How Did They Do It?

Hard, hard work.

Christine and Bethany are both talking about how wacked things are in the US where 2 people can work full time jobs and make an industry average salary and STILL not be able to afford to eat healthy, or sometimes to eat at all if they have kids, and at no time will they have as much food buying power as someone on government assistance. Which of course they make too much money to qualify for.

I was thinking about this during my morning commute and I got to thinking about how Granny, and the other women who got through the depression with large families, managed to feed people in the days before twenty-five cent a box instant Mac & Cheese.

And the answer is hard work. Hours and hours of it.

Every single one of the women of that generation and before in my mother's family had chickens, pigs, and vegetable gardens to supplement the food that they could buy at the store. Every single one of the men hunted. By the time I came along it was no longer a question of survival so they didn't hunt squirrel and coon anymore but I heard the stories of how fried squirrel was the only meat on the table sometimes back in the thirties and forties.

A lot of money couldn't be spared for the garden. Forget tilling the soil with a gas powered tiller, if you were one of these women you would be out there at dawn before it gets too hot with a hoe and some thick gloves to keep the blisters at bay. You wouldn't have used commercially available chemical fertilizers and pesticides either. You would use manure from your own stock or acquired from a neighbor and you would hand pick the worms and such off the plants and douse them with one home remedy or another.

You'd probably also know places where you could get wild plants like poke weed and swamp cabbage that you could gather for free but that was just a little seasonal treat, not a staple.

In return you got enough produce to fill the pantry with mason jars that would provide vegetables for most of the Winter and it was all organic to boot. Also, backaches, varicose veins, and occasionally heat exhaustion.

The hunting wasn't sport hunting with expensive rifles and 4 wheelers. They walked through the woods with their Daddy's old hunting gun.

The meat could be preserved by smoking. Not in a pretty little steel smoker with a temperature gage and a bag of special seasoned wood chips. In a wooden shed that you probably built yourself from scrap lumber.

I was present when a pig was slaughtered once. It took 4 adults the better part of the day to bleed it, scald it, skin it, butcher it and put the meat away in the freezer.

Every single step, from raising the food, preparing it for storage, to cooking with it from scratch took work. Often long hours of hot, sweaty, backbreaking work.

Even those with the will to do that these days may not have the time. In fact I believe that the vast majority of modern families with "food insecurity" don't have this as an option anymore simply due to not having the hours in the day. With nuclear instead of extended families, both adults working 8 hours minimum a day, and average commutes to work being nearly an hour each way, if you are out in your garden when the sun comes up at 6 then you need to turn around and get right back inside and finish getting ready for work before you are late and get fired.

Then there is the matter of not being allowed to do it even if you somehow had the time. Zoning laws are such that keeping so much as a single chicken in your backyard may earn you fine in a lot of areas. Assuming you have a backyard. If you do you can probably get away with a garden, as long as they don't regulate the sorts of plants you can "landscape" with in your sub-division. Tom and Barbara Good wouldn't make it a week against the neighborhood resident's association in 2006 suburban America.

Apartment dwellers can take advantage of community gardens in a very few lucky places but space is limited per person, certainly not enough to plant enough to meet most of your families needs.

I don't really see a solution to this either.

Even 80 years ago cheap won out over healthy most of the time. Get a book on old time southern cooking and if it's authentic and not some foodies modern reconstruction then you can get hardening of the arteries just by reading it.

Tomato gravy (canned tomatoes - your own or store bought - with a good size spoonful of drippings or shortening and maybe some garlic salt) over rice or biscuits is the healthiest cheap food I know. At least you get vitamin C with your high cholesterol.

Granny Sadie's potatoes and onions would put a health nut into spastic shock. Just cut potatoes into round slices and pan fry with slices of onion in a big skillet with some bacon grease like you were making hash browns and serve with the bacon you used to get the grease from. You can feed a crowd for very little with them though.

Damn, I'm going to have to make some now that I've thought about it.

Anyway, no real point that hasn't already been made, mostly just admiration for the women who manage somehow or another, then and now, to put food on the table for their kids and resentment of a society that makes it so difficult for them to do so while giving them food that is healthy, not just filling.