Apr 10
You Are What You Eat
Living here in the Grand Valley, it’s easy to forget that we sit in one of the most productive and interesting food growing regions in Colorado. Whether you are talking about peaches in Palisade or corn in Olathe, wine on the mesa or lamb in Fruita, this area is a cornucopia. Not only is it rich in food resources, it is a prime area to escape the corporate industrial food industry. A few of us remember when our food was connected to our lives.
When I was in high school, I remember going to John and Thelma Littlefield’s house for cottage cheese. They sold milk, butter, cream, and cheese all from one or two cows that grazed in the side lot and lived in the modest barn out back. The cottage cheese wasn’t quite ready so I got to see how the cheese I would soon be eating was made. While I waited John, who was severely disabled by polio, wanted me to help him pick pears from a tree on the north side of the house so we went out and picked about a bushel of pears. The cheese was just finishing draining so I went out to look at the barn and the cows. When I left I had fresh milk, freshly made cottage cheese, about a peck of pears and some butter all of which I had either picked or watched being made by people I knew and loved; folks who were part of my life. And I had a story.
We had a garden and raised much of what we needed for most of the year. The garden took-up a little over an acre and fed four families. What we didn’t grow (those little cucumbers that make such great pickles) we bought at Rose’s fruit stand. If we were headed to the creek and wanted a treat, we braved the big cattle tank filled with fifty pound blocks of ice, water, and Black Diamond watermelons. We even knew the areas that had the best watermelons. A common spring meal consisted of Poke salad or wild onions and eggs or wilted Romaine lettuce we picked an hour before. In the summer we feasted on fresh crappie we caught, fried okra and green tomatoes.
For much of my early life, we raised our own beef or ate deer if we were having red meet. My uncle Dee raised a hog and traded some pork for some of the beef. If we bought meat at the store, we bought it from my cousins Jerry and Agnus Stafford who owned a family store where my cousin Calvin personally bought and cut the meat. We could pick any cut or size of cut for any meal and get it by pointing and asking for it. The cooler also housed half rounds of cheese and a few prepared lunch meets. If you were happy with bologna, salami, head cheese, ham loaf, lunch loaf, and yellow cheese you were in business. Everything came wrapped in a butcher sheet and white paper. The price was written on the paper with black wax pencil in large letters.
Today buying food is nothing like that. It is more like going to an auto parts store. We, more often than not, have no idea where the food originates or under what conditions it was produced. It’s not hard to get some information on food production, though. We know that in response to anger over rising meat prices in the 1970s, meat processing has industrialized to the point that life is mere commodity with little or no connection to the nature of the creature being processed. We also know that people working in these processing plants become no more than parts in a machine, with no name or face or story. Does this process express our ideals? Not mine, but I’m guilty of supporting the very culture I find repulsive. Can we do anything? I think so.
Do you have a story when you shop for your food? The March 19 issue of the Free Press ran several stories on local eating. It’s worth going to their office and getting an issue. The way we eat is how we live. We can start living our values now by telling our own story, growing some of our own food, buying local, and slowing down even if it means eating much simpler meals.
