By Dick Brooks
For Capital Region Independent Media
I was in the supermarket the other day, making my daily visit, pushing the cart that they seem to reserve just for me. It has a wheel that flutters as you push it down the aisle. It does serve a purpose since it alerts my fellow shoppers that they are about to be run over by a senior shopper on a mission.
Actually, I’m rarely on a mission (a mission consists of searching for an item The Queen has requested), usually I’m just browsing.
I like the market — it’s a clean, well-lit place, to quote Mr. Hemingway. He would have liked our little market, not only is it clean and well lit but it’s full of nice people and exotic goods from around the world.
I spent some time in the produce aisle and checked out things like mangos. I picked one up, it smelled good but I’m sure that the “Grown Locally” sign above them really didn’t apply to it. I put it back, having no idea how to eat the thing, but it was interesting to look at and hold.
In fact, there were a good many things there that I wouldn’t have even known were edible if I hadn’t seen them there. I imagine while I was making this observation that somewhere in this big world of ours, far, far away, some old guy is staring at a head of cabbage or a bunch of broccoli and trying to figure out how or why someone would eat it.
I got to reminiscing about food in my youth. If it was meat, I knew it well. Usually I could tell you its name and family history. We raised a lot of our own food and got used to having this year’s pets be next year’s dinners.
I guess I didn’t appreciate how well we ate and how healthy our diet was. I was raised on free-range chickens and organic eggs. The chickens ate only organic foods. We didn’t realize they were free-range, we just thought we were letting them run around loose. The cracked corn we fed them had no growth hormones or pesticides. I’m sure the bugs and crawly things they ate were organic, probably low fat and sodium free, too.
Our beef came from grass-fed cows, because grass was what cows ate in the summer and they ate dried grass called hay in the winter. Pork came from pigs fed an organic-based food called “slop,” made from the finest kitchen scraps, grain and water or raw milk all cooked together.
Most of our milk was fresh from the cow, not pasteurized and certainly not homogenized. It had a thick layer of cream floating on the top, which had to be stirred or shaken into the rest. Skim the cream off and you had skim milk —that no fat, blue milk you can still find in the market.
The vegetables from our garden were all organic; they had holes in them and bugs crawling over them just like the finest organic foods to be found in the market today. The only fertilizer used to grow them was manure from the barn, which was all natural and had come directly from the animal’s organs so it had to be organic.
All the foods that I ate growing up are still there in the market. They’re labeled “organic and all natural” and cost more than their unnatural and unorganic counterparts, but it’s nice to see them still around and it brings back pleasant memories of my “free-range” childhood.
Thought for the week — “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’” ~ Dave Barry.
Until next week, may you and yours be happy and well.
Reach columnist Dick Brooks at Whittle12124@yahoo.com.
