Linda Greenwall spills the beans on the story behind her new cookbook, Food Memories, and how it is tackling the oral health crisis.
My name is Linda Greenwall, I’m a dentist and founder of the Dental Wellness Trust and past editor-in-chief of the FMC journal Aesthetic Dentistry Today. I’m also an owner of a multi-specialist practice in Hampstead with seven dentists.
I’ve recently published my sixth book, Food Memories. But while my other books are about things like tooth whitening, aesthetic dentistry, practice management, molar incisor hypomineralisation, white spot removal and resin infiltration, this is a cookbook made with love.
It’s the story of being in lockdown when all the dental practices were shut and we were at home for three months. The weather in the UK was awesome at the time, and I was in lockdown with my four children and my daughter in law.
There were seven of us, so I was making 21 meals a day for my family. I have four boys and they all have different diets and requirements, so I was making a lot of different meals to cater to all of them.
Inspiring stories
I started collating all the family recipes and reminiscing about the times when we could be with our family because we were locked down. I’ve also recently become a grandmother, and I remember cooking with my own grandmother and the cooking advice she gave me.
I never learnt any cooking advice from a mother because she always told me to get out of the kitchen and go and study. So, I was always studying for many, many years, but eventually one does need to be in the kitchen!
One day I was cooking and in my very old, tatty recipe collation book, I found my grandmother had quickly scribbled a recipe on the back of an envelope. I thought that they were all so amazing, the way they are written out quickly, and so I decided to collate them all together.
I was trawling through our family archives, photos and stories for this cookbook. And what I find really interesting is it contains isolated stories of everyday heroes that do inspiring, amazing work. Our precious grandparents aren’t with us long enough to share all of their amazing wisdom, so that’s why I collated the book.
Taking time to reflect
This book is really the story of my life. We don’t often get time to reflect on our lives because we’re always moving forward.
My family originally come from Lithuania, but they then went to South Africa, and now we’ve been in the UK for 30 years. On every journey that you make, you take the food with you wherever you go. When you cook that food, the taste reminds you of the times that you were with your family or with your grandparents. That is the purpose of the book.
As a dentist, I also have to be mindful of sugar. We must practice what we preach! In the olden days, sugar was a complete luxury and everybody used to put it in everything – as the recipes showed. But, realistically, we can’t do that.
Therefore, when putting together the recipes for the book, we would cut out the sugar until it still had the same taste and my kids didn’t complain.
Making a difference
The main purpose of creating this book was to raise funds for the Dental Wellness Trust, the charity that I set up 12 years ago.
Currently, we are looking after 58,000 children in three different countries. Here in the UK, we go into schools and do screenings and implement our toothbrushing programme.
We also work in Kenya with 8,000 children doing the same tooth brushing programme, and with 21,000 children in South Africa. In Cape Town, we also run 12 soup kitchens daily where we feed the children in the community.
We’re always looking volunteers, so if you’re interested in getting involved, please come and volunteer with us. We need dentists, dental hygienist, dental nurses, and dental therapists to all roll up their sleeves and come and help us.
We’re also building a mobile dental truck in Camden which will go into schools, but again we need volunteers to help us, so please be inspired to volunteer.
At our last outreach at a primary school in Luton, hundreds of children were seen for oral health checks and fluoride varnishing. It was an amazing experience – you could feel the energy in the room. It was such a fun experience and everybody really enjoyed it. The kids enjoyed it too!
This is something that you can do to make a difference. But we always need volunteers, and we always need funds. Therefore, all of the profits from this book will go straight to the Dental Wellness Trust. That’s the real reason I wrote it.
