Changes

Many, many things change for us over the course of our lives.  One of the things I never thought of being changed was my love of food.  Mostly, my carnovoire love of meat, meat and more meat.  When I was a youngster my mother and my grandparents raised huge gardens.  Summers were filled with fresh vegetables and winters were filled with vegetables that had been canned at harvest.

Unfortunately, I never cared much for them fresh or canned.  What years of great food I missed!  But as far back as I can remember all I ever really wanted to eat was meat.  My mother forced veggies on me but I fought and fought them.

Oh there were a few things I did like in the veggie line but most of them involved meat in one way or another.  Especially bacon.   Bacon and bacon grease were foundations of my food when I was growing up.  We had bacon every morning and never wasted the bacon grease.  It was all used as seasoning for other foods.  We used is as a base for breakfast gravy and to season the biscuit dough and the eggs were fried in it.    Green beans, pinto beans and most other veggies were seasoned with it.  Bacon grease was the most universal part of our diet.  Virtually everything we at had some component that used bacon grease.

When I was young I never cared for pinto beans but I did like green beans.  I loved "killed" lettuce.  Most people have never heard of "killed" lettuce but that is all I ever knew it as when I was growing up.  I guess today  you'd call it "wilted" lettuce.  It is not iceberg lettuce it is leaf lettuce.  You'd chop it up and heat bacon grease to smoking hot and pour it over the lettuce.  Crumble some bacon in it and chop up some green onions (scallions) and put them all together.  Now, those I loved. 

My brother loved pinto beans and I heard about that every time we had them and I did not want to eat them.  He would take a big bowl of beans, lettuce and onions and eat them with cornbread.  I wish, now, I had been able to do the same thing.  But, I just wanted meat.

Now things have changed almost completely.  I'm not sure what it started with but I believe it was pork.  Pork (except for fried pork chops) started making me sick when I'd eat it.  I thought it was just the amount of fat in pork.  Next was chicken.  I could (and still barely can) eat fried chicken but any kind of baked, broiled, broasted chicken just feels nasty in my mouth.  I used to love both chicken livers and gizzards but livers make me very sick though I can still eat gizzards.

My favorite thing was beef and now that is also beginning to make me sick when I try to eat it.  Now, I mostly just want pasta and vegetables.  And, I don't eat an awful lot of those.  I will eat raw cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, cabbage etc.  I will eat all that lightly steamed as well as raw.  I also love cucumbers, tomatoes, turnips etc.   What I have trouble with is meat.  Except for bacon.  For some reason I still love that.  But, now, all I want other meats for is a little flavoring for my potatoes and other vegetables.

How happy would have my mother have been had I wanted to eat like this when I was growing up.  How happy I would have been had I wanted to eat the bounty of garden produce I was provided.  How I wish I had it now for free (well, free except for a large amount of hard work).  Fresh corn on the cob, green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce, onions, turnips, sweet potatoes and all the things I'm forgetting.

It would be so wonderful to have all that again without all the phony stuff used in today's agriculture to  fool us into believing we are getting something naturaly.  They gas our tomatoes, they spray chemicals on everything, they feed the chickens and other animals growth hormones and antibiiotics.  No wonder we, as a people, are a sick lot.

It is now Spring and in a little more than a month the local Farmer's Market will be open and I am so looking forward to seeing something that might just be a little bit like all those things I did not want when I was a kid but want so much now.