Generational Food Stories: When Your Mom Was the Worst Cook in America and Your Grandfather Took You to French Restaurants Instead.

New foods, new stories, new hosts at our table.

Nancy May of Family Tree Food and Stories welcomes guest co-host Sylvia France, while Sylvia Lovely steps back temporarily to focus full-time on Azor Restaurant and Patio in Lexington, Kentucky.

Her mother put her on a diet at age five. Her dad did all the cooking. And yet Sylvia France grew up to be the kind of woman who cooks salmon in a dishwasher, raises kids who willingly eat yak, and shows up to a friend's house with a pedigreed sourdough starter registered in an international registry. (Yes. That's a real thing. His name is Fred.)

This is what generational food stories actually look like, not the Currier & Ives version. The real one, with #Jell-O salad in a rectangle pan, mystery marshmallows, and the grandfather who said "order anything you want" at a French restaurant in Sarasota when you were eight years old and it changed her food life forever.

Our Table Gets a New Voice

Nancy May introduces Sylvia France, native Floridian, #self-taught cook, food history researcher, and new co-host of Family Tree Food & Stories. Sylvia's family food memories didn't come from a recipe box. They came from survival, from a grandfather with suspenders AND a belt (you've got to just smile at that one), from a trip to India where she politely moved food around a plate rather than offend a host, and from a Thanksgiving tradition she loved more, the night before, stealing uncooked #Pepperidge Farm stuffing straight from the bowl.

Meanwhile, Nancy shares her own table: a father who made her walk with books on her head and ordered the cheapest thing on every menu, a St. Lucia trip that included donkey trails, squealing pigs, and being invited into a stranger's home for a meal that she still thinks about decades later.

Two women hosts and at different tables. One show.

What Food Actually Is:

Sylvia puts it plainly: food is the one human experience that uses all five senses at once. It's how she showed love to her three kids, including enforcing the "one bite or you get a plain peanut butter sandwich" rule that turned them into adults who seek out Vietnamese, Indian curry, and golden curry for birthday dinners.

Food is how connections are built across cultures, across class, across a table you've never sat at before. And it's why, when you share a sourdough starter with a friend (as she did with Nancy) and Nancy has named her two sourdough offspring Sophia, and the evil twin, Sylvia says, "you feel like you've given them something that matters." Nancy agrees.

Fred the sourdough starter has been alive for years. So has the idea that food is how we find each other.

What You'll Hear and Learn:

• Sylvia's mother, the worst cook in America, and the sweet potato marshmallow dish three-year-old Sylvia named "puppy dog noses," and why that name stuck forever
• The grandfather who took his grandkids to high-end French restaurants in Sarasota with zero parents allowed and said "order anything you want"
• The dishwasher salmon