"Hard Boiled Egg"

The Massachusetts Minimum Size Requirements for Farm Animal Containment, also known as Question 3, was on the November 8, 2016, ballot in Massachusetts as an indirect initiated state statute. It was approved.

A "yes" vote supported this proposal to prohibit the sale of eggs, veal, or pork of a farm animal confined in spaces that prevent the animal from lying down, standing up, extending its limbs, or turning around.

A "no" vote opposed this proposal.

Millie:  "There were always nine people to feed."

 "We ate A LOT of eggs."

Diane: "I have experienced hunger and homelessness with my family.'

"I have pawned jewelry inherited from my grandmother to feed my children."

"I have dug through my sofa for enough change to buy a dozen eggs for dinner."

Millie: " We 'd walk by Grandma's after church after she'd  baked bread.  If she was home we'd stay and visit.  If she wasn't, we ate all her food. We'd spread mustard on the homemade bread..."

 "Mom baked bread every Saturday; she made loaves enough to last all week.  She baked home made donuts with some of the dough. The older kids told us younger ones biting into a donut hole would kill us.  And when we left a chewed around hole behind, the older kids came after and ate them all.....  

Diane: "I was a mom and grandma struggling to pay my bills, working two jobs, unaware that so much money and effort was being earned and spent to bad mouth our food system, those who grow, and those of us who do not eat from their politically correct menus."

"I had no idea how indifferent the food police are to those who struggle and cannot afford to take our food for granted."

"Ninety percent of egg customers vote for conventional eggs when we shop, yet big retail ag let themselves be bullied by vegans who, ironically, are not even their egg and meat customers."

Diane: "The perception that farm groups are going after federal nutrition spending for the poor divides the urban and rural coalition, playing right into the hands and policies of the food police."

 Dianne Sullivan is standing in front of 1200 Missouri farmers, a moral force behind the podium, her sentences short, her message stinging  like BBs.  

"We must be more united and assertive in protecting and distributing our abundance."  

"We must have the voices of victims in this debate join with those who produce."

"The voice of low and middle income consumers can no longer be excluded from the negotiating tables."

"It is imperative that we restore the farm bill coalition, uniting urban and rural partnerships, to promote food security and protect our dinner plates from the self-appointed food police."

Dianne is speaking to us food producers about food consumers....not the consumers that propelled Massachusetts Question 3 to victory in November, not the ones purportedly eating their sausage and eggs without guilt, knowing the hog wallowed and the chicken scratched before becoming over easy in a quaint New England diner. No, the consumers Diane is speaking for are people like my mother-in-law and most farm families in the not so distant past: hard working, hard scrabble, hand to mouth folks. People on a budget, people who cut coupons, people whose grocery carts have gallons of milk, peanut butter, eggs, and whatever is on sale that week. The "food elite" and "food police" Diane dismisses might consider a pantry full of such basics barren in taste or choice, but it offers what is most necessary: bounty and energy at a reasonable price. Her emphasis on the cost of food is a necessary and potent reminder to those of us who grow it: our allies in the debate about the indispensability of scientific and modern inputs and methods in agriculture cannot afford the luxury of free range, GMO free, or other even less measurable and efficacious adjectives to describe their dinner. They are even more powerless against the bankroll and celebrity cache' of organizations like HSUS and the Sierra Club. ( More endorsements of Question 3)

Diane: "As you know, corporate agriculture and big retail has the ability to pinch producers on one end and pass costs on to consumers on the other end, making it all too easy for some of them to lie down, roll over, and play dead, whenever HSUS marches in with their list of demands. " 

"As I shared before every Massachusetts audience I encountered, question 3 is a regressive food tax, hitting poor people the hardest and according to Cornell, will cost consumers nearly $250 million in higher food costs the first year alone."

"This is the definition of social injustice: those elite with money and satisfied choices imposing burdens on those with neither."

Those of us who are the second and third ....or the fourth...or fifth generations of family farmers...have heard tell how our parents, grandparents, and ancestors worked and sacrificed to make a living and feed their families. Their stories are our heritage...and our conscience in the food fights of this era of prosperity. The mindset that ignores the well being of our neighbor in pursuit of some endgame in which animals are landscape, not menu, is not merely selfish, but immoral. Food is for people and farmers' mission is to provide it the best way they know how. To that end:

Diane: "American agriculture does provide the safest abundance in the world."

"It does so more sustainably than anywhere else in the world."

"American agriculture is the envy of the world".

"American agriculture will decide whether growing world food demand is met or, tragically, whether we fail."

"How much courage should it take to stand up for that?"

 "This is a call to action. And remember, in the end, you will be judged by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg."

This Old Porch and The Farmer's Wife

This old porch is like a big old

red and white Hereford bull

Standing under a mesquite tree

Out in Agua Dulce.

And he just keeps on playing hide and seek

With that hot August sun

Just a-sweatin' and a-pantin'

Cause his work is never done.

And this old porch is just a long time

Of waiting and forgetting

And remembering the coming back

And not crying about the leaving....

Lyle Lovett

               

There was a big crack in the southwest corner of the porch foundation when we moved to Spruce 14 years ago.  It didn't make me happy at the time; an obvious major project for the future, just another addition to all those repairs and renovations one comes across while living in an old house, to be dealt with depending upon the level of duress and emergency.  Example one: tree roots plugging up sewer line while wedding party stays at house over the Christmas holiday..major stress, red lights, sirens screeching, ambulance, 911, emergency repair.  Example two: leisurely removal of wallpaper from two different rooms with repainting as a pleasure, not a pain...a nip here, tuck there, touch up the hairdo, new outfit discretionary type remodel.

We lived with the crack for a decade or so, fixing other big ticket items...windows, a new chimney, guttering, a new paint job...but a few years ago, water began to run into the basement around the washer and dryer and the pier at that corner seemed to be settling underneath the massive concrete floor of the crown jewel of 502 Spruce, the front porch. 

Repairing our foundation climbed to the top of the to-do list....

Here is a short version of the efforts to secure someone to take on "This Old Porch":  Two different firms that made appointments to look at the job and make a bid...and not only didn't show up, but argued with Blake about the dates and times of the appointments they had scheduled.  One guy that wanted to be paid just to come look at the porch and provide an estimate. One firm that did look at the job and made a bid so over the top our mouths fell open in shock and awe....but when he didn't show up for six months to work on it we assumed he didn't need that much work no matter what the money.  

Moral of the story: Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys, but by all means, encourage them to become mudjackers.  They'll thank you when they retire to a condo on a beach or a dock on the Lake..with their future secure!

There is a happy ending.  This weekend Blake and I will sit in the shade of the sycamores under in the shelter of our newly repaired, square and straight, jacked up and squeezed together century old porch.  Yes, indeedy, the task was begun, interrupted, reconsidered, reconceived, and then completed, all within this week. The front garden took a hit, but, as I told the man in charge, I can always plant more daylilies...I cannot repair a foundation.

That was one to mark off the to-do list for this week...and another was scanning all six years of Millie's "The Farmer's Wife" articles and saving them digitally.  This task proceeded as one would expect: the computer running Windows 10 would not communicate with my handy scanner precipitating a return to Windows 7 (fine by me, I was forced against my will to "upgrade" as it was.) But once that hurdle was overcome, it was just a matter of feeding each week into the scanner and watching the images and stories appear on the screen.  

What a joy to revisit these pieces!  Like opening a grab bag gift or taking a bite out of that proverbial Forrest Gump chocolate! Sometimes she wrote about a chapter of local history like the articles about St. John's or the bomber that crashed east of Tarkio in 1944. She followed the perennial parade of the seasons with notes about the birds in her yard and garden and feeders, how the crops were faring, the work on the farm, the good weather, bad weather, drought and floods, storms and sunshine here in northwest Missouri. We kept up on the activities of friends and family...and whoever isn't part of Millie's family is her friend and laughed with her at the antics of her kids...her grandkids...even other people's grandkids.  Millie is a humorist of the most generous kind; she is never afraid to tell a funny story on herself.

But amid the humor, there are stories of great poignancy, reminding us that all the great lives come with sorrow and loss: the week she wrote about tearing down her childhood home, the week she remembered the fire that destroyed their house, the short tribute to one of her very best friends.  

We take for granted the ability to run a "Google"search whenever our curiosity is piqued. But my very favorite kind of history is this type of personal recollection; part experience, part storytelling, built on a foundation of ties to people and place. These are stories that celebrate "remembering the coming back" and "not crying about the leaving." I am so grateful Millie has saved all these 'hard copies' of her efforts in tidy chronologically ordered notebooks. Millie has always told us she'd write a book someday; I'm here to tell you she already has!

From Scratch II

" I had a greengage tree, that's the best of all plants, espaliered on the wall outside my bedroom. And there is nothing that tastes better than a warm greengage plucked out of your bedroom window on a summer evening. And I did have the extraordinary good fortune to grow up eating what I think the romantic movement dreams of. We had milk fresh from the cow; I never had pasteurized milk until I went to school. We had fish from the river, pheasant from the farm. The food was extremely good. French friends used to come and stay for great long periods of time because they liked it so much. It wasn't fancy, but it was--we never had cans, we never had tins, we never had--everything was fresh from the garden. So, I do romanticize--some of that because the taste was often extraordinary. " Rachel Laudan, author of Cuisine and Empire, from the interview with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast: (Rachel Laudan on the History of Food)

"This book of recipes of wonderful things to eat suggests that we were all raised with a background and heritage of good food, and for the most part, this is true.  But the definition of luxury food has changed over the years.  What is now economy food was in some cases a luxury item 50 years ago. For example, chicken is now one of the cheapest meats, but several decades ago chicken was the choice for Sunday dinner or when there were guests.  Lucky indeed was the man who married a girl that could fry chicken since it was an inborn trait."
C. John Renken, Jr. , Introduction to The Renken's Recipes to Die For, Thanksgiving 1992

Nelson Ladies with Peach orchard

Millie: "Mom baked bread every Saturday; she made loaves enough to last all week.  She baked home made donuts with some of the dough. The older kids told us younger ones biting into a donut hole would kill us.  And when we left a chewed around hole behind, the older kids came after and ate them all.....   Mom baked biscuits from scratch every morning for breakfast...biscuits and gravy and fried leftover potatoes and fried beef.  We got a bucket of beef every week from the Farmers City beef club; it was always gone by Friday.  Mom had to get up early to get the fire going in the wood stove to cook breakfast."

Charlie :  "There was an upstairs room in the old house that we stored salted meat in.  When we tore the house down, it still smelled like Morton salt. We didn't eat much beef....mostly pork and chicken. "

Millie: "We only had iced tea...though it wasn't cold...when the haymen or threshers came to work and eat with us.  That's when we would eat "special food" like chicken..  First the men would eat, then the children, and the women would eat after everyone else was finished.  Everything was from scratch.  We ate roast, noodles, and a lot of hash...onions, beef, and leftover potatoes."

Millie: "My grandma kept butter and milk cold in her well. We had an icebox. Mom made cottage cheese every week, setting milk out in a crock on an enameled table in the kitchen.  We churned butter by hand and separated the cream. "

Charlie: "We had a water separator for cream; it was a 10 gallon column with a valve at the bottom and a sight gauge.  You'd pour the milk in the top and then pour in water.  The water made the cream separate faster.  You'd open the valve to let out the cream.  The chickens got the leftover milk and water.  It stood on a three legged stand."

Millie: "We'd shell peas til our fingers blistered."

Charlie: "Mom tried shelling peas onto a sheet by running them through the Maytag wringer washer...peas flew everywhere!"

Millie: " We 'd walk by Grandma's after church after she'd  baked bread.  If she was home we'd stay and visit.  If she wasn't, we ate all her food. We'd spread mustard on the homemade bread..."

Young Charlie Hurst

Charlie: "When I was six, we had three single men and the school teacher living upstairs and eating with us."

Millie:  "There were always nine people to feed."

"Raising five kids on a letter carrier's salary required holding the weekly grocery bill down but we certainly never went hungry.  However we did have some menus which represented a real challenge to a kid's palate.  Even now, I can feel the gorge rising at the thought of breaded beef brains or fried eggplant.  Often when something new was on the evening menu, Mom would take me aside before the meal and charge me with trying the new food and showing a favorable response to my younger brother and sisters. The responsibility was awesome; at the first bite, I could see their eyes scanning my throat muscles.....
.....Dad was also the recipient of occasional gifts of dressed coon from some of his patrons especially when he was carrying mail in the east side of town.  Mom would dutifully bake the coon.  I can't remember any negative reaction to it which means it must have been good.  Dad and I would also go down to Weir's creek below Lincoln University and seine for crawdads which were delicious.  We frequently received gifts of cooked cheese which was a special treat on homemade bread.  Momma Beck would buy it from out in the country.  I have never seen anything like it in the supermarkets or delicatessens.  I don't know its proper name; maybe it doesn't exist anymore except perhaps in rural Germany or Switzerland."  C. John Renken, Jr.

 Millie: "We ate A LOT of eggs."

Charlie: "You had to boil and boil to get rid of enough salt to make that pork edible."

 If we say that peasants in the past ate healthier and safer food, it's easy to translate that into the world of development and say, 'We really want people to stay in small farms on the land. We want women in South Africa to continue pounding their maize in a mortar with a great big pestle.' And to condemn them to the kind of poverty that our ancestors escaped, 3, 4, 5, 6 generations ago. I think we just simply have to give up the myth of a golden age in the past that is a template for the present.
Rachel Laudan

History professor Rachel Laudan wishes critics of today's food systems would  look back to the not so distant past and have a conversation or two with people who truly ate what they grew and lived on the food available seasonally.  Folks who were pork folks...or beef folks...and killed, not the fatted calf, but a squawking chicken, when company called.  The breakfast my husband's grandmother prepared for her large family every morning: from scratch biscuits and gravy, fried steak and potatoes, cornmeal mush, sounds like a feast. But it required her to rise early to revive the fire in the wood stove to bake and fry and boil the water she hauled from the well to clean up the dishes afterward.   Today's abundance of food is no mystery; it is the result of both the revolutionary increase in productivity on the farm and a concurrent transformation of processing, preserving and transportation, increasing not just the amount of food available, but giving consumers of all incomes an astronomical increase of choices and variety....

And then I tweak myself and I say, 'Look, Rachel, your mother spent all day, every day gardening or cooking.' Essentially. As well as doing other chores. And she said to you, 'Rachel, it's servitude. I want you to have a life I didn't have.' And here I am sitting in this very privileged position of having had a life as an academic, which has to be one of the happiest situations a human being can find themselves in, with time to think and money to live on and the chance to travel. Rachel Laudan

  Whenever we add up the pluses and minuses of a modern food system, we are less than honest if we do not include the freedom to do something else with one's time and talent besides make a meal.  Cooking can be art, created and composed with loving attention to the mingling of tastes and textures; we all remember and treasure meals like that.  But food is also fuel and sustenance; the world is a richer place if Mom throws a take and bake pizza in the oven before she goes to church for children's choir with one kid and Dad gets home from coaching Little League with the other....

We haven''t always had that choice....
 

Renken family circa mid 60s

Mighty Fine May

Monday, May 4th, a moist morning, not unlike the early morning eight years ago when Blake and I headed out to the greenhouse to work with some of our brain directed to the business of selling flowers, but all of our heart a few miles south where Ann and Matt waited for the arrival of the newest family member.

Today we make a stop at Casey's to pick up a dozen doughnuts, including the flower shaped ones we know are Lizzie's favorites. As she blows out her doughnut birthday candle, I think: is there anyone with better reasons to celebrate Mother's Day week than I?

Forget the whole greenhouse thing...Yes, for reasons both natural and man made, we anticipate a string of days jam packed with deliveries to landscapers, fund raisers, garden centers, and all matter of other ephemeral customers that appear like earthworms after a rain when the irresistible urge to dig and beautify comes over the populace.

But that meme is so commonplace as to be cliche. This week in May means more than corsages and coleus, ageratum in a Dixie cup or treating Grandma to a buffet after church.
To me, Mother's Day is the exclamation point at the end of a week when, eight years ago, this mom became a grandmother again....and again... and again... a momentous occasion and really quite a bit over the top in terms of Mother's Day gifts!

Celebrating Lizzie's birthday on the 4th and turning around to party again with Gabe and Abbie is sufficient reminder every May of the unutterable joy and miracle of their existence and the adventure that was May 2007.

Sometimes Millie's birthday falls on Mother's Day too!

 If she isn't otherwise occupied, I hope Millie will ride along with her oldest son on a plant delivery this week or next to pick out something pretty...a blooming shrub or some hardy hot weather bloomer. The plants are fun, but they are just a ruse for Blake to spend a half day with his mom this week of her birthday.

And then there is my own mother. As a youngster, I thought my mother could do everything well; she cooked and baked and sewed and cleaned. She painted and took pictures; she helped with Sunday school puppets and Girl Scout badges. These were accomplishments that were important and impressive to a little girl.

When poison ivy made her legs a mass of miserable blisters, she didn't stay home from our class field trip to the Planetarium...no, she whipped up a long gathered floral skirt and carried the look off with aplomb. My mother didn't join the work force until I was in high school, but in ten years, she was the director of personnel. She's been my father's right hand man for nearly sixty years....together they proscribed my more foolish activities when I was growing up, but never discouraged my imagination. My mother could make me a Winnie the Pooh...and explain calculus...develop photos in the kitchen and plant a garden tapestry like Monet. My father always told my sister and me she'd be perfect if she could only sing like Elly Ameling.

Elly Ameling and Schubert's Shepherd on the Rock

I can't sing either....

......... unless it's a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday....

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Egg-sessive?

Shhhh!

It may not be general knowledge but after more than a decade of empty nests, fowls are playing once again north of town on Route O.

Like many another cagey operation, this one began behind closed doors....closed garage doors, that is. In past years, the nucleus was an ordinary playpen, but this time around the feathers were flying behind an
impr-egg-nable fence of discarded pallets. No de-fence-less nesting place here!

Ask not which came first: the Chicken or the Egg.

In due course, the egg-sistence of so much bounty could not fail to be egg-sposed. You know the old joke about zucchini? If you don't lock your car someone will break in and leave a squash? Like some off season Easter Bunny, an unlocked house or open door will result in a dozen beautiful clean brown eggs on the counter. Go to Sunday school or church and an egg-stra blessing will appear on your front seat. Stop for a cup of coffee....and leave with brunch for the next day! In its most natural aggr-egg-ation, of course.

But don't get egg-cited! Our fertile minds had no trouble whipping up ways to put this egg-stra egg-stravagance to good use! Just a few egg-samples:

Two dozen loaves of apple bread in December (2 per).

Four cream cheese coffeecakes (5 per).

Six Chinese coffeecakes (3 per).

8 FB coffeecakes (2 per)

Two cream cheese pound cakes (1 dozen each!)..yeah, I know...don't be judgmental... Poppy seed cakes (3 each). Butter cakes (4 per). Gooey butter cake (hmmm, don't know) . Dozens of cookies.

Egg casseroles (half dozen), quiches (5 per) for dinners and suppers. And an in-egg-spressible tally of omelets, homemade McMuffins, huevos rancheros, fried eggs or scrambled eggs for meals in a hurry.

Eggs...we're the people who cook 'em...and eat 'em.. We can only egg-spress our hopes that the Queen of the Hen House will soon be in fine feather and ruling her Roost!

After all, there's no better way to consume all those eggs than....

in one of Millie's homemade Angel Food Cakes!

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