What Grandma ate
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Unlike the olden days, when people were forced by economics in the country to be very self-sustaining, I have a host of entities keeping me afloat. Just about the time I think I'm really self sufficient, I have to stop and acknowledge all the people whose work keeps my lifestyle feasible. Did I say all? This is a drop in the bucket!
In the grocery store, I stay away from prepared foods — or so I thought — which makes me feel rather smug. The fresh veggie section is where I hang out. And then the other day I sat down to eat my noontime meal — that's dinner in Kansas, right? — OK, I'm at dinner and I looked at my plate. Everything on it had been prepared by someone else.
Someone had cooked the garbanzo beans. Not only cooked, canned them, too. All I had to know how to do was use the can opener. Someone had grown the potatoes, grown, shelled, frozen, and packaged the peas. Someone had fed the cow, milked, pasteurized, and bottled the milk. The oatmeal I'd had for breakfast had been grown, harvested, washed, hulled, and squashed flat by someone else. The almonds that I snacked on between meals had been grown in California, picked, shelled, packaged, and shipped to Kansas.
Even though I had a garden this year, someone else grew half of the corn I froze. We did can lots of tomatoes but fresh ones in the winter come from near and far. My cranberries come from Maine, my cherries from Chile, my lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower from California and the list of food shipped for my consumption goes on and on including far flung places like Mexico, Brazil, and even Ecuador who shipped bananas for my mom.
All this time I've been feeling rather self-righteous about the food we grow for ourselves. I grow tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, carrots, beets, okra, watermelon, cantaloupe, sweet potatoes, cabbage, kohlrabi, regular potatoes, and peppers in my garden. What a healthy spread! We can peaches and sometimes make applesauce. We make jelly, jam, pickles, and even sauerkraut of our own. And I have chickens who make eggs! Wow!
Even with all this bounty, the pickings would be slim, though, from October to June, if it weren't for all these other places that kick in to fill the gap. I've become so used to these outside sources that I don't even notice — just take it for granted.
Grandma would have thought she was in seventh heaven with all these goodies available — in fact, once she moved to town, she did enjoy the ability to buy almost anything she wanted right there in aisle #7. One of her great luxuries was to buy green grapes. As long as they were available from California, she always had them in her refrigerator in Nebraska and on a hot summer day the only thing more delicious than cold green grapes was her crock of fresh dill pickles stashed in the basement.
When I read, the other day, "You are what your Grandma ate," (remember me telling you this?) I stopped mid-sentence. "Really? What Gramm ate?" My Grandma Ehrhardt had very little at her disposal, so that means I'm rather simply made of corn, potatoes, fried chicken, beef, and bread with a few pickles and some sauerkraut thrown in for interests' sake. From the Schubert side we'll add some pork belly (to my mother's horror).
It's another day in the country and in a few months I'll be receiving an extension to our family — a grandson! He will be what Grandma ate — and that Grandma is me! I had to stop and think back recalling what was available to me when I was making the mother of this little boy that's coming — a very different diet from pork belly and beef. While I didn't know then that my diet would affect the DNA of generations to come, I did know that what I ate, drank, exposed myself to, effected my unborn child. Luckily, Grandma Pat was eating rather carefully, growing vegetables and fruit in her California garden, shopping at the local farmer's market for her organic, vegetarian fare, and living in the country, albeit California-style country. And right about now, I'm thankful that I lived in such a rich time, enjoyed such clean living, without scarcity of nourishment or undo trauma, so that (unbeknownst to me) I'm able to pass on this legacy of a healthy lifestyle to Little Bean, our newest generation gestating in his mommy's tummy.
