Homestead Snobbery/Onion Time

It's never a fun experience to be a homesteader, fresh out of your homegrown crop, forced to head into the supermarket to buy it there. Some kinds of produce feel OK for me to buy:  It's too cold in winter to grow avocadoes here, so I have no qualms about heading into town when I need avocadoes for guacamole.  Ditto for peaches; our tree is not large enough to produce more than one or two pieces of fruit yet, which means I will be visiting either the supermarket or Farmer's Market if I want some nice, ripe Elbertas.

But my Spring 2014 onion crop has now been consumed by us, and so the other day I had to throw three or four red onions into my shopping cart and that hurt. It's silly, because my pain was mainly because of 1) homestead snobbery, where I feel my own onions are vastly superior and fresher to anything grown at the market and 2)more homestead snobbery, where I feel snooty and self-sufficient because I know that (for most of the year) I can head outside and dig up some onions almost anytime I need them. Onions just aren't really ever on my shopping list -- at least not 95 percent of the time. And really, there is nothing better than an onion whose time from ground to skillet is less than 10 minutes.  It's true.

But even on the best homesteads, sometimes you run out of a crop before you have another one ready to go, and so it was with me and onions.  And so today I plant new ones. 

I will put about 10 onions in the ground today, another 10 next month, 10 more after that, and so on.  Sometimes this works, and the onions mature at evenly spaced intervals, and sometimes (like when we get a ton of late, warm weather like we've had recently) it does not, and they come of age at roughly the same time and I end up shortchanged at the end of the season.

Of course if I had some kind of cold storage or a cellar, I could harvest them all at once and store them, but since this is an old complaint I won't go there today.

But it does feel good to know that we're once again back in the onion business.  I cry when I have them, and I cry when I don't, but I'd rather cry over a fresh, pulled-from-the-ground onion than an empty onion bed any day.  And let's not even talk about the tears of shame which spring up at the onion bin at the supermarket when I'm standing over it. 

Yes, along with the pride of growing things yourself, there is also the disappointment when you have to start buying it at the grocery store again.  So I'll just say it. My name is Hot Flash Homestead, and I am a homestead snob. There.  I said it.

Snap peas and generation gaps

I walked into the staff meeting at the winery last night with a large bag of snap peas, and immediately became the most popular lady in the room. Three of the girls I work with and a couple of the guys came right up and started taking handfuls of peas out of the bag as if it was a cookie jar, oohing and aahing as they bit into the crunchy pods.  After the feeding frenzy I noticed one of my friends tucking what was left in the bag into her purse to take home and eat later.

 I find it heartening that so many 20-somethings are fans of healthy food.  In fact, I love taking excess produce to the winery for that exact reason.

My grandparents' generation ate healthy food which they grew themselves.  The ones who were not land-owning farmers turned parts of their city gardens into growing spaces, whenever possible. My parents' generation, on the other hand, entered adulthood at the exact time large supermarkets came into being, complete with frozen food on Aisle 5, where you could pick up a boxed TV dinner, bring it home, and heat up individual and unique meals for everyone in your family in minutes. 

It was a convenience that took hold, and the result is that many of us born in the 1960's grew up eating that way.

This was, I should add, a purely American phenomenon back then.  When I visited London in the late 1960's as a child, I was amazed when we went shopping with my grandmother.  We visited the butcher, the baker, and the fishmonger.  Paper goods we bought at a local general store. Milk, cream and butter was delivered to the front door every morning. Nowadays of course London has the same giant supermarkets we do, but back then they lagged a good 20 years behind the states.  And they were probably healthier for it.

Anyway, post-war London was the environment my mother grew up in, and so I can somewhat understand her wonderment and willingness to plunge into American Supermarket Life when she moved here and married my American father. We ate hot dogs, fish sticks, TV Dinners and Stouffer's Lasagna on a regular basis.  Our next door neighbors did the same and, in another nod to convenience, ate nothing that was not served on a paper plate, thereby eliminating dishwashing.

And so my generation grew up expecting that kind of convenience, and you'd expect that most of us would simply have passed that onto our own children when we came of age.  And most of us did ... for awhile.  Sometime after the Good Times With No Social Responsibility ended (also known as the 1980's), food became important again.  Trend forecaster Faith Popcorn called it "Nesting."  Staying home more, learning the art of cooking again, and even keeping an herb garden or small veggie patch in your suburban backyard.

"Nesting" took hold with the financial uncertainties of the 1990s, along with a swing back towards natural ingredients. My generation discovered a lot of the food we'd grown up with in the 1960's was, to speak frankly, crap. Kool-Aid contained Red Dye #3, which caused cancer.  Saccharine, which was supposed to deliver us from the weight-gain of eating real sugar, also was found to cause a variety of health issues. In short, my generation realized that if they continued on the path that our naive but well-meaning parents had put is on, we'd be dead or at least in chemotherapy by age 50.

But if we started the "natural foods" trend, the next generation ran with it and made it the norm.  No longer was eating at McDonalds seen as a healthy dinner option.  No longer would Diet Coke and a can of Pringles be an acceptable lunch. If my generation went back to the land for our food ( while sometimes wistfully remembering the soft, spongy texture of Wonder Bread or the extreme sugary sweetness of a Cherry Coke), my kids' generation turned their back on all that tasty but deadly garbage completely and made endamame, quinoa, pomegranates and locally raised-and-butchered animals the new cool food. And kudos to them for it.

The new "supermarket" in town.

As I sat on the counter of the winery watching this new generation of 20-somethings and young parents fighting over a bunch of fresh snap peas from the garden, I realized that Mother Nature always has a reset button -- a generational one.  My generation pushed it, the next one furthered it along, and now we just have to make sure the new generation -- the toddlers growing up now -- understand the reasons why their grandparents and parents turned their backs on food that wasn't real, and opted for a crisp snap pea over the stale snap of a processed supermarket cookie.

I hope they understand why. I really do.