Parents’ nutrition
My diet has always been informed by nutrition. I’m not a saint, by any means, not vegetarian, not vegan, and I eat sugar a bit every day. But my mother stressed learning nutrition. She had taken home economics in school, when that was the only science offered to college women in Wyoming. She started with sausage, butter, spring greens, garden vegetables, bread, and beef that were available to her as a young woman. Her family and her husband’s family were both producers of food; she said she was grateful that I did not know the intense longing for green food in late winter. Refrigeration and margarine were innovations during her lifetime. I don’t mean to say they didn’t exist before her; I mean that where she lived in northern Wyoming, there was no electricity until she was nearly an adult, and shipping in margarine was expensive even then.
When she and her husband were no longer on a farm that produced butter, and there were refrigerators in grocery stores, she bought margarine. For years we had a round-topped refrigerator with no separate freezer compartment. Instead it had a metal frame making a rectangular space right by the freezer element, at the top of the fridge. That was the only place to keep something frozen; the cold flowed down from there to cool everything else. My parents bought a chest freezer and put it in the garage, across the back yard from the house. In my early years the garage was kept locked, I assumed to keep the ice cream from being eaten by children, since the only time I was allowed out there was to get the ice cream for dessert.
Eventually the round-topped refrigerator died and was replaced by progressively more rectangular models. By the time I left home the refrigerator had a broad flat top where the wooden case for my mother’s wedding silverware stayed. It also had a freezer section, small but separate from the refrigerator section. My parents didn’t buy frozen food when I was little. They canned everything that could be canned, in glass jars. My mother dried food in a large dehydrator my father built out of wood and window screen materials. It was heated by incandescent bulbs.
The chest freezer mostly held meat, chunks of venison and beef, pieces of raw chicken, and one or two containers of ice cream. My parents didn’t eat pork much. Most of the farms thereabouts grew beef cows, not as many pigs. My mother read that the preservatives used in ham, along with copious amounts of salt, were not good for you. So she served beef roasts, sliced a quarter inch thick. You got one slice per meal, and if you were still hungry, why, there were lots of potatoes and canned vegetables, with canned fruit to follow.
My mother made her own bread, whole wheat because that was more healthy. She struggled for years to make it taste better and hold together. She added honey, dough conditioners, lecithin; nothing kept it from being crumbly and a little like sawdust. Her efforts to make whole wheat cookies met with much more success. Sugar and eggs added a lot, along with raisins. Occasionally she included chocolate chips; not often, because they were high in sugar and expensive to buy. More often she added cocoa powder to them, which was good but still dry.
At holiday meals we children were instructed to put on a plate of sliced bread, neatly cut down the middle into two piles of rectangles. I didn’t see a point in this, until sometime in my youth I noticed Grandma Ida LaFollette’s meals always included a plate of her white bread, sliced and cut the same way. I suppose it was a tradition my father kept. My grandmother probably set the bread out to sop up gravy and broth and to fill her several children’s bellies. Her family spent years barely keeping everyone fed and clothed. The fact that it was white bread caused some dissonance in my young brain. Of course, it was white bread when I saw it; in my father’s youth it was probably whole wheat and not enough of it. White flour had to be processed somewhere else and then shipped back to Wyoming; it was expensive and therefore a sign that they had succeeded.
My mother let us serve ourselves within reason, but insisted we MUST eat everything we took. If that meant sitting there until we ate all the sugar that had settled to the bottom of our oatmeal, so be it. My father, on the other hand, would growl, “Be grateful you have something to eat!” When he said that, I obediently ate whatever it was.
