The maternal family were dryland dirt farmers. The paternal family were city folk, such as "city" is defined in buttscratch oil country who as far as I could tell never grew anything but maybe some flowers and subsisted on the Reverend Granddad's salary and whatever the parishoners offered in tribute. The canned food thing would explain why Mom always complained that when the 'rents got married, Dad figured the only good vegetable was a dead vegetable, boiled within an inch of its life.
But now we have refrigerators, refrigerated transport, freezers, centralized food processing and the carbon footprint of global commodity markets. Not hard to me to imagine whole thing might add up differently with only small changes in flows / costs at key points. DC On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 6:13 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Up until the '50s anyhow (probably varying from region to region) one
> reason some might grow at least a small garden would have been for
> luxuries not available on grocery shelves -- leaf letturce, green
> onions, radishes. My memory is pretty dim here, but I'm fairly confident
> that even large supermarkets pre-war did not have much in the way of
> fresh produce. The point during the war was that all canned foods were
> rationed, Your ration of sugar was larger if you canned fruit: I think
> that was only for fruit farmers.
>
> Carrol
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>