I didn’t know we were poor.  Most young children don’t.  The 30’s were some of the most difficult times in our recorded history.  But I can’t recall of ever being really hungry.

If you could choose one food that you would have to eat every day, what would it be?  For me, I think I would choose the potato.  It is very nourishing, tasteful, relatively cheap and so diverse.  It can be used in so many delicious ways. During the thirties, as a young boy, I think we ate potatoes almost every day, usually in the form of potato soup and today it’s still my favorite soup.  Potatoes were as low as 20 cents a bushel and never got above a dollar in the 1930’s and living on the farm, our cows produced a lot of milk.  We separated the milk and sold five gallons of cream for $2.00 and bought a bushel of potatoes for about 25 cents, 10 pounds of sugar for 30 cents, five pounds of salt for 10 cents and some pepper for a dime and still had $1.25 to save for a rainy day.

Bread and gravy was a part of every one’s diet.  Quite often there was no meat or fat to make the gravy but water or milk, flour, salt and pepper did quite well.  Or sometimes steaming hot milk over toast (commonly known as “graveyard stew”) made for a tasty meal.  But potato soup was always my favorite.

Our chickens laid enough eggs that occasionally we could sell some;  however we ate most of them as we could only get 10 cents a dozen.

Fruits and vegetable that grew wild were a real Godsend.  Lambs Quarters and dandelions were eaten by many, Wild plums, choke cherries, gooseberries and mulberries were picked along the roadsides or wherever we could find them.

We were ahead of the times with colored sheets as we used them to catch the mulberries as we shook the branches.  Of course this stained the sheets purple in random patterns that wouldn’t wash out.

Lard on a slice of bread, with a little sugar sprinkled on, tasted pretty good as well.

Corn sold for 8 to 10 cents a bushel and was often burned instead of coal to heat homes.

We sometimes ate field corn, toasted or baked in butter and salt.  This was a snack that lasted a long time as the kernels were rather hard to chew but tasted pretty good.

It sounds like we ate pretty good; however, there were times the chickens weren’t laying and the cows were not producing enough milk because of the lack of food for them so we wouldn’t have anything to sell or more money was needed to buy coal in the winter.

I would hope we will never have to experience what we went through in the 30’s, but years later, as my banker used to say, “they were character building years”.

If you ever think you didn’t have a good meal, read Frank McCourt’s book, “Angela’s Ashes”.