[Granville-Hough] 5 May 2009 - Diet

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Tue, 05 May 2009 07:16:48 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Diet - 5 May 2009

What did SullivanÆs 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.