Libby wrote:
On Nov 9, 5:24 am, George Shirley wrote:
Help an old demographer out: How many of you who are currently
involved in canning and preserving your own food, whether you grow
it or not, were raised in rural areas? Conversely how many were
raised in urban areas?

Well... semi-rural, sort of, on occasion. When I wasn't anywhere else,
I stayed with my grandparents in Bakersfield, California. While even in
the late '50s and '60s it was definitely urban, they lived far from the
city center (about a 10-15 minute drive) and had a large yard (front
one, too, until in the early '70s most of it was taken for eminent
domain to widen the canal across South H Street). They owned a
roadhouse called Flo's Log Cabin in the shape of a log cabin even
further out, and my grandfather commuted to Los Angeles as a master
baker in a kosher bakery. He was gone 3 days a week and back 3 days,
although being that he worked for almost those 3 days straight he was
sleeping the first day back and part of the second.

While my grandmother didn't garden, per se, lots of foodstuffs were
grown. Fig tree, almond, apricot, loquat, grapevines were available,
for example. She did have a couple tomatoes in the summer, as well as
cucumbers, and eggplant scattered about. And she could cook... in fact,
after my grandfather died, the fellow who'd married her late sister
asked her to marry him because "I've missed the cooking of a Zabarsky
girl." (she was 72 right then). She always had projects going (I won't
list all her accomplishments, but she could sew a princess dress for my
mother without a patten as well as drive an 18-wheeler).

Preserving projects included drying apricots, making apricot jam, (the
tree was quite prolific in season), fig jam, pickles, candying the
loquats, all with me actively involved in assisting. She'd also get
cases of this or that from the produce guy at what passed for a
supermarket near by... while my grandfather was making wine and root
beer and cider in the garage. It wasn't subsistance preserving by any
means, but it wasn't simply hobbyist either.

Then again, during the time I was in Salinas, California (Steinbeck
country), again, it was urban, but we lived 5 houses from the fields at
the very outskirts of the town (it was only 23,000 at the time).
Lettuce was grown there, as well as cauliflower, broccoli, and the other
cole crops, There were artichoke bushes in our back yard. I was given
a small plot behind the garage to garden--I'm afraid I wasn't as
assidous at as I should have been, but I had radishes, carrots, the
ubiquitous eggplant, a row of corn, mustard greens.

So even though we were never really "country folk" I've been surrounded
by many of those principles from an early age.

B/