old-timey eats

There's a lot of wrangling in the arena of ideas these days about diet -- what's the best diet? the most supportive of optimum health? the most humane? the coolest, trendiest, and with-it-est?

I got to thinking about the impressive longevity of some of my not-so-distant ancestors, and what their diets were like. A lot of them lived in Kentucky, and I don't know for sure what they habitually ate, but I can guess. I would bet they ate a lot of things like rabbits, raccoons, possums, and squirrels -- especially squirrels -- to supplement their staple fare of bacon, beans, and cornbread, sometimes with molasses. Also quite a few chickens, along with corn, taters, onions, turnips, apples and peaches in season, and collard or mustard greens.

They most likely had eggs from the chickens they kept, and frequent breakfasts, lunches, and even dinners of biscuits and gravy, the white flour (Michael Pollan calls it "the original fast food") and fat-laden gravy made from meat drippings being two of the worst things in this largely home-made or foraged diet. But even the gravy, made from wild or home-grown meat, would not have been as bad as today's gravies made from the fat of factory-farmed animals.

Peach pie and apple pie in season would have been luxuries and special treats, ice cream (home-made, of course) a delicacy, gingerbread or bread pudding more usual desserts.

All in all, I think my Kentucky ancestors probably ate a better diet than most people in America today. There was no pizza and no processed food -- no Hot Pockets™, no Big Macs™. They worked real hard, lived a long time, got through the summers with no air conditioning and the winters with wood stoves or fireplaces, and frequently had schools of kids. They lived pretty much as people had for thousands of years and hundreds of generations before them, close to the earth, adapted to the climate, flora, fauna, and topography of where they happened to be. They had no running water in their homes, and no electricity. They may not have even known what electricity is.

Eventually one of my recent ancestors decided he wanted to leave Kentucky. Maybe he got into trouble, or maybe he just thought he could do better elsewhere. So then, as the old hills-of-Kentucky song* says:

Now he's long gone from old Kentucky;
Long gone -- ain't he lucky?

Not so lucky as it turned out, because he moved to Kansas.

Then came the twentieth century, and the human race, especially the American portion of it, decided we needed to make some serious progress, And that, also, was not so lucky, although our immediate ancestors had no way of knowing that.

*The Ballad of Long John Dean from Bowling Green.