XP: Slow Food???

Peter Creasey

Peter Creasey

Peter Creasey
Surely, no one here fits this profile, even so...

‘Someone asked the other day, ‘What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?’

‘We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up,’ I informed him.

‘All the food was slow.’

‘C’mon, seriously. Where did you eat?’

‘It was a place called ‘at home,” I explained. !

‘Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.’

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn’t tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it :

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, never wore Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never traveled out of the country or had a credit card.

In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears &Roebuck.

Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer.

I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow)

We didn’t have a television in our house until I was 11.

It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God; it came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people.

I was 19 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called ‘pizza pie.’ When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It’s still the best pizza I ever had.

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the *********** and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn’t know weren’t already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 2 cents. He had to get up at 6AM every morning.

On Saturday, he had to collect the 42 cents from his customers. His favorite customers were the ones who gave him 50 cents and told him to keep the change. His least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren

Just don’t blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn’t what it used to be, is it?
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. . . . Pete
 
Jonathan, tut tut. About half of that applies to my childhood -- dinner with my folks, b&w television for the first 6 or 7 years of my life, my parents rented, it was a big deal getting my own phone. I'm a city boy so I didn't deliver newspapers and I knew all about pizza.
 
On a serious note, even people my own age goggle when I tell them that I've never eaten at a McDonald's or Burger King and that I've never drunk Coke, Pepsi or 7-Up. Part of that is due to growing up in proximity to Berkeley, where the first Mickey D's wasn't built until the mid-'70s, but the rest of it is due to growing up with parents who were Depression children, one of whom had grown up in Europe and the other of whom had lived in East Asia for two years. The closest we ever got to fast food was going out for Chinese food in SF.

Mark Lipton
 
My grandpa notes the world's worn cogs
And says we're going to the dogs.
His grandpa in his house of logs
Said things were going to the dogs.
His grandpa in the Flemish bogs
Said things were going to the dogs.
His grandpa in his hairy togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state:
The dogs have had an awful wait.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Jonathan, tut tut. About half of that applies to my childhood -- dinner with my folks, b&w television for the first 6 or 7 years of my life, my parents rented, it was a big deal getting my own phone. I'm a city boy so I didn't deliver newspapers and I knew all about pizza.
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Yes, I always ate dinner with my family. My parents didn't get a color TV until after I'd moved out of the house and was in grad school, I believe. I'm not sure why that was a good thing. I liked color movies then and like color TV now (even if many b&w films, and especially B film noirs, are truly beautiful). And although I didn't eat at them, there were White Castle hamburger joints and Howard Johnsons in the world. And my parents were nostalgic about the good old days.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
And although I didn't eat at them, there were White Castle hamburger joints and Howard Johnsons in the world. And my parents were nostalgic about the good old days.
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HoJo! Yes, they existed. I think we went there, as a family, once in a while. Clam strips!

My parents were not nostalgic for the good old days. We visited their parents every weekend so we got to see them.
 
This thread reminds me of Fritz. In New Jersey my neighbors mother came to live with them as she was getting on in years. She was a wonderful person, very sharp and a pleasure to talk to. She grew up on a farm in Virginia and witnessed in her life, among other things, the introduction of electricity and the automobile. She said that growing up on a farm they had everything they needed and the only reason to go to town--on a horse--was to trade for sugar and salt. She seemed to lament the loss of food preservation skills in modern society. They canned meat and sulphured apples for instance, the latter being a treat she particularly missed. According to her life on a farm in those days was not easy but it also wasn't at all unpleasant. And at ninety years-plus she was quite healthy.

Don't know why I'm sharing this, guess she just made a huge impression on me.
 
That is very cool. Today is my Grandma Joyce's 95th birthday. She's my Aunt Marilyn's mom and grew up in the wilds of eastern Washington State (rattlesnake country, not the PNW). She's a total treasure; I got to wish her happy birthday on Facebook, with which she keeps up to date.
 
originally posted by Kay Bixler:
She said that growing up on a farm they had everything they needed and the only reason to go to town--on a horse--was to trade for sugar and salt.
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Typically, there was one more thing people had to trade for: coffee.

They canned meat and sulphured apples for instance, the latter being a treat she particularly missed.
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One of my friends learned to sulfur fruit from her parents. I ate a sulfured banana once. It looked just awful, black and twisted, but it tasted fine.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
On a serious note, even people my own age goggle when I tell them that I've never eaten at a McDonald's or Burger King and that I've never drunk Coke, Pepsi or 7-Up. Part of that is due to growing up in proximity to Berkeley, where the first Mickey D's wasn't built until the mid-'70s, but the rest of it is due to growing up with parents who were Depression children, one of whom had grown up in Europe and the other of whom had lived in East Asia for two years. The closest we ever got to fast food was going out for Chinese food in SF.

Mark Lipton
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You should really remedy the McDonald's thing, just for the fries.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
You should really remedy the McDonald's thing, just for the fries.
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No, Mark, you don't. They're not that good. I've done very well without them for 10 or 20 years. There are much, much better fries out there.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
No, they are truly great. Kenji agrees!

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aht.seriouseats.com
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they are crap. have been so since they hyper-rationalized the entire process, moving away from decent cooking oil and adding coating to the outside of the pre-cooked potatoes.
 
originally posted by Tristan Welles:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
No, they are truly great. Kenji agrees!

Loading…

aht.seriouseats.com
Click to expand...

they are crap. have been so since they hyper-rationalized the entire process, moving away from decent cooking oil and adding coating to the outside of the pre-cooked potatoes.
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Well, we all prefer the earlier, funnier fries.
 
Wow, guys, thanks for the advice. It's actually moot as I eat about 3 French fries a year on average. Like dessert, I eschew them, preferring to get those calories from wine instead. Cheese, OTOH...
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
And although I didn't eat at them, there were White Castle hamburger joints and Howard Johnsons in the world. And my parents were nostalgic about the good old days.
Click to expand...
HoJo! Yes, they existed. I think we went there, as a family, once in a while. Clam strips!

My parents were not nostalgic for the good old days. We visited their parents every weekend so we got to see them.
Click to expand...

Ah, good ole' clam strips. The taste of New England under the orange tile roofs!
 
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