Suburban Hippie and the Boys

So now that Wenders has been regaling everyone with the secrets of where her world and history of food comes from, I feel it’s a good time for me to say “Hi” and a few words on where my world of food comes from.

It is actually eerily similar to Wender’s story, with the exceptions of ; A. we didn’t live on a farm and B. we lived on another continent.  But my earliest and cleares memories from the homeland most often involve picking berries off the bushes, sneaking with my best friend into the greenhouse and schnagging a couple cucumbers (European ones not these nasty thing you have here in america with ginormous seeds and leather for skin) and then hiding in the hedge and devouring our loot.   Or picking peas, raspberries, strawberries, digging up potatoes and carrots or cutting chives, and parsley for dinner.    It seemed like everyone had a garden of some sort with something healthy to go snack on.   Heck, I even remember picking apples from the trees along the bike path on the way to school.

So when I hear of kids who have absolutely no idea where carrots come from and have to make special field trips to the country side so they can see things actually sitting in dirt, it makes me wonder what it would be like to grow up in a world where food is like gasoline.  Yeah you know it doesn’t start out at the store/station but beyond that it comes on trucks you don’t really give it a second thought.   That makes me sad, because I remember the joys of finding my very own pea and watching it grow and sneaking it extra water, until I deemed it was ‘Perfect’ and then picking it and eating it.

Then in the early 80s we moved to Texas, hot, burning, scorching, Texas.  We were very fortunate, in that mom generally kept us well fed with home made meals on a daily basis which we all ate together at the table, but the parents were busy, the land a rental in the sprawl of suburbia, and time was a precious commodity for us all and so the days of fresh handpicked berries, veggies and herbs were over.

Next… the end of family dinners and the creep of convenience.