With four growing kids in my family, in the 50‘s and 60‘s, we needed to figure out a better way of feeding en masse. So the folks bought one of the first ever, chest style deep freeze, freezers.
Defrost was done usually by me or my brother. You emptied everything and put huge buckets of boiling water in to break off the accumulated ice. Once done, you would proudly put back in the frozen stuff. A big deal came when we got milk in cartons.
Before that, the milk man used to come by the house and leave cool fresh same day milk on the porch. But for when you ran out, the cartons could be frozen if Mom found them on sale somewhere. She would find them for about 5 cents and get white bread, completely without any nutrition for 10 cents. But it filled us up.
For breakfast, we had range free organic eggs; remember, there weren’t any other kind. Or cereal. Rice Krispies and special K, frosted flakes (Tony the Tiger) were my favorites because I had been brainwashed by the commercials on TV. Rice Krispies featured three little guys who were snap, crackle and pop.
I would eat the cereal, with as much sugar as I could get away with, so I could put my ear next to the cereal and hear it talk just to me. A.D.H.D. hadn’t been invented yet, so sugar was ok, except for the threat of cavities. (Are A.D.H.D. and sugar related?)
Campbell’s had just invented a canned soup that helped the teachers with our alphabets. We could find and arrange our alphabet in the bowl and try and spell our names.
Since there were no instant meals or microwaves, everything was prepared by the professional Mom, steaming and hot each evening. We did not sit and watch TV, but actually said a grace for our meal. No one ever ate before that, and then you had to actually use cutlery properly to eat. Maybe that hasn’t changed much, but today’s fast food diet and meal, unwrapped carefully after pulling out of a bag and consumed with fingers is certainly more average and normal today. It is often done in front of the TV, or at individual computers throughout the house, or while it is still semi hot, in the family “SUV”.
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