CAREER DAY 01

One of thirteen children, my grandmother grew up in “lean times.” A crowded farmhouse with too few beds and too many children was no place of packaged convenience for anyone. Work was manual. Money was scarce. Food, by extension, was something of necessity. “Putting lard on the popcorn,” my grandma recalls, “would stick to the roof of my mouth.”

One generation later, as a mother to four children, my grandma cooked like many Midwestern mothers in the 1970s: lots of canned food, lots of carbs, and lots of love. She made sure to fill the dinner table with carefully chosen favorites, simple but made from scratch. In her household, a salad might have included coolwhip and marshmallows with some canned mandarin oranges. She has always had a sweet tooth, I think.

Her yellow-paged recipe books have crossedout equations, little additions, marking when to substitute butter for oil or how to quickly multiply the recipe for her family of six. But there are so many penciled conceptualizations that don’t make the paper. Little mental notes that put care into the things she cooked. Things that make food slow. In an age of boxed dinner kits with pre-portioned seasonings or drive-thrus mass-producing the same product for twelve hours a day, the magic of slow food seems to be disappearing.

I think back to my grandmother’s childhood. Brutal prairie winters, dinners cooked to sustain the hard work in the rows of corn, a life of harsh simplicity.