Food As Solace; Food As Hope - A Guest Post

The astonishingly talented and formidable Mad wrote today's post.

I was born on a family farm. We were agrarian poor but we made do. I still remember drinking whole milk taken by the jug-full from the pasteurizing machine. It was warm, delicious. We had a small garden plot that we supplemented with produce from some of the cash crop farms in the neighbourhood. There were beef and pig farms nearby too. Food bartering was part of life in my rural community, because the products of hard work were readily abundant but cash was always scarce.

I sometimes tell my very attached child that my parents never played with me when I was a girl because they always had too much work to do. She’s dumbfounded at the notion until I tell her that I had lots of brothers and sisters to keep me company. I tell her that we had free reign at the farm until we got old enough to do chores. She focuses on what it was like to play hide and seek in a hay loft. I muse on the lingering effects of a feral upbringing. Life back then was not easy but it was good.

When I was 4 years old, my father was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We sold the farm, built a house on the corner lot and waited out his treatment and eventual death. I was seven when he died. My mother, whose only skill (and a considerable one it was) had been Farm Wife, was no longer marketable. That’s when our family made the shift from being agrarian poor to just plain poor.


Imagine, would you?

Imagine having six children and a terminally ill husband. Now imagine having six children, no husband and a grief almost too big to bear. Now imagine having all of that and no income whatsoever, outside of a Federal mothers’ allowance cheque. Now try very hard to imagine this as a life-long sentence and not just a five second hypothetical request.


How would you make do? Really, how would you make do?

Now imagine you have to do all the housework, all the chores without a helpmeet. Imagine that you have, as my mother did, a wringer washing machine and no dryer (or just imagine having to take all the laundry for a large family to the Laundromat instead). Imagine getting that many kids out of bed and fed and off to catch an 8 am school bus. Imagine you and your kids shovelling your long driveway all winter long without a man about the house. Imagine car or appliance fixes taking up your entire grocery bill for two weeks. Imagine no vacations ever for you or your kids. Imagine not being able to buy new clothes for your children. Imagine a life of hand-me-downs and kindly hand-outs from neighbours who used to be your peers. Imagine burning your garbage because you can’t afford the dump fees. Imagine working all day long, cooking and cleaning and just trying to cope with the hand that you’ve been dealt. Imagine never getting any thanks and collapsing into bed at night, every. single. night without someone to tell you, “It’s ok. You’re doing a great job. It’s going to be fine.”

Now imagine being one of the kids in this family.

Here’s what it’s like, nutritionally to grow up poor. My version is an isolated, rural version but poverty no matter where it happens is analogous in a lot of ways.


In the fall we would buy 200lbs of potatoes, 50 lbs of onions, turnips and cabbage, and countless bushels of apples to keep in the root cellar all winter long. These were the main ingredients in everything we ate. By December the food was so limp that boiling it into submission was the only way to make it palatable. Boiled potatoes one night would be followed by fried leftover boiled potatoes with onion the next night. My mother stored away extra pennies all year long so that we could afford these fall purchases; otherwise we would have precious little winter produce whatsoever.

The closest grocery store was a teeny one in the nearby town, five miles away. Their produce options were limited and packaged food in general was small in size and very expensive. If Mom drove 20-25 minutes to the bigger town, she had more options but she rarely had an extra hour in the week to justify the drive. Besides, to leave home for that long, she had to take the younger kids with her because a thirteen year old really cannot manage too many younger siblings on her own. Taking kids to the grocery store on a limited budget, however, is nothing more than an exercise in despair. Too many times I remember Mom caving-in to our demands for squeeze cheese, potato chips or Mr. Christie’s cookies. I’m sure she only did it because she wanted us to have a treat--she loved us, and she was too brow-beaten to see beyond the immediate moment. Besides, there really wasn’t a “beyond” to see.

For meat, we ate discounted stewing beef and hamburger, boiled bones in soups, fried bologna steaks, cheap Salisbury steak tv dinners, boiled corned beef, beef pot pies, and canned ham. My school lunches were always bologna or mac’n’cheese loaf sandwiches on the white bread that we kids demanded. I developed a life-long addiction to sodium. Hamburger Helper was cheap and made the same-old, same-old more interesting, and, so, we kids demanded it too. It turns out that the crappier we ate the hungrier we felt and the more demanding we got. My mother was already broken. It wasn’t long before she chose giving in as a means of coping.

When I was about nine, someone—an Uncle perhaps—gave Mom money for a deep fryer. From that day forward those limp, eye-ridden potatoes were served up as French fries. Usually, a hot plate of fries was waiting for us when we got off the school bus. Every day. Potatoes were cheap but cooking oil was expensive. This meant that the fry grease got changed about once a month.

By the time I was eleven, I was an expert at making French fries myself. Somewhere along the line, though, the handle of the deep fryer broke and I would have to wedge a fork into the boiling grease to lift the basket of fries out. One day it slipped and boiling grease splashed in my face. To this day, I have no freckles where the grease scarred my face.

And where was my mother when this happened you might ask? Well, she got a job as a Nurse’s Aide at a chronic care nursing home where she worked shift work: 1 week, 8-4, the next week 4-midnight and the final week midnight ‘til 8am. Repeat, repeat, repeat. She had a job like this in her late 40s with no child care at home. If she wasn’t working, she was usually trying to sleep. I spent many hours as a child rubbing her varicose veins, trying to ease the constant pain she lived with. My older sister who was now a teenager made most of our meals. From the time she was 13 until she left home after high school, she did a goodly part of the child rearing too. Both she and I eventually became quite good cooks out of necessity.

Ah, but when left on our own, we made brown sugar sandwiches for lunch if we were feeling sweet, mustard sandwiches if we were feeling savoury. We ate whatever we could find so much so that my grandmother’s favourite refrain was “You kids are going to eat your mother out of house and home!”

A few times during the course of my childhood, Mom, who had become considerably overweight, tried to diet. It never worked, though because she could only afford healthy food for herself, not for us, and we would always get into it. You might wonder why she tried to diet for herself when she knew she couldn’t feed us well in the first place. The answer to that is simple: she wanted to lose weight so that maybe someone would marry her and ease our collective family burden. What other hope did she have, saddled as she was with all these kids, a grade 11 education and a house in the middle of nowhere?

In summer we gardened and, oh, the sweet taste of fresh tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. We gorged on produce as long as we were able to. In August, a kind neighbour always left a 50lb sack of sweet corn anonymously on our back porch. We ate 8-10 cobs at a time and had the trots for the better part of a month, but it was oh-so worth it. And then winter would come again...

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You may think that it’s easy to eat well and cheaply. If you haven’t worn the psychological chains of poverty, of course you would think that way. My childhood was an exceptional one but, really, what keeps any of us from the experience I just recounted? What if you lose your job, your spouse, your home, your physical or mental health? What happens if the social safety net doesn’t catch you?