The farmers and ranchers near me who started selling local again over the last couple of years are booming. No middle-man processing.
Our family has maintained it's own small herd of dairy cows for decades now. Always had the farm, but the family decided back in the 50's to remain as self-sufficient as possible. I think it started because of the Cold War, then Grandpa's concerns about fluoridation kinda sealed the deal (we have a well). It became something of a point of pride with the family to purchase as little processed store-bought groceries as possible. I lost track of the number of times I heard my mom or one of my aunts say in the store, "Oh, go put that back. We can make that at home."
I remember looking at the supper table one day as a kid and thinking to myself that except for the salt, pepper and iced tea, I knew exactly where on our farm every other food item on it came from.
We did everything that the us.gov has always said was supposed to be bad for you. Drank raw fresh unpasteurized milk, ate eggs, made our own cheese, cottage cheese, butter, etc. Aunt Betsy made fresh biscuits from scratch, with lard, every day, that were served with butter, at every meal. And yet somehow, despite almost never being hungry, we all stayed skinny as rails. And Grandpa was still bucking hay bales up into his 80's.
Sounds ideal.
I never realized how lucky I was / we were, until the Carter administration. That gave me my first opportunity to compare and contrast our overall quality of life with that of the "city kids" living in town, that I had always been so jealous of. Whereas our lives continued more or less undisturbed, the town folks seemed to be hard up against it sometimes. I heard the talk amongst my friends, and the talk amongst folks at church and the grownups around the supper table, and suddenly living the way we did didn't seem so bad after all. It was like watching a big storm pass over the next county. A part of you feels for the folks under it, but another part says, "Man, I'm sure glad that's not us."
You, uhh, got some recipes to share?
I'd love to try making cottage cheese, but I think I am too used to the stuff from the store. I get the one brand that literally has like 3 ingredients though..
Most of what the ladies cooking came from collective family memory, passed down in the kitchen from mother to daughter, and long experience, but I think there was a church recipe book that was written and sold one time years back for a fund-raiser that might have seen some of them written down. I don't know if we still have it around here anywhere (I haven't actually laid eyes on it in years).
Anything in particular you're looking for? I'm in Texas now and the rest of my extended family is still back in West (BG) Virginia, I can try to reach out if you have something specific. I remember most of the things I saw being made in the kitchen not having more than four or five ingredients to them. The rest appeared to be just mixing and cooking time. Women's magic, you know?
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