Food Musings

Photo midiman

What a powerful thing, food. We have to eat, and it is so easy to eat badly.

 For some reason our society started thinking that food was supposed to be fast and furious, indulgent, and that we were much too busy to prepare or have anything to do with food, other than packing it inot our mouths.

I think when I was younger, I don’t remember being hungry really, just that food was precious? I would feel so guilty that I couldn’t stand the taste of something, no matter what it was. My biggest dislike was of beets. To this day, I can not even smell them without gagging. It all stems from a horrible memory I have of my brother overeating them, but that’s all I am going to say. Beets = ewww

So as I grew older and started having children, the instability of my young adulthood became very noticeable. I remember when I had $11.00 a week to feed pregnant self and my toddler. Yep, 11 bucks. Those were pretty tight times, but we ate whole foods because I knew how to scratch cook. I am beholdin to all the women of days past, who wrote their meticulous notes on the edges of the old, musty cookbooks at the library. Have you ever seen those? Their pages look like they are falling out, they recipes always include using organ meats nad weird pans and utensils that modern day cooks don’t even know how to pronounce.

 These women cooked on the prarie, on wagon trains and in small sod houses, after starting their own fires before anyone in the family was even awake. Their talents are vastly under appreciated in this modern age of hurry up and rip that box open-style of cooking we all know. Nowadays, we think we are entitled to having someone else cook for us, entitled to eating a dizzying array of foods from around the world at any time of the year, and somehow that sitting down to family food is an unworthy cause-not worth our time or effort.

I don’t get that. At our farm, dinner is the only time we actually all sit together with my husband. He is always busy working on some project or another. Yes he sees the boys, but they are not talking or connecting, they are building or fixing or cleaning up.

Dinner is our time together, then we sit, sigh and catch up. Dinner feeds our stomachs and our souls. We connect. Our time at the table is just as important as a good night’s sleep, our seatbelts, a hug or a good laugh. It is our fuel. Be sure to fuel up your family at least once a day.