My teta soaked her lentils overnight. Every single time.
I’d stand on tiptoes in her kitchen in Western Sydney, watching her tip dried red lentils into a bowl of water before bed, covering them with a tea towel that smelled like thyme and onions. I thought it was just the way things were done — her mother’s way, and her mother’s mother’s way before that. One of those kitchen rituals that belonged to the women who came before you, handed down with the recipe but never the reason.
It took me decades — and a paper on anti-nutritional factors in legumes — to understand what she’d been doing all along. She was reducing phytic acid, a compound that binds to iron, zinc, and calcium, making them harder for the body to absorb. She was unlocking nutrients.
She just didn’t call it that. She called it cooking properly.
And here’s the thing that keeps me up at night, in the best way: she wasn’t the only grandmother who knew.
Something Changed on the Way to the Supermarket
There’s a question I keep coming back to, and I think it’s one worth sitting with over a cup of tea: if we have more food available than at any point in human history — more variety, more convenience, more year-round access to things our grandparents only ate in season — why does so much of it feel like it’s missing something?
It’s tempting to write off “food was better back then” as nostalgia talking. But a growing body of research suggests the instinct may be, at least partly, on to something real.
In 2004, researcher Donald Davis and colleagues at the University of Texas published a landmark study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They compared USDA nutritional data for 43 garden crops between 1950 and 1999 — nearly half a century of modern agriculture. What they found was striking: statistically reliable declines in six key nutrients, including protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C. Some vegetables showed up to 38% decreases in riboflavin.
The crops were bigger. They grew faster. They yielded more. But the nutritional density — the amount of good stuff packed into each bite — had measurably dropped.
Davis’s explanation was what he called the “dilution effect.” Modern agricultural breeding has prioritised yield, size, pest resistance, and appearance. These are reasonable goals — feeding more people matters enormously. But the trade-off, research suggests, is that plants growing faster and larger don’t always keep pace in mineral and vitamin uptake from the soil.
This doesn’t mean modern produce is nutritionally empty — it isn’t. A head of broccoli in 2024 still has plenty to offer your body. But when your grandmother ate a tomato from her garden in 1965, it may well have delivered more of certain nutrients per bite than the one you picked up at Woolies last Tuesday. The science supports that quiet hunch many of us carry.
The Grandmother Method: Slow, Soaked, and Fermented
What fascinates me even more than what happened to the raw ingredients is what happened to how we prepare them.
Traditional food preparation — the kind practised across cultures for centuries, sometimes millennia — turns out to involve remarkably sophisticated food science. The women (and it was mostly women) who developed these techniques didn’t have laboratories or peer-reviewed journals. They had observation, repetition, and the accumulated knowledge of generations who noticed that this way made people healthier, even if they couldn’t name the mechanism. They had their hands in the food, and they paid attention.
Soaking and Sprouting
A 2015 review in the Journal of Food Science and Technology examined traditional methods for reducing phytic acid in grains and legumes — soaking, fermentation, germination, and enzymatic treatment. The findings confirmed what traditional cooks across the world seem to have independently discovered: these processes significantly reduce phytic acid content and increase the bioavailability of iron, zinc, and calcium.
In South Asia, lentils and chickpeas are soaked overnight before cooking. In parts of Africa, millet and sorghum are traditionally fermented into porridge. In Latin America, beans are soaked, sometimes for days. In my teta’s kitchen, it was a bowl of lentils by the sink every night like clockwork. These aren’t the same cuisine, the same culture, or the same continent — but the underlying principle is identical.
Research suggests these traditional preparations can reduce phytic acid by 30–70%, depending on the method and duration. My grandmother’s overnight bowl of lentils wasn’t a quaint habit. It was effective food science, passed down through generations of women who noticed that this way felt better in the body. They were right. The data now says so.
Slow Cooking and the Whole Animal
There’s a reason every traditional food culture has a version of long-simmered broth — and I find it beautiful that they all arrived there independently.
In Lebanon, it’s the base of countless soups and stews; I can still smell my mother’s kitchen when a pot was on. In China, bone broth has been a foundation of cooking for thousands of years. In France, it’s fond — the liquid gold of classical cuisine. In West Africa, slow-simmered meat and bone stews are staple family meals. In Japan, dashi made from fish bones and kelp serves a similar role.
The slow extraction process draws out collagen, glycine, and other amino acids from connective tissue and bone. Research into the nutritional profile of these slow-cooked preparations is still emerging, but studies have found that the extended cooking process does extract meaningful amounts of protein, minerals, and gelatin from bones and cartilage.
This connects to something broader, something I think about a lot: traditional cooking tended to use the whole animal. Nose-to-tail eating — liver, kidneys, marrow, skin, cartilage — wasn’t a trendy restaurant concept dreamed up by a chef in a Surry Hills kitchen. It was how food worked when nothing was wasted, when respecting the animal meant using all of it. Organ meats are among the most nutrient-dense foods available: liver, for example, is exceptionally rich in vitamin A, B12, folate, and iron. Research consistently shows that organ meats deliver micronutrients at concentrations that muscle meat simply cannot match.
The modern shift toward eating only the lean, boneless, skinless parts of an animal represents a significant nutritional narrowing — one that traditional food systems, by necessity and by wisdom, avoided.
Nixtamalization: A 3,500-Year-Old Chemistry Lesson
Perhaps the most striking example of traditional food science — and the one that gives me genuine goosebumps — comes from Mesoamerica. For at least 3,500 years, Indigenous peoples of Central and South America have prepared corn through a process called nixtamalization — cooking dried kernels in an alkaline solution of water and lime (or wood ash).
This process does something remarkable: it releases bound niacin (vitamin B3) from the corn, making it bioavailable to the human body. Without this treatment, niacin remains chemically locked up and largely inaccessible.
When Europeans adopted corn as a crop but not the nixtamalization process, the consequences were devastating. Pellagra — a disease caused by niacin deficiency — became epidemic in parts of Europe and the American South from the 18th to early 20th centuries. The knowledge of how to prepare corn properly existed. It just wasn’t transferred along with the grain itself.
The people who developed nixtamalization didn’t know about niacin. But they knew that corn prepared this way kept people well, and corn prepared without it did not. Thousands of years of accumulated observation produced a solution that Western nutrition science wouldn’t fully understand until the 20th century.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s data — gathered in kitchens, not labs, but data all the same.
Fermented Foods: Ancient Practice, Modern Microbiome Science
If there’s one place where the distance between what traditional kitchens knew and what laboratories are now confirming has collapsed most dramatically, it’s fermentation. And honestly, it’s the part of this story that makes me proudest of the women who fed us.
Every major food culture on Earth has its fermented foods. Yoghurt and labneh across the Middle East — my teta’s labneh, rolled into balls and stored in olive oil, was non-negotiable at breakfast. Kimchi in Korea. Sauerkraut in Germany and Eastern Europe. Miso and natto in Japan. Injera — the spongy sourdough flatbread — in Ethiopia. Kefir from the Caucasus. Dosa batter, fermented for hours, in South India. These aren’t coincidences. They’re convergent discoveries — different cultures independently finding that letting microorganisms transform food made it more digestible, more flavourful, and, as research is now suggesting, potentially more beneficial.
A major 2021 study from Stanford University, published in Cell, tracked 36 healthy adults over a 10-week dietary intervention. One group ate a high-fibre diet; the other ate a diet high in fermented foods — things like yoghurt, kefir, fermented vegetables, and kombucha. The fermented food group showed a significant increase in gut microbiome diversity and a measurable decrease in inflammatory markers, including interleukin-6.
This is notable because reduced microbial diversity in the gut has been linked in research to a range of modern health conditions — from metabolic disease to autoimmune disorders. And studies comparing the gut microbiomes of people eating traditional diets with those eating modern Western diets consistently find a stark difference. A 2014 study in Nature Communications examining the gut microbiome of the Hadza — one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer populations in Tanzania — found significantly higher levels of microbial richness and biodiversity compared to urban Italian controls.
A 2017 review in Current Opinion in Biotechnology summarised the broader evidence: fermentation can enhance or alter the nutritive and health-modulating properties of food constituents. The microbial metabolites produced during fermentation — including short-chain fatty acids, B vitamins, and bioactive peptides — appear to have effects that go beyond the nutritional profile of the unfermented food.
In other words: when your grandmother made her own yoghurt, or kept a jar of pickled vegetables in the back of the fridge, or let her bread dough rise slowly overnight with a sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast, she wasn’t just preserving food. She was cultivating microorganisms that research now suggests may support the ecosystem living in the human gut.
She was doing microbiology. She just called it making breakfast.
What Modern Convenience Traded Away
I want to be careful here, because I’m not interested in guilt — not about what we eat, not about how we feed our families. None of this is an argument against modern food systems. Industrial agriculture feeds billions of people. Refrigeration, pasteurisation, and food safety standards have saved countless lives. The convenience of being able to feed a family in 20 minutes on a weeknight is not trivial — it’s a genuine advancement, especially for households where every adult works and time is the scarcest resource. I’m a mother of three. I know what 5:30pm looks like.
But it may be worth being honest about what the trade-offs have been.
Ultra-processed foods — the pre-packaged, shelf-stable, ready-to-heat products that now make up a significant portion of dietary intake in many countries — are engineered for speed, consistency, and shelf life. What they are not typically engineered for is microbial diversity, nutrient bioavailability, or the kind of slow transformation that happens in a pot of stock simmering for eight hours or a jar of vegetables lacto-fermenting on the counter.
The speed itself is part of the picture. Traditional preparation methods are slow by definition. Soaking takes hours. Fermentation takes days. Bone broth takes the better part of an afternoon. These processes aren’t inefficient — they’re doing biochemical work that faster methods skip over. There’s a kind of patience built into them, and I think the food knows the difference.
Research suggests that ultra-processing often strips fibre, reduces micronutrient density, and introduces emulsifiers and additives that some studies have linked to changes in gut permeability. This is a rapidly evolving area of research, and it would be premature to draw sweeping conclusions. But the direction of the evidence is consistent enough to be worth paying attention to.
Tradition Isn’t Nostalgia — It’s Data
There’s a temptation when writing about traditional food to slip into sentimentality. To romanticise the past, to suggest that everything was better before, to cast modern life as the villain of the story.
That’s not what I’m doing here. The real story is more interesting than that — and more generous.
What’s emerging from the research — across nutrition science, microbiology, agricultural studies, and food anthropology — is that traditional food preparation methods often represent a form of empirical knowledge. Not mystical. Not superstitious. Empirical. Accumulated through centuries of observation: this preparation keeps people well. This one doesn’t. Keep the one that works.
The Mesoamerican grandmother who nixtamalised her corn was running a nutritional intervention. The Korean grandmother packing her kimchi into earthenware jars was cultivating probiotics. The Lebanese grandmother soaking her lentils and slow-cooking her lamb with bone was maximising mineral bioavailability and extracting amino acids from connective tissue. The Ethiopian mother fermenting her teff flour into injera was reducing anti-nutrients and producing beneficial organic acids.
They didn’t use those words. They didn’t need to. The food spoke for itself, and the children grew strong.
Science isn’t correcting these traditions. It’s catching up to them — providing the vocabulary and the mechanisms for wisdom that was already, quietly, working.
Coming Home to the Kitchen Table
I still soak my lentils overnight.
Not just because my teta told me to — though she did, with a look that made it clear this wasn’t optional. I do it because I now understand why she told me to, and the answer makes me respect her more, not less. It makes me respect all of them more — every grandmother, in every kitchen, on every continent, who knew something true about food before anyone handed her a study to prove it.
The research doesn’t say we need to abandon modern food systems or live like it’s 1950. It says something more useful, and I think more beautiful: that the traditions carried in the hands of grandmothers around the world — the slow cooking, the soaking, the fermenting, the refusal to throw away the bones — encoded nutritional intelligence that we’re only now beginning to measure.
The kitchen table is where that knowledge lived. Where it was passed from one woman to the next, in the language of do it this way, habibti, without ever needing to explain the science underneath.
Maybe it’s worth pulling up a chair again. The lentils are soaking. The broth is on. And your grandmother — whichever kitchen she cooked in, whichever language she spoke — was right all along.
Sources Cited:
- Davis DR, Epp MD, Riordan HD. (2004). Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 23(6), 669-682.
- Gupta RK, Gangoliya SS, Singh NK. (2015). Reduction of phytic acid and enhancement of bioavailable micronutrients in food grains. Journal of Food Science and Technology, 52(2), 676-684.
- Wastyk HC, Fragiadakis GK, Perelman D, et al. (2021). Gut-microbiota-targeted diets modulate human immune status. Cell, 184(16), 4137-4153.
- Schnorr SL, Candela M, Rampelli S, et al. (2014). Gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers. Nature Communications, 5, 3654.
- Marco ML, Heeney D, Binda S, et al. (2017). Health benefits of fermented foods: microbiota and beyond. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 44, 94-102.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice. Consult a qualified health professional before making changes to your diet, exercise routine, or supplement regimen.
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