“It is so hot,” Ma said. “I believe I will have cottage cheese balls with onions in them, and the cold creamed peas. Suppose you bring some lettuce and tomatoes from the garden, Laura.”
~Little Town on the Prairie, “Mary Goes to College”
I had a long talk today with a kindred spirit. Since childhood she’s been sensitive to chemicals, including—and especially—preservatives. She grew up in the 70s like me, the Golden Age of Preservatives, but it wasn’t until 10 years ago that she finally figured out what was causing all her allergic reactions.
She and I got into a spirited conversation about food. She’s new in town, and I first met her last summer as we both pored over the offerings from our town’s “farmer’s market” (read: one guy selling his produce on the street). She’s a stickler about the kind of food she serves at home. She has to be; her health depends on it. She has to watch not only what she eats, but what makeup, shampoo, and lotion she uses, sometimes driving several hours or placing many online orders to make sure she has exactly what she needs.
I listened with a mixture of admiration and envy. Admiration because what she does is by no means easy; envy because I’d like to do that too. But it’s expensive. And time-consuming. And inconvenient. Sometimes you just want to open a box of something and call it a day. (And that’s why they’re called “convenience” foods.) But my goal, particularly for my kids, is always to at least try to shorten the process of “real food” to consumption. The more steps it takes to get the food into the form I eat it, the less likely I am to want it. And chances are, the more steps it takes, the longer the ingredient list grows of things I can neither identify nor pronounce. But our society does not make it easy to eschew these foods, particularly if–like me–your location limits your choices. (Believe me, the irony of living in a farming community and not having enough access to fresh food is not lost on me!)
I don’t know about the rest of you, but whenever I get into a conversation or a thought process surrounding food consumption and wishing for simpler choices, I think of Laura. Specifically, I think of Ma. Feeding her girls (and her husband) cannot have been easy. But it was healthy. Number of steps from food source to food consumption? Zero. Her family—as did, I’d venture to guess, all families of that time period—appreciated the simple things they had. They appreciated them not because they were simple, but because they were good. I don’t eat raw onions, but honestly, those cottage cheese and onion balls in Little Town on the Prairie? I want them. Every time I read about them, I want them bad. I even want the creamed peas.
Even though I know it’s folly, I can’t always escape the thought that the Ingalls family had it easy. They and their contemporaries knew sweetness only sparingly; cake was reserved for weddings and borne of sore arms. Fruit was scarce. Candy was for very special occasions. In good years meat and milk were plentiful, as were vegetables when they could support a garden. And although she was diabetic later in life, Laura did live past 90 years old. (Although it bears mentioning that she did outlive the rest of her family, who were raised on, presumably, the same diet.)
It doesn’t make sense right now for me to keep my own hens, and gardening is unfortunately out of the question due to my snake phobia. But I still want to do what I can to make our food simpler. I want my kids to appreciate that simplicity and to develop a taste for it. Every time I think of simplifying our food and figuring out how to make something from scratch, two themes emerge. First, I’m challenging myself to feed my kids the best ways I know how. Whether that means teaching myself to make bread from scratch or convincing my daughter to dye her homemade frosting with pureed strawberries rather than green food coloring, it’s all baby steps toward the same goal.
Secondly, I’ve got Laura on the brain. I can’t crack an egg or measure flour without picturing her gathering her own basketful of eggs or kneading her own bread in front of her kitchen’s picture windows. I may not be great at simplifying, but if I continue to keep Laura in mind, I hope to someday be good.