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what would great-grandpa eat?

September 1st, 2007 at 06:40 am

I finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It was about a commitment to eat off the garden or very, very locally for one year. Of course, such a thing is possible if you live on a bit more than a postage stamp lawn and in a state with well balanced agriculture.

I've also been reading and hearing about others making a commitment to eat food grown within 100 miles of one's locale. Local-voring, its called. I like the idea, but I've always had problems with such rigid rules. A bit expensive and a bit pretentious. At the very least, local-voring within the greater Seattle area will give you a massive caffeine withdrawl headache. (No coffee trees within 100 miles of Seattle). Bananas are good for you. Standing around the meat case tempting yourself with either the New Zealand or the Oregon beef means annoying other shoppers who just want to get in and get out. Nope, I want an easy rule to avoid total deprivation and at least not do the completely wrong thing. Big Grin So I've come up with my own semi-local-frugal-vore rule, short and sweet.

Eat what and from where your great-grandpa would eat.

Now I know I have a definite advantage here. My great-grandpa on my mother's side was a grocer during the Great Depression. (FYI, great-grandpa was still alive when I left for college.) The grocers' kids ate okay, however they ate what wouldn't sell, a frugal but possibly disgusting and frightening prospect in the Depression.

Still, coffee was not unheard of, neither were bananas. Fruit and produce, however, were sold in season from either North or Central America. Fresh food coming from places much further was prohibitively expensive, so great-grandpa wouldn't eat it. Sugar was just granulated, and also expensive, so it was a once in awhile thing. He was also, as you might have guessed, darn frugal. He also ate home cooked meals, no junk food, and only in his much later years ate things with a lot of strange preservatives. Except he had that unfortunate taste for Spam.

The great-grandpa rule isn't perfect, but it has to be better than having to bring a mental GPS unit when going to the grocery store.

3 Responses to “what would great-grandpa eat?”

  1. princessperky Says:
    1188666274

    heh, shoppers GPS

  2. LuckyRobin Says:
    1188712697

    Well, Spam was the meat substitute a lot of people used during the wars because the real meat was being shipped to the boys fighting, so a lot of folks developed a taste for it. Part of the reason its still so popular in Hawaii. I don't care for the lump in the rectangle can but I actually like the hard to find Spam spread. Brings back middle school lunch memories. That and chipped beef.

  3. baselle Says:
    1188794881

    A little secret - I really like spam musubi (spam tied on a little pad of sushi rice tied up with nori). Spam musubi would definitely fail the great-grandpa test.

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