That is an interesting viewpoint, given my own experiences, now that I am 60. When growing up through the 1960s and 1970s, on a Saskatchewan farm, my experience regarding the food on our daily table was decidedly different from the current millennium. The summer and fall period on the farm is remembered partly by the effort to preserve the food grown in a huge garden. Even as a fairly young boy shelling peas, that meant carrying huge cabbages from the garden. A few years older, I graduated to cutting beans to be frozen.
Who could forget the smells of pickling, and we pickled everything, beets, carrots, onions, beans, cauliflower, and of course, cucumbers. There are memories watching dad chop the head off chickens with an axe, and the combination of giggles and fear as their bodies flopped around after. Then carrying the chickens to mom – who did not work off-farm -- to pluck, gut and prepare for the freezer. The smell of scalded feathers – to help in the plucking – while not nice, is also keenly recalled. Supper that night would be the first of the chickens, the rest consumed through winter. Then there was butchering a pig, usually around the time of the first snow.
It was a time when you were closely connected to where food came from, and 95 percent of meals were cooked by family, and the food was from the deep freeze, garden, or cellar. Canned food from the grocery store was a thing for camping, not for regular meals. Take-out food, given we were on a farm 16-miles from town, was simply not a thing. Restaurant food was a rare luxury, maybe lunch on the day sales were held at the auction market.
Fast forward to the present day, and gardens are rare, and generally for a few summer meals, not winter preserves. Even farms tend not to have livestock to put in the deep freeze. We have relied on the grocery store. We have fast-food delivery on speed dial. There is no time to cook with both parents typically working out of the home. The pandemic has at least meant more time to cook for many.
There has been an increase in food to prepare in the kitchen, not from a factory sealed microwaveable bag. There is more interest in maybe having a garden, in connecting with a farmer for direct access to food, to better control what we eat. That is generally a good thing, but will it last?
In the short term, maybe, but we are creatures of habit, and as COVID-19 eventually passes, we are likely to return to relying on the store almost exclusively, whether that is a good thing is up to everyone to determine.
- Calvin Daniels
Comment on this article at lmtimes.ca/calvin
Disclaimer: opinions expressed are those of the writer.
