That’s right. When I was your age, television was called books.
Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse. (…)
Evidence of the nostalgia abounds. (…) The surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. (…) Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they’ve replaced “bad” high-fructose corn syrup with “good” cane sugar. (…)
It’s unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that “Food used to be better” so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn’t. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn’t very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.
artwork { Eric Thor Sandberg }
