Poverty and Sharing Food

In most parts of the world where there's subsistence living, the sharing of food amongst those you call friends, relatives, neighbors, members of your personal community, clan, sect or tribe, is almost a compulsion.  Even when times are better and food more plentiful, this is especially true in areas with no refrigeration.  The hunt often demands cooperation.  The killing of an animal larger than one can eat would be wasteful if food were not shared.  It's also to the benefit of the entire community that all members be as healthy as possible - and that means as well fed as possible - to avoid disease, produce healthy offspring and maintain and defend the community.

It takes at least a generation or two of food-plentiful city living until people eat solitary diets in their cars, at their desks, in front of the TV or open refrigerator, and then it's a rare thing to have the whole family together for a healthy, balanced communal meal in a relaxed, rush-free atmosphere.  This lack of natural food sharing and communal eating is psychologically harmful - studies have shown that where families sit down to eat together on a regular basis, juvenile delinquency of all kinds drops.

Sometimes famine comes by drought, sometimes by war.  Often, as in the case of Iraq and other dictatorships, because the leaders have forgotten this first rule of survival of the "tribe" and keep the best for themselves and their loyal family and cohorts.   Meanwhile the poorest segments of the society learns to make do with scraps from the table of the privileged and discards the wealthy do not care to eat.  Thus we have fish head soup where even the brains and eyes are eaten, bean dishes with bits of meat or veggies, crawfish, chitterlings, head cheese or scrapple, hawg jowls with black eyed peas, blood sausage (mortadella), sopa de pata y panza (cow's foot and tripe soup), pig's feet, chicken soup that includes the peeled claws, and other dishes many find disgusting or unbelievable.   These are seasoned with herbs, seeds, roots and greens gathered from the garden or the wild, rich in antioxidants as well as flavor. Only the wealthy in times of scarcity could eat refined bread and other grains, cream and butter, plenty of meat (often well marbled), rich sauces and ample sweets.  Due to the reduced caloric intake and variety of diet, sometimes when there was not actual severe scarcity of food, the "lower classes" were healthier and stronger than the overfed privileged.  Worse, some of these subsistence dishes were so tasty, the richer started eating them, leaving less for the poor.  Hence the current high price of many items like tongue, tripe, sweetbreads, whole fish, crab, lobster, marrow bones, chicken liver, frog's legs, etc. which cost a pittance when I was small.  The above is a sure recipe for rebellion and leads to downfall of government and/or society in the end - every time!

In the USA, inhabitants of the South - as well as most of the Appalachians, the West and Midwest, were often much, much poorer than in the north during hard spells.  Many times all that was on hand to eat was flour and lard.  Sometimes milk if you were lucky and a few eggs.  I'm a d---ed Yankee from Western New York, and our family, while suffering losses during the Great Depression, didn't have anywhere near the problems most of the rest of the country went through, between the financial collapse and the terrible drought conditions in most areas.  Same for the Civil War.

I married someone from Kentucky.  During the Great Depression in the 30's, his father walked some 15 or 20 miles to a quarry every day, where he broke rock.  Then walked home again.  He earned 50 cents a day.  Floyd's mother carried water in buckets from a creek to raise tomatoes, okra, beans and a little more, but not enough to provide an adequate diet.  As a result, her breast milk dried up, probably from lack of calcium and overwork.  A neighbor a half-mile away with a baby, a cow and better resources agreed to let Floyd nurse a couple times a day whenever his mother walked over there with him.  The rest of the time he drank tomato juice.  Their second child was born exceedingly premature, in fact a shoe box was used for a cradle until he died.  

Especially if one has been hungry, the taste and smell of food from one's childhood is a comfort to body and soul.  Fortunately I already had learned from a pro how to make good Southern biscuits.  But Floyd demanded milk gravy.  So I called my mother-in-law.  It was basically what I'd heard from others who were at some point dirt- poor in the South.  If flour and lard is all you have, you can either make sourdough biscuits, or use a little baking powder.  Or you can make hoe cakes, primarily white corn meal and water, fried in a little lard if you don't have an oven or only have cornmeal. 

Then you melt some more lard in a skillet (preferably cast iron, as it adds trace amounts of iron to the diet),  heat it up and add flour, stir until the flour turns a light caramel.  Remove from the heat long enough to cool it just a little, then add milk, or water if you don't have any milk, stirring furiously so it doesn't lump, then boil until thick.  Add salt to taste.  Then you serve this over the biscuits or hoe cakes, and over the eggs if you had any.   For those who had homes, a chicken dinner on Sunday was a luxury indeed, sometimes only indulged in those Sundays when it was your turn to invite the pastor or schoolteacher for a meal.  A treat in the evening, or sometimes the whole meal, was bread torn in cubes with milk, eaten with a spoon, or torn bread with dark molasses or syrup - sorghum or cane - drizzled over it, eaten with a fork.

During the 20's and 30's, many thousands of Americans lived primarily on this diet.  If you got a day job, it scarcely paid enough to buy the flour and lard, so you didn't buy your lunch.  You stuck some biscuits or hoe cakes in your pocket and ate them dry; if you were lucky perhaps you had a piece of bacon to eat them with.  Some "hobos" with little cooking skills bought cheap white bread and made lard gravy under bridges or in makeshift camps.   It was satisfying and filled them up.   If they could work for (or swipe) a little milk and eggs, and perhaps some fruit from an orchard, they had a great meal.  

I use olive oil now, and on occasion canola, and Smart Balance non-hydrogenated margarine instead of lard for the biscuits whenever hubby gets a craving for "down home" food, and let me tell you, it's a heck of a lot better meal than you'd expect.   The milk gravy is rich in calcium.  Sometimes if we have a little bacon or sausage, or some lean ham, I use the skillet the meat was cooked in (after draining the grease).  See my recipe for Healthier Milk Gravy.

For those of us who throw out as much food as many families had available to eat back then, or who gorge ourselves to overweight, then join diet plans and exercise classes to slim down, here's some things to think about (understanding a problem is the first step towards a solution):

1. Do you doubt that both instinctively and culturally, your compulsion to overeat and gain weight may be due to past conditions suffered by your parents or grandparents... and previous generations?
   
   
2. Do you realize that consumption of today's over-refined and artificially flavored diet, high in sweets and fats, is partly a desire to be part of the privileged class that can afford to do so and to prove it by pigging out on unhealthy foods?
   
   
3. If you agonize about your slightly overweight image, less than perfect form or cellulite/stretch marks, etc.,  how about, instead of further feeding your inferiority complex, getting counseling or having plastic surgery, you put your spiritual and physical energy into programs to feed the homeless, help the underprivileged train for and find jobs, join Habitat for Humanity to build shelter, or even just do what you can in your own neighborhood to help those less fortunate - take an elderly person or handicapped one along while you do your shopping.  Bring a healthy dish to a feeble older person.  Offer to baby-sit (if you know how) while an overworked mother or one with a new baby has a rest or gets her hair done.  Put your skills to work for others.
   
   
4. Back government policies that will help those suffering from hunger, malnutrition, lack of education, illness, discrimination and especially population control, as overpopulation has always been a major cause of disease, war and famine.
   
   
5. Support ALL efforts to protect the environment - we are fouling our own nests to the point that food will become in shorter and shorter supply, more toxic and less nutritious. Seafood as the rivers and oceans are contaminated, plant and animal products as pollution blocks the sunlight, and drought as more and more firewood is cut down and deserts expand.  Stop or cut back  use of  "throw-away" or disposable products.  Buy quality electric items that are energy-efficient.  Recycle.  Mulch.  Keep your car tuned up and push for more energy efficient vehicles, even if they cost more initially.
   
   
6. You've heard the phrase "Think outside the box".  In this case think outside your own body - think of community, environment and the health of the whole human race.  You can make a difference - it all starts with one - you!

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