Grocery Stores, food, and nutrition

Do you ever wonder how much we lost with technology?  I mean you can go into any grocery store at almost any given time and pick up an entire meal without batting an eyelash.  It could be a complete meal from a deli, or a boxed meal from the shelves, or individual ingredients to take home and transform into a meal.  The choices are limitless, and they are all within our reach.

But when was the last time you REALLY thought about all that convenience?  Do you read the ingredients on packages?  Do you know what they are?  How to pronounce them?  Do you care so long as dinner is ready on time?

I just recently started REALLY REALLY paying attention.  It started with my finding out that Pepsi is made by using aborted human fetuses.  YUCK!  True story, by the way....I didn't believe it either, so I looked it up.  As if that isn't bad enough, Kraft and Nestle do the same thing in the making of their products!  Double, and TRIPLE YUUUUUCCCKK!  And of course the ultimate shocker?  President Obama has declared this "business as usual".  WHAT?!!!  If they can seriously do THAT to our food, what else is in there?

I don't know.  Thats the problem.  And I'm not looking to take college level chemistry classes to try to decipher those unknown ingredients either.   So that is what got me to where I am now.  Making as much as possible from "scratch".  

I was blessed to inherit my Grandma Birchard's old Betty Crocker Cook Book (copywrited 1956).  I love it.  I love the comments.  I love the nestalgia.  I love that almost everything that I've ever tried to make from the recipes comes out nearly perfect.  And I love reading the little tips and tidbits so lovingly included.  Of course, some of it is purely humorous in todays society, though maybe still applicable? "If you're tired from overwork, Household chores you're bound to shirk.  Read these pointers tried and true And discover what to do."  Those "pointers" by the way, are things like "wear comfortable clothes and shoes while working" "Use good posture" and "harbor pleasant thoughts". 

I would love to see what the grocery stores were like back then.  I would love to look at the things they had on the shelves.  Apparently, up until the 50s there were hundreds of small little grocery stores all over the place.  Did they have "convenience foods"?  What were the ingredients in those?  I know my grandparents were all farm kids.  They grew a lot of their own food.  And even into my parents generation my mom will tell you that things like bottled juice were almost non-existant in their household.  They worked.  They supported themselves.  And I bet they could pronounce all of the ingredients in their food and had a pretty good idea as to where it came from.  What an awesome concept......