The Rural Voice, 1998-06, Page 8"Now is the
time when we
need a tire we
can bank on".
The GOODYEAR
TRACTION TORQUE
14.9-28 $ 320.00
16.9-30 $ 380.00
18.4-30 $ 405.00
CaII about our GOODYEAR On -Farm
Service. We come to you, so you
can concentrate on your work.
Get It At
McArthur Tire
Hanover 364-2661
Owen Sound 376-3520
GOODYEAR
#f in Tres
4 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Tastes change, even in the country
There are people who say things
never change in the country, but as I
got the barbecue out the other day, I
stopped to think how much even our
diets have changed since I was
running around on the farm as a
youngster.
I guess I'm
showing my age
when I recall
that barbecue
was once a
foreign, citified
idea that seemed
like it would
never catch on
in the country.
Now, of course,
there's a
propane
barbecue parked
in the back yard
of nearly every
farm — some of
which cost
nearly the price of a new kitchen
stove.
At least a barbecue goes along
with the good old tradition of meat
and potatoes of us country people.
Some of the other food trends
couldn't have been predicted when 1
was a kid.
I remember, for instance, when
the first salad bar opened in our
village — not all that many years
ago, come to think about it. Now
when I was growing up, putting salad
on the table in front of working farm
men was likely to bring comments
about it being something to feed to
cows, not people. Now, of course,
you're apt to see even big burly men
putting salad on their plates at
restaurants and banquets.
Then there's pasta. Pasta seems to
be the food of the '90s. Whole
shelves of cookbooks have been
written about different ways to
prcpare pasta. When I was a kid we
had spaghetti (in a can) and
macaroni. Check out the shelves in
your supermarket today. There are
entire sections given over to dozens
of kinds of pasta in different shapes
and textures and exotic names.
Of course growing up on a Bruce
County farm in the 1950s, we not
only ate mostly "Canadian" food, but
food from our own farm and garden.
We weren't going to waste precious
cash buying things we didn't have to
when we could cat well from what
we produced ourselves. So mom and
grandma canned and preserved (we
didn't even have a refrigerator, let
alone a freezer for the early years of
my childhood). We ate our own
chickens and our beef was from our
own farm, frozen and kept in the
freezer locker service at the
creamery. Ice cream was a special
treat, brought home wrapped in
newspaper for insulation and eaten
immediately before it melted.
Meals in a restaurant were a rare
treat (whereas today my business
takes me to restaurants so often I'd
just about as soon eat peanut butter
sandwiches at home).
Exotic foods in those days before
we shipped food all over the world
would be an orange or a banana. I'd
never even heard of a kiwi fruit or
kohlrabi or egg plant or artichokes.
Alfalfa sprouts was a disaster that
happened when you were trying to
combine alfalfa seed and had a wet
year.
Pizza was a mysterious ethnic
food when it first began showing up.
Little did we know we'd be doing
Chinese stir -fry cooking in our own
kitchens or Mexican tacos and
burritos. People are experimenting
with Greek cooking, Italian cooking,
French cooking. Who knows, with
the heavy population of southern
Asians and Somalis and West Indians
how long it will be before some foods
from these cultures cross over.
Some of the changes came
because of immigration, some
through better communications'
opening us up to world trends, and
much of it due to a greater prosperity
that allowed us to eat what we
wanted, not what we had.
All of which, of course, has
changed the growing and processing
of food. Those changes will likely
continue, giving us more variety in
what we eat, and in what we grow on
our farms. Even in the country,
change is constant.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice. Ile
lives near Blyth, ON.