expanding, pregnant midriff. Deep into the mountains, up winding passes and a rough, rugged terrain between which olive trees and drooping eucalyptus burst forth, 84-year-old Niki is the only inhabitant of her village in Greece’s rugged Mani Peninsula. She lives in a stone house, with centuries-old embroidery framed and hanging on the walls, along with traditional wooden instruments, customary religious icons, and sepia photographs faded even more by the sun. Outside, her pony Marco dips his shaggy chestnut mane into a basket of apples—and I count my blessings, once again, for this extraordinary odyssey that I’ve embarked upon.
I’m here on a mission for my cookbook: Yiayia: Time-perfected Recipes from Greece’s Grandmothers. And I want to learn about more than just regional dishes. Diet, of course has a lot to do with the longevity of the women living here, in and near one of the world’s five official blue zones—the regions where the average life expectancy is the longest on earth. While traveling across Greece, I’m also coming to understand that the traditional Greek way of life might have a lot to do with the the thriving grandmothers of this nation.
Niki, for one, is a healer: She says she’s never been to a doctor in her life—and her supple, wrinkle-free skin is proof of the power of raw vegetables and fruit that she swears by. Together we make the flavor-rich dish of bakaliaros plaki—cod baked with potatoes, tomatoes, currants, spices, and plenty of fresh herbs. As we eat it in the dappled shade of her balcony, overlooking the inky blue water in the distance, Niki emphasizes the importance of always including fresh herbs and eating as many raw ingredients within one meal as possible. She’s still completely autonomous, nimble as a cat, and a testament to the wholesome, organic diet she swears by.
It’s been six years since I started the @MatriarchEats Instagram account, through which I embarked upon a project to cook with grandmothers from all over the world—but I am still learning lessons in longevity from women like Niki. The inspiration behind the project was my own Yiayia (the Greek word for grandmother) who still grows her own vegetables, makes her own olive oil and wine, and cooks over an open flame. She enjoys a diet of seasonal, organic vegetables, and rarely eats meat; and she treats colds with garlic and stomach aches with herbal tinctures she brews herself. Her biceps still put my own to shame, and she has the sturdy and strong calves of an ox. Yiayia might be 87, but she would completely destroy me in an arm wrestling contest.
“How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut […] the sound of the sea. Nothing else,” writes Nikos Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek. It is very much in the bones of the women that I cook with to enjoy life’s small pleasures. Like my own grandmother, they were raised in a poor nation and on little except what they could grow from the land themselves. This has influenced not only what they eat, but their entire life philosophy.
“People come here and ask what the secret is to our eternal youth, but there isn’t one answer we can give,” says 80-year-old Yiayia Marietta. “Maybe it’s good genes, maybe it’s our lifestyle. I’m not a doctor but I can say that life here is different.”
