On March 10, 2020 I'll be having dinner with my mother, who will be in her mid 70's and my daughter, who will be 9. We are in my hometown of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in the dining room of the house where I grew up. I am cooking and they are sitting at the table talking.
The youngster is asking her grandma questions about what things were like when she was a girl. My mom begins telling some stories, "Your great-grandparent's farm was about 30 minutes drive from here out into the countryside. It was surrounded mostly by other farms, except right across the road was the one room school house I attended when I was a little girl. No, I'm not kidding. My father grew corn and hay mostly as cattle feed. My mother had a sprawling garden that had a much bigger footprint than the farmhouse, which my sisters and I had to weed like crazy all summer. We kept pretty self-sufficient by eating off our land, trading with neighboring farms, and getting through the winters with the help of things preserved from the previous harvest. We bought as little food as possible from town."
As they are talking I am serving dinner. We are having chicken with a vegetable soup, bread, and milk. The chicken came a neighbor, the vegetables were extras from our own garden that we canned, the bread is made by hometown heros
Natural Ovens, and the milk is by a dairy farmer just outside town.
My daughter turns to me and says, "What about you dad? Is that how you ate when you were a boy?"
"Not exactly," I reply, thinking back to the fast-food and mega supermarkets of my youth, most of which have either died out or transitioned to more responsible practices. "Society had a different outlook on things when I was growing up, but we're getting back on track now."
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