F is for Food

 

Food delivery the more things change....

When I was in elementary school we lived in a small town 30 miles from Oklahoma City. In the morning Momma would call the grocery store, order groceries and Melvin would deliver them. He and his wife Mary Ann owned and ran the store. Melvin was Daddy's cousin and best friend and Mary Ann was Momma's cousin and best friend. Did I say it was a small town?

One time Melvin delivered to our neighbor Adelaide. Actually I think she was one of the few people in town who were not related to one or the other of my parents. Anyway, Melvin knocked on the door and someone called "Come in." So Melvin did. Nobody in that town locked their doors in those days. As he discovered, Adelaide was not at home. No one was. Just Adelaide's parrot. So Melvin put the refrigerator items away and left the rest of the order on the kitchen table.

Almost everyone else on our street was related to us. Mother's mother lived next door. Two of Grandma's brothers and their families live behind us. Daddy's parents lived across the street. And Mother's father's sister and her husband lived next door to them.

It was a great place to be a kid. There were cousins to play with and aunts who were generous cooks. Aunt June would give us ketchup sandwiches made with homemade ketchup and light bread. Aunt Emma always had sweets of some kind. One Grandma had store-bought cookies and the other had homemade ones. It's a wonder us kids were ever hungry for supper.

Everybody had their own chickens and gardens and fruit trees. Nobody bought chicken at the grocery store. Of course this was before refrigerated trucks and Tyson's industrial chicken farms.

A couple of years ago the stores here in Lakewood started delivering groceries. Even Walmart. From The Denver Post, April 12, 2018,"Grocery delivery competition speeds up as King Soopers adds 2-hour service in Colorado." 

I guess it'd been so long since grocery stores delivered, that it made the news and Lakewood is a much larger town with more grocery stores so competition was inevitable.

Even as interwoven as our relationships were in that small town, we're much more dependent on a much wider community now. Fruit out of season is from Mexico. Even fruit in season comes from all over the United States. Because of the way Federal subsidies are set up our milk is usually from dairies that are instate. Unless, it's some kind of nondairy milk. (Is that an oxymoron?) Almond milk comes from California. Coffee and tea and chocolate come from even farther away.

When I was a kid, I didn't think too much about where our food came from or worry that we might not have enough. In-season we ate out of the garden. Out-of-season we had jars of canned produce that were put up in the summer.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, I'm a lot more aware of just how vital those farm workers scattered around this continent and, indeed the world, are. How important the truck drivers who deliver the food to our town are. And the grocery store employees who stock the shelves, or gather what we need from those shelves for curb-side pickup, and those who deliver to our door.

I'm not ready to keep chickens again, but I think I will plant a small kitchen garden. And, if I need to, I can go online and order groceries delivered.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, but with much more appreciation.