Fresh and Local – it was ‘just how things were’

An early relationship with food is something we can all rely on. Certainly memories are selective, and in my case a telling reminder that ‘we are what we remember we ate’…

Fresh and local milk & meat were on the table almost every day – even though fresh vegetables were not really available most of the year in Michigan in the 1950’s. But, in summer we were happily eating a lot of it!

Summer meant fresh food and sometimes it was grown in our backyard or from a garden just outside of town. We had a raspberry patch, a few tomato plants & plenty of rhubarb behind the garage. A black walnut tree by the driveway never failed to give us its strangely green fruit.

My grandparents were farm folk and appreciated fresh eggs. Grandma got them from Aunt Esther whenever she could. Grandpa fished almost daily for pan fish – bluegills, perch, sunfish, bass in Wall Lake where I remember the food being particularly great after a day of swimming & outdoor play. Once we crossed the lake on a boat to Aunt Nonie’s cottage where we picked blackberries & huckleberries too. The roads were full of summer farm stands with corn and squash. It was almost daily that dinners were centered on corn on the cob with plenty of butter and salt. Everything else on the menu from those meals has faded from memory, but the taste of fresh corn lingers in my primal brain.

We loved the blueberries, corn & tomatoes from the farm stands, and ate our way through August and on into September when at some point we noticed that the table was now set with canned beans or peas with a side of iceberg lettuce. Phooey!

I remember long hours helping my mother to can peaches, pears, and tomatoes on  hot August afternoons. I sat on the picnic bench & cut, peeled, lifted skins & pits out so that she could make the wonderful jeweled rows of canned fruit that we relied on during those Michigan winters. One year we made grape juice & the deep purple contrasted beautifully with the golden pears & red spaghetti sauce on the shelf in the root cellar. We drank that juice many a Sunday night with our popcorn as we watched the Ed Sullivan show or Disney. No coke or chips were ever in the house and this was a treat indeed!

Now that I think about it- almost all of our sweets were homemade except for ice cream Sunday drives or penny candy bought on trips to Grandma Bogner’s house. Some special Sundays we made fudge with black walnuts that my sister & I cracked using a hammer on the basement floor. They were ready once the fleshy green hulls had blackened and fallen off while being driven over & pushed into the dirt driveway.

One year mom won a prize at the Diamond’s Hatchery where she bought her eggs & chicken. One hundred baby chicks… They were so cute, and noisy! She enterprisingly traded them to a friendly farmer for the prize of a dozen full grown hens. I remember dropping off the chicks into their heated house lined with straw & fitted with water cans & feed cans. The next thing I remember is a line of chickens hanging upside down from the clothesline dripping blood onto the backyard grass. It was a pretty scary sight, so near to my swing set, and I have conveniently forgotten when or how we ate those birds. They entered the food chain and that was it.  Most of us have forgotten the relationship between our food and its death or sacrifice.  Whether a carrot or a chicken, something ended its life cycle for our health & life.  Better that I should experience this chicken harvest again soon, than to forget about this.

More on my early food memories: The milkman delivered quarts of whole milk in glass bottles into the insulated box on our front porch on an almost daily basis. He mysteriously arrived before I was up even on the coldest of winter nights. In our cold Michigan winters, the milk would often freeze in a relatively short time and push the little cardboard tops up. Some mornings, you would find a small tower of frozen milk protruding from the bottle. That little top hat of cream rising out of the top of the bottle was so fun to see. My dad always claimed that for his coffee, and would drink it black once the cream was gone. My mom was proud of her absolutely clean empties that she would put back in the box. Those bottles were re-used so many times, I wonder how many, and where are they now? The milk was processed in a small plant just a few blocks from home, and there were lines of big steel cans sitting on a metal conveyor for years after it closed down, until  housewives started collecting them to paint on, I guess.

Yes, I see now that we ate local food all the time, but it wasn’t a bragging point – it was just how things were. More memories coming soon!Things like riding in the wheat harvesting wagon & making bread & sauerkraut…