As I was eating my bagel with peanut butter ....

As I was eating my bagel with peanut butter and drinking my cup of green tea this morning, it occurred to me how different what I eat now is from what I ate as a child. Of course, one reason is that I choose what I eat now and my mother chose most of what I ate as a child. But it’s more than that.

For breakfast, in my childhood, there would be buttered (with margarine that we called “oleo”) toast (white bread, of course, from the local Dandee bread bakery), jelly (Grandmother Roberts’ homemade guava—my favorite-- jelly or Grandmother Hunter’s homemade orange marmalade that I didn’t care for. Also eggs, either scrambled or fried, or occasionally hard-boiled, but never soft-boiled. Bacon, too, of course, fried and the fat saved for seasoning for cooking vegetables. I’d never heard of a bagel, and English muffin, or a croissant, and wouldn’t until I was grown.

For the lunch I took to school, Mama made a fried Spam sandwich (boy, didn’t the classroom smell good long about 11:00—IF you liked the smell of Spam) The white bread was spread with Miracle Whip, never plain mayonnaise, and if Mama had made cookies, there’d be one or two included on the side. Both wrapped in waxed paper, and carried in a brown paper bag that I reused umpteen times until the bottom threatened to fall out.

Today lunch for me is liable to be a big salad of various lettuces, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, cauliflower, onion, and tuna fish or sliced turkey breast.

In my childhood, we never ate tuna fish (why would we? Daddy brought fresh fish---free—almost every day), or turkey except at Thanksgiving, and even then it might be chicken. We never had fresh spinach or cauliflower and I thought I didn’t like onions or cucumbers.

We did eat lots of fruit when I was a child—bananas, apples, grapes, mangos, strawberries, and citrus fruits of all kinds, but no cherries, blueberries, raspberries that are so ‘in’ now (and so expensive.)

Dinner. Now there’s where nothing overlaps. For five nights every week when I was a child, we had fried fish (the kind varied with what Daddy was catching—I loved them all), grits, cole slaw, sliced tomatoes, pickles, and some vegetable such as corn or green beans. On weekends, we had pot roast, or stewed chicken, or boiled ham, plus mashed potatoes, gravy, field peas or black-eyed peas, plus sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, pickles and bread (white). Dessert was usually Jello with fruit cocktail inside, or maybe canned peaches or pears (that I liked a lot better than the fruit cocktail.)

Today I can rarely afford to have fish, and when I do I usually broil it. I almost never have pot roast or ham or mashed potatoes or pickles or those delicious field peas. The bread I eat is multi-grain, when I eat it.

 could go on and on, but you get the picture. Conditions change, tastes change, the culture changes, and with it goes the old menu.