My Food History

[plumtreeblossom]

The wonderful food history class I'm taking has me thinking about food a lot lately, something I'm always happy to do. The topic and the textbooks are so engrossing that it's almost hard to believe that I'm going to get college credits for it. I would totally take this class in a non-credit adult ed setting just for the enrichment, and for how it also has gotten me to look at my own food history.

On the first day of class, the professor had us each introduce ourselves, and also briefly describe the cuisine we grew up on. There are people from all over the world in the class -- Haiti, Dominican Republic, southeast Asia, Latin America, native Boston. Then there's me, from suburban Cleveland.

When it was my turn, I had to be truthful -- I was raised in the 1960s and 70s almost entirely on foods from cans, boxes and packets. My foods had names like Betty Crocker, Libby's, Swanson. I confessed this with what I hoped would be perceived as a proper amount of shame, then followed up with "Only in adulthood did I discover real food."

My professor right away pointed out "You've made a judgement call, there." I must have mumbled something, but as the class wore on, and for days afterward, I realized she was right, and that perhaps I would do well to rethink why I was passing that kind of judgement on the food that was provided for me in childhood.

It took some contemplation to remember that in the 60s and 70s (and probably the 50s, too, before I was born) convenience foods didn't mean the same thing that they do today in the US. Back then, food from cans, boxes and packets were modern and innovative. They were good, respectable middle-class food for families to enjoy together. They allowed the family meal preparer(s) to whip up tasty and satisfying meals in a very short time, freeing up their time to do something else they enjoy. There was absolutely nothing lazy connected to canned/packaged foods. They were purely sensible, and downright progressive for the times.

My nuclear family (after the divorce when I was barely 5) was me, my brother, our mom, and our grandma and grandpa. Grandma did 100% of the cooking because mom taught school all day to support us, and grandma embraced packaged foods in spite of rejecting most of the rest of the modern world. They were a godsend to her.

Every meal was eaten together at the kitchen table. Breakfast was generally cereal and milk, and we were allowed to put sugar on it if it wasn't already sweetened. Every lunch and dinner had a meat, a vegetable and a starch. We ate every kind of canned vegetable available. Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup was in or on everything, from casseroles to baked chicken. Dessert was available for anyone who cleaned his or her plate, and it came from a local German bakery, and later from cake or pudding mixes when I was old enough to cook. We ate Reddi-Whip, Manwiches, Lipton side dishes, Tang, Veg-All, canned hams, Shake-n-Bake (and I helped!), Idaho Spuds, Velveeta, Sealtest Ice Cream, Blue Bonnet Margarine, Jell-o, Jif peanut butter, and store muffins shaped for the toaster. We almost never ate out. Takeout Chinese was a rare treat for special occasions, as were pizza and Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips. We kids were required to drink at least one glass of whole milk with every meal. We were allowed to stir a few drops of food coloring in it if we liked. Eating these good-tasting and easily accessible supermarket foods set us apart from both rich people and poor people. The rich could hire someone to cook for them and we didn't give a hoot about them or their snooty lives. The poor were poor and that was sad, but we didn't really know many of them, so it was hard to have any real comprehension of their plight. Being able to buy a box of cake mix or a can of pineapple slices meant you were doing well enough economically; you were okay and safe. Not too much, not too little.

It took grandma between 30 and 45 minutes to prepare our dinners, less for lunches and far less for breakfasts. She had plenty of time left to do things she loved like sewing and crafting. It's only just now that I'm comparing that to the family across the street, who were from Italy. Every last bite they ate was cooked from scratch by the mother. She was cooking in the kitchen All. Day. Long. Every single day. I never saw her do anything else. My brother and I were friends with their two youngest, and their house always smelled like the daily yeast bread she baked from scratch. She made pizza from flour and ripe garden tomatoes. I'm sure their food was delicious -- they didn't really have guests for meals who weren't relatives -- but it took up the mother's entire life. The kids had to sneak around to get something like a popsicle from the drugstore.

Now it is the 20-teens. Sure, I grow veggies in a container garden, but I do it because I enjoy it so much. I don't live exclusively on them, nor even mostly. Whole food, slow food, sustainable food -- whatever foods we are supposed to love and hold in highest esteem today....were not the foods I was raised on. And you know what? I'm not going to feel any shame about that anymore. For the times, what we ate was good and wholesome and made perfect sense in the modern world of the 60s and 70s. I was loved and, as far as I'm now concerned, well nourished with the foods of the era. And I won't lie -- I still like most of those foods. A favorite at-home meal for me and beowabbit is when we pick up a hot rotisserie chicken at the supermarket, throw some Tater Tots in the oven, and open a can or two of vegetables. It's good food that we enjoy sitting down to together. Food is love, no matter what foods you love.

So, that's my early food history. I might write my research paper on this. Yes, I just might.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I grew up on much the same sort of food. My mom never learned to cook well from her mother, because her mother was paranoid that she would burn down the kitchen or hurt herself. Plus my mom was a working mother in an age and place where that was uncommon (she was a teacher, a "more suitable" job for a woman in the 70s and meant she kept hours similar to mine as a student in the same school). So I grew up on shake-and-bake, TV dinners, minute rice and dehydrated soups. My mom made sure I had the basics of how to handle myself in the kitchen so I wouldn't feel helpless about it like she did as a young wife but I didn't learn to cook much else until the summers I spent away from home between years at college.

We did have some ethnic traditions, since my parents were Jews from New York City, including bagels and cream cheese, back before they became popular, and ethnic restaurants when we got to them. I think I had several birthdays at Mongolian grill type places.

My own style of cooking is very different from how I grew up, but you're right, I shouldn't disparage how I was fed.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Ah, you get it. :-) I'm feeling a bit bad, as an adult, for looking down on the food I was fortunate to have. I enjoy a great LJ community, vintage_ads, which often has food and other ads from my childhood and teens. Fascinating the way collective tastes and sensibilities about food change, and how quickly.

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

A series just started on the BBC here called The Men who Made us Fat. It is about what changes in food (processed, corn syrup, etc.) that has caused changes in our bodies (even thin people are full of fat around their organs) and our weights. So far, it has been excellent. Try and see if you can view it on the BBC iPlayer via a British proxy, I think you'll enjoy it. An article about it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18393391

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

Argh. I clicked on the wrong reply button. Sorry!

[ron_newman]

I greatly enjoyed reading this, and hope you'll write more in the same style.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I really loved this post.

[heatherp8.livejournal.com]

sounds like this is an interesting class.
When I was really little, we had a cook but she didn't last long after she stole $, the stepmonster had to take over kitchen duty. Aside from setting the table and maybe fixing the salad, I was pretty much kept out of the kitchen.
Dinner was always salad, meat, veggie + starch and maybe dessert of pudding (made on the stove) or canned fruit. Ice cream was a rare treat. And forget about home made cookies or cakes. That wasn't happening.
She was a pretty good cook and a lot of what she prepared was "from scratch" even though she was also a business woman (branch Manager for Stanley Home Products)
As her business expanded, things like Tang and Hamburger Helper crept onto the menu along with Chef Boyardee and frozen dinners.
Dad cooked, too, and even taught me a few things but when I got out on my own, I felt ill prepared to keep myself fed.
My spouse usually eats what I put in front of him without complaint, but I feel as if my repertoire is less than steller. My stepsisters, on the other hand, were raised by an Italian dad and they know all the secrets to some amazing dishes.
I'll be interested to read your posts about this class!

[thesynergizer.livejournal.com]

this was so wonderfully written and inspiring and thought provoking. thank you!

[beowabbit]

Read this when you posted it, but just getting around to commenting now. Thank you so much for posting it! I’m still on board with the canned foods at 45. And to make things even easier, I usually dump the cans into the crockpot in the morning and come back to hot dinner.

I love the occasional artisanal meal baked in an oven made from bricks the baker shaped with her own hands from clay from her ancestral village, but there’s something to be said for quick, easy, cheap good food. I am very glad that we live in an era of reliable canning and refrigeration.

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I had been indifferent about food when I was a kid and then lived on convenience foods until I finally really learned to cook. And when I did, I made the same value judgment that real cooking was better. It wasn't until I visited my sister for a week and babysat her then-2-year-old son that I realized how time-consuming kids are! And now takeout and packaged food made so much more sense. I hadn't thought of how they were once seen as modern and innovative until reading this post.