Nowadays, whenever a group of people is discussing food and recipes, someone is bound to ask the Big Food Question: “Is it healthy?” But when I was growing up, the Big Food Question was “Will there be enough for everyone?” My parents didn’t worry about whether food was organic, vegan, paleo, LCHF, South Beach, or North Pole. They were just grateful to be able to put food on the table for four growing children. Besides, most of those diets hadn’t been invented yet. (Have you heard of the North Pole diet? It’s really new: I just made it up.)
Oddly enough, much of what we ate would probably be considered “healthy” by most people today. To save money on groceries, we always had a huge garden. We children helped plant, weed, harvest and preserve the vegetables. Eventually we had our own orchard, but prior to that we drove to an orchard to pick peaches, pears, and apples. Were they organic? Probably not. There was a large cherry tree on our property already, so we didn’t have to buy cherries elsewhere, as I recall.
Daddy always raised sheep and goats. I don’t recall drinking goat milk; perhaps he sold it. The milk man delivered several quarts of homogenized, pasteurized cow milk to a box at our door every week. (Depending on who you talk to, that is or is not “healthy.”) We ate lots of old mutton. I have unpleasant memories of chewing endlessly on pieces of stew meat that would not get smaller or become something I could swallow. To this day, I can’t bear the odor of lamb or mutton cooking, and I can only eat it if it has been well-disguised in a recipe with lots of other ingredients.
We usually raised chickens, so our eggs came straight from the coop, as did the chickens we ate. Mama cooked with pork and beef, too, but it must have come from the grocery store. That’s a detail I don’t remember.
Mama did pay attention to the official food guidelines, so we dutifully used margarine and Crisco shortening, because they were said to be better for us than butter and lard. Nobody worried about white sugar or white flour back then, and Mama baked wonderful bread, cinnamon rolls, cookies, and cakes.
So my childhood diet was a mixture of good and bad, according to today’s standards. But back then, it was considered good, because we were not starving.