My parents and food
Food I have less trouble with. My parents taught that vegetables and fruits were the most important foods, along with bread. Eat whole grains, pay attention to the latest nutritional information but don’t switch on a dime. Cut costs by growing your own vegetables. As a result I grew up eating whole grain bread and lots of garden veggies, fresh in season, canned otherwise. My mother made pickles and bottled green beans and beets. She cooked dry beans and made chili. We ate a lot of potatoes, some rice. Mainly bread and veggies. Pasta only occasionally, dry store-bought elbow macaroni.
Not a lot of condiments: very little mayo, not much ketchup. Barbecue sauce wasn’t a thing yet, and Ranch dressing was in a special category with Twinkies: only at friend’s homes and potlucks. My mother gave us peanut butter and honey to eat on her solid wheat bread, as much as we wanted. We ate a lot more peanut butter and honey than we did bread, I thought. The honey was in a Crisco can on the counter, sometimes with the lid left off. One morning we found a mouse drowned in it.
Breakfast at my parents’ home was oatmeal, grapefruit, eggs, toast, milk; whole wheat pancakes with unsweetened applesauce and sugar syrup flavored with maple extract. All the milk we could drink, but we had to drink it. All the sugar we wanted on our oatmeal, but if you took it you had to finish it. Every one of us spent a morning crunching through the soggy sugar in the bottom of the bowl before Dad would let us leave. Only once for me. I learned to mix it in and while I still used a lot of sugar, I ate it all. Sometimes there would be Cream of Wheat instead of oatmeal. When I taught myself how to make it, preparing to move out, I asked my dad, “Do you put in the salt the box calls for?” He responded, “Sure, if you want to waste salt.”
He taught me how to fry eggs in an aluminum frypan with no non-stick coating. It shone with repeated use and wear. He had replaced the handle with a polished wooden section from a broom handle. He seasoned the eggs with salt and garlic powder, and served them with salsa made from his own tomatoes, onions, and peppers. I only got breakfast meats elsewhere: we didn’t eat much sausage because of preservatives, and ham was expensive and salty. Hungry? more eggs; more toast. I don’t remember hashbrowns but we ate boiled potatoes with butter a lot.
The vegetables they grew were: corn, tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, acorn squash, onions, dill, cabbage, broccoli, peas, green beans, rhubarb, zucchini, yellow squash, carrots. We ate the tiny carrots that got thinned out and then canned the fat Dad-thumb-sized ones later. They grew Jerusalem artichokes one year, and sunflowers. My dad grew Brussels sprouts one year; I think he decided you didn’t get much for the amount of effort, and they didn’t taste stellar. My mother was excited the year they grew eggplant. It didn’t take off, and didn’t appear again. My dad grew hot peppers later in life; I was a teen and he was in his 60s.
I remember him poring over the Burpee seed catalog. Fully half of our large yard was devoted to the garden, from the front fence to the garage in back. Acorn squash climbed the fence next to the sidewalk; sunflowers alternated with other things next to the garage. In between were rows and rows of tan dirt covered with manure and rototilled to mix it in. We had to irrigate the rows every few days. The dirt alternated between powdery and rock hard when dry; it made a soupy mud that didn’t hold moisture very long in the Wyoming desert. My dad picked out small rocks while tending the rows. He said the entire driveway was done in rocks he had picked out of the garden.
Food was work. Worth doing, worth producing, but definitely something you worked for. I grew up knowing it was not to waste.
