Homestead mailing list

[Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

At 4/27/2007, you wrote:
> Guess another one to read goes on the very long list....

I know about that.  I noticed that I am down to a single fiction so have to 
go find a book store this afternoon.

I am currently in Stockton, California for the next four days.



Don Bowen              Awl Knotted Up                       KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com
My travel journal
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html

I am omnivagant.  
> From Clansgian AT wmconnect.com  Sat Apr 28 10:10:14 2007
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Subject: Re: [Homestead] Are you a locavore?
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OK.  This is happening far too often any more.  I save up a thread on an 
email list, like this tread, to read it all at the same time. I see and 
interesting observation and think I will comment on it.  Then I go back and cannot for, 
for crumbs sake, find the damn quote.  After third time rereading the thread, 
I give up.  Maybe I imagined it, little odds.

Somone (may or may not have observed) "100 years ago everyone was a locavore."

True enough, but we don't have to go back nearly that far to draw a line 
where eating far distant foods was a luxury and and option and not an necessity.  
That is, here abouts in the 50's and 60's far flung foods, mainly out of 
season foods, were available, but they were a rare treat.  The refrain in several 
Appalachian ballads (when the bard needs the line to rhyme with 'all') goes:

Peaches in the summer time
Apples in the fall

Oranges are ripe in midwinter in Florida and so it is only natrual to ship 
some of them north at Christmas.  My father used to travel in his business and 
was regularly in Florida in December and brought back magnificient sacks of 
oranges on the train in which we indulged as a seasonal treat.  Twinkies were 
invented to make use of the machinery that made strawberry filled cakes when it 
was not strawberry season.

The difference now of days, I observe, is that whereas food from more than 
100 miles away has been available for a long time, it has not always been a 
necessity.  We'd have eaten fine without it on only local foods which was what we 
did 95% of the time or more.

There were in my mispent youth three bakeries in town (large commercial 
bakeries) and most of the four came from a mill 100 miles away (Knoxville, Tn) and 
most of the wheat from that four came from .... yes, Tennessee.  Milk and 
butter, eggs, and meat were all local products.  The default prefered peasant diet 
was cornbread, brown beans, a wedge of onion and a dollop of chow-chow ... 
all locally grown.

Sometime between then and now all the food for the common masses moved 
farther and farther away.  Now there are no bakeries, no slaughter houses, almost no 
dairies, and eggs come from several hundred miles away.  Heck, even our 
cornbread and beans are from more than 100 miles away.

I would suggest a view of our eating history not just as local diet vs 
imported diet as much as when we became utterly dependent on the imported diet.   </HTML>