Our Food

A thought occurred to me today, as seems to happen if I spend any time driving round town.  Anyway, I started to think how far we are removed from our actual food sources, and how most people have no idea what goes into making sure we get fed every day.

You see when I was younger I was brought up on a farm where we butchered our own animals grew all of our own vegetables and had a small grove of fruit trees.  I still remember seeing my first butchering when I was 5 or 6 years old.  Ask a 5 or 6 year old today where the meat comes, his reply would be the supermarket.  Butchering of animals has become so clinical that most people would not even think about it.  To me it was normal and it took me a few years to get used to the idea of getting meat from the supermarket.

Another thing I was thinking about is grains, like rice wheat etc.  Back in the old days you lived or died depending on if your crops did well or failed.  Today commercial crops are grown on a massive scale.  I personally have help remove thousands of acres of wheat, and seen it taken away to massive silo's for storage. These days if there is a crop failure, there is always somewhere to get the grain we need.  I wonder how many people who live in cities have any concept of where this stuff is grown, or even how it is planted tended to and then harvested.

When I was younger my mother made preserves and we picked blackberry's from the scrub around the farm and on the sides of the farm roads.  A fond memory of my childhood is my mother with all the clean jars and the smell of the preserves on the wood fired stove.  She also made our own tomato sauce, and still does to this day.  Back then we would pick the tomatoes from our veggie patch.  I still remember the smell of the tomatoes, and watching mum make the sauce.

Another thing we would do is pick mushrooms.  I remember a lot of weekends out in the paddocks walking around with a bucket, fresh field mushrooms with fresh eggs from the chickens and our own cured bacon for breakfast.   A world of smell and flavor.   Milk was always fresh the farm I grew up on as a young boy was a dairy farm, still miss the smell of whole milk in the Vat.Today 99% of what we eat we purchase from the supermarket, those skills of making our own food a thing of the past.  In a way its the passing of another generation, and I think we have lost something special.

Can understand why people give it all away to self subsist...