Tuesday, March 11, 2014

What's Happened to our food?

     I'm reading Michael Moss's Salt Sugar and Fat. This is a Pulizter prize winning book and I and see why it won the prize.

    Last night I read the chapter on convenience foods. Moss covers the history of convenience foods and how the big companies used it to sell more food. After the war more women began working out of the home. They needed some help in preparing meals. The food companies were all too ready to oblige. Television was established and for the family to watch an evening of television, food preparation had to be more convenient.

   This got me thinking about food when I was a kid. I was raised on a small farm. I was born just before the war started. At that time most of our food was produced on the farm. Very few things were bought from a store. Mom bought, flour, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, yeast, baking powder, rolled oats and probably a few more items at odd times. All of our food was prepared on the farm. Mom canned hundreds of quarts of food...beans,corn,carrots, peas, fruit, chicken, beef and probably many more. One more that's special would be sauerkraut. Several large crocks of sauerkraut were made and lasted all winter. Mom baked bread, pies, cakes and cookies. We made our own butter and I can remember crying about having to turn the churn. Then I would fight with my brother as we both wanted to be turning the churn when the butter formed. Mom and Dad grew a large garden which more than supplied them with enough food. Potatoes, turnips, beets and onions wee stored in cold storage. 

    So in one way you can see why women looked for convenience foods. This was a tremendous amount of work for my Mom. We also had much better food than the convenient foods that are full of sugar, fat ,salt and a multitude of strange chemicals.

   I know that when I look back nostalgia sets in. Was the food really that good. I think we would be much better off with food that had a lot less fat, sugar , salt and weird chemicals..