We’ve had some beautiful weather this week and I have put it to good use outside.  While the “big kids” (yes, now Lydia is one of those, at least according to the grandmother who was so eager to have her come along ) have been visiting their AL grandparents, Timothy has been supervising my work.  Yesterday, we got 8 new blueberry bushes put in the perennial patch and today we got 3 fruit trees added to the orchard.  Timothy tried out his exersaucer for the first time.

We were soon joined by the other members of “middle management” (aka Daisy the dog and Guido the Guinea).

Off camera was an assortment of chickens, another dog, and a cat or two.

We couldn’t get enough of the beautiful sunshine.  Come on, spring!

As we get older, Joe and I are learning to appreciate the wisdom of bygone days more and more.  We installed an antique pot-bellied wood-burning stove to heat one end of the house.  We’ve been gardening and “putting food by” for use in the winter.  We’ve started our own herd of goats and cattle for meat in the future.  We raise heritage breeds of chickens (and hopefully turkeys again).  In past years, these decisions have been based mostly on lifestyle preferences rather than strictly economics.  But like most people, we’ve begun to look more critically at our finances and unnecessary spending this last year.  We have been especially targeting our electricity bill.  One of the things we’ve decided to try is the old-fashioned clothes line.

I had bought the lines and pins years ago, but we have never gotten around to putting them up.  Joe put up the lines this last weekend and I have been using them whenever it isn’t raining.  It does take longer to do laundry this way, but strangely I’ve found that I almost enjoy doing laundry now.

There is something satisfying and calming about a line of sweet little diapers and clothes dancing in the breeze.

So, if we were pretty healthy and actually enjoying real food, WHY did we give it up for the common fare we exist on now?

From what I’ve been reading in many different sources (which I will begin naming in case you are interested), the answer to that has many parts.  For the sake of brevity, I will try to encapsulate it here.

Our country began with small groups of like-minded people who settled into communities and farmed (and truly before that, with Native Americans doing much the same thing, but some following animals).  They raised, foraged, or hunted most of their food.  They did some trading with other groups for foods not native to their region.

Fast forward a couple hundred years and larger cities began to arise.  Then came the Industrial Revolution and focus on mass production.  As people began to work longer hours outside of their homes, move into crowded cities without yards, and look to how mechanization could speed everything up, things began to change.  Even in the last hundred years, lots of folks used to get a hog to fatten over the summer and then had a year’s worth of delicious homegrown pork come winter.  They’d “put up” the summer’s bounty from their backyard garden patches.  These practices have mostly disappeared now.

Huge slaughterhouses opened up in the major cities.  Food products could be shipped by rail car.  Commercially canned goods became pretty common place.  As we became a more industrialized nation (and thus less agrarian), we became accustomed to and more dependent on food produced by strangers.

In the 1930s and ’40s doctors began to find their patients were sickening.  They weren’t dying of measles or diphtheria or the other things that used to claim young lives thanks to the development of vaccines.  But they were suffering from newer things like heart disease, all kinds of cancer, high blood pressure, and diabetes.  Researchers began to try to find out why.

Studies that didn’t take into account other factors began attacking certain foods.  A few studies with a very far-reaching impact villified saturated fat.  All fats including an increasing percentage of new trans fats were included in the diets of the subjects.   Many of the subjects turned out to have health problems but the studies declared that it was the fats we had been eating for centuries without ill effects (butter. eggs, and meat) that were to blame.  The American Heart Association, government agencies, and lots of food companies began telling the public that they must remove those traditional foods from their diets and replace them with the new “healthy alternatives” like margarines made from trans fats, heat-pressed vegetable oils, and egg white-only processed products (from battery-raised hens).  But we are a much more sickly nation now than we were back then!  Longer term studies have shown it is the very “healthy alternatives” we were instructed to eat that have impacted our health so negatively.  But given the litigious society we live in, I’m not expecting a mea culpa.  Fats aren’t the only things about which we have been wrongly advised- they just happen to be a very high profile one.

More recently, I think the rise of Feminism dealt a major blow to the family and our nutritional health.  That wasn’t the aim, but I think those are repercussions all the same.  The message presented to women from all directions was that a life spent caring for their families was not enough to make them really count in society and that by doing so they were perpetuating a degrading slave-like situation for all women.  Never mind that God may have called them to a traditional life devoted to family-  any self-respecting woman should stay out of the kitchen and aspire to take over the board room.  Cooking was beneath a woman who had any dignity.  That’s hard to hear continuously without developing discontent or even contempt for a role that previously had suited them and even made them happy.  Many women who had (or otherwise would have) found fulfillment without a paycheck in their own names left the home to climb the corporate ladder, leaving nutrition and meals to the mass producers.

This opened the floodgates for “convenience foods.”  Women still did the majority of the shopping, but they had far less time for meal preparation.  Items that said “heat and eat” or “just add ground beef” and the like became very appealing.  What went unnoticed for quite some time was the ever-expanding list of synthetic additives that made up the majority of these prepared foods.

There is still more to the story, but I’ll end it here for now.  If you are interested in doing your own investigation into nutrition and the history of our present food system, a few excellent books I’d recommend are Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck.  In previous postings I have mentioned two other very good books by Michael Pollan- The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

Although Joe was really reluctant to get the kittens two years ago, I think he would agree now that it was a good decision.  Even though they are outside only cats, we haven’t had any mouse problems since we got them.  Prior to that, we constantly had mice in the house.  And the mice felt so at home that they didn’t even run when they saw us- they walked.

The two cats have very different personalities even though they were littermates and grew up together.  Patch (foreground) likes to accompany us everywhere (preferably riding on my shoulder) and keeps closer to the house.  Coco is more independent and a devoted hunter.  He shows up for meals a little more than half the time.  Oddly enough, he is the one that is so patient with little people.  Lydia spends a good bit of time “giving him love” while Patch tends to stay just out of reach unless the child is at least 4 years old.

Lydia certainly enjoys her bucolic lifestyle.  She can’t wait to go outside and make the rounds to watch all the animals and do her imitations of the sounds they make.  Recently, when Lydia was doing her impression in public, someone commented that she must be a girl who has her own cow because hers was good- no silly “moo” for her.

After logging some time with her pal Coco, she toddles off to watch chickens.  If they come onto the porch, she knows to say “Shoo!” Then it’s off to see the quadrupeds through the fence.  If she’s lucky goats, donkeys, and cows will all come up for water together so she can call to them and almost stroke their noses-  she hesitates to make actual contact at the last moment.  Probably for the best since they have gotten used to eating apples from our hands and she isn’t holding any.

So far, she hasn’t shone an aversion to any kind of animal or even insect.  She appreciates them all.

A few days ago, Rachel found a juvenile snake in the yard.  We all went to investigate.  Coco and Daisy (one of the dogs) were both beside themselves wanting to play with it.  We looked on as the tiny thing- maybe the size of 2 Kindergarten pencils end to end (it was actually almost cute)- bravely coiled and faked strikes while Daisy and Coco both moved in from opposite sides.  Lucy (the other dog) and Patch both looked on with interest, but were content to see how it went for the first two before committing to the fight.  Guido the Guinea was nowhere to be found.  I gave him his pinkslip later on- the only reason we tolerate him is because he is supposed to keep the yard clear of ticks and snakes.