[Granville-Hough] 5 May 2009 - Diet
Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough
gwhough at oakapple.net
Thu Aug 5 06:24:55 PDT 2010
What did Sullivans Hollow folks eat?
News that Mize (our one square mile capital city and school) no longer
had a grocery store did not seem strange to me. When I lived in Smith
County, I never once went to a grocery store. I did not need to, and it
would have cost money, for which I had better uses when I had any. We
grew everything I ate, but we did buy salt, vanilla, and other
flavorings. Cattle furnished milk, butter, beef, and tallow. Hogs
furnished pork, sausage, and lard for cooking and other uses. Chickens
furnished eggs and meat. We grew sugar cane for molasses and sugar. Our
great source of fiber and starch was corn. Our work required about 4000
calories daily, and I would guess 1000 calories came from corn. (We did
change from white corn to yellow corn to get the niacin needed to
prevent pellegra. We also used commercial fertilizers which contained
iodine to prevent goiter.) We grew field peas for summer and we had
dried peas for winter. We had a fruit orchard from which we got fresh,
dried, and canned peaches, figs, apples, grapes, scuppernongs, and
muscadines. We grew sweet and Irish potatoes and sometimes rutabegas
which we could store for winter. We had watermelons and canteloupes for
summer months and peanuts for winter months. Our garden included turnip
greens, English peas, beets, string beans, butter beans, squash,
cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, and the everpresent collard
greens for winter months. We frequently put a little patch of popcorn in
some place far removed from regular corn so it would not cross-polinate,
and that was our popcorn ball source. We made our own peanut butter,
catsup, sausage, pepper sauce. We had our own wild pecans, hickory nuts,
chinquapins, blackberries, huckleberries, and plums. We frequently made
sassafras tea, which went very well on a cold day. I would say that our
farm was not focused on making money, but rather on eating well. We
preferred it that way.
I would not say others were so focused. They wanted every inch of their
farm in some cash crop. They wanted their farms to make money, not
merely sustain life. They were the ones most likely to be in debt. So
you had this range, and some were successful one way, and others some
other way. The tenant farmers had it worst, as they could only depend of
the vagaries of the land-owner. When the opportunities arose in WW II to
find better lives elsewhere, half the population left. The ones who
remained gradually shifted into a money economy, grew whatever could be
sold on world markets, and shopped at grocery stores in the larger towns
for food. Life does change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
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