Where does our food come from

Warning!!! Some of this content may cause some people to squirm.

Having spent a lot of my childhood holidays on my grandparents farm, a lot of my food memories stem from then.

Fresh meat and chicken, were always on the menu, and when I say fresh, I really mean fresh.
You hear the advertisements from Woolworths the "Fresh Food People," or  fresh from the paddock to the table.
Our food really was from the paddock to the table.

We live in a society where people, like to think that milk comes from cartons,  meat, chicken fruit and veges come from the supermarket.
We don't want to think of where our food actually comes from, or how it gets on the supermarket shelves, we just want to eat it.
If we think about it or even talk about it, god forbid what will happen to our children.

They need to be sheltered from such horrendous activities, as killing our animals to feed our families.
They have petting farms, and agricultrual shows, where they can go and see the cute little baby animals, and they don't need to know why they are being born and bred.
Then mum will take them to get a chesseburger and they innocently go on with life.

In my family nothing was wasted, meat was cooked, bones were boiled up to make soup, then given to the dogs to eat. Vegetables come from the garden, and the scraps were given to the chickens.

I remember going down to the vegetable paddock with my pop, and he would pick a carrot out of the ground, wash it in the dam water and give it to me to eat or pull off an cob of corn, clean it up and it would be a nice fresh snack.
We would pick peas, beans, potatoes, corn & carrots out of the garden and take up to the house for nan to cook.

One of my pops' had a farm and a lot of cows to milk, he would milk them in the morning and at night.  The milkng machines would be attached to the cows and the milk would go through the machines and into a big cooling vat.

Twice a day  the man from the dairy would come in his big truck and pump the milk from the vat into the tanker and transport it to the dairy to be processed and put into cartons, or make cheese or to be used however they decide to use it. 
Sometimes, pop would  bypass the vat and pour a bucket of milk to be used at the house.

My other pop had a house cow, he did not have a farm, but did live on a small property.
Everyday pop would go out with his bucket and stool and hand milk the cow for milk for the day.

We never had a shortage of milk.

Every afternoon we would go out to the chook shed and collect the eggs. Chickens are funny creatures, you build them their own shed, with private little laying boxes,  but if you let them out for the day, they will find a spot in, say, the haystack and lay their eggs there. It was like an easter egg hunt looking for the fresh eggs that weren't in the chicken shed.

I remember I would go with my pop and a trailer load of calves, to a place where a man would weigh the calves and pay my pop some money.  Then we would go home.
I knew at a young age that these calves were being sold to used as meat.

I would watch in awe, when a sheep was caught and slaughtered to chop up for the freezer. The farm dogs would also love it.
I used to help my nan, chase, kill and pluck the chickens to be cooked. Seriously watching a chicken running around with it's head cut off is a funny sight to see.

It all sounds a bit gruesome, but this is life, it was not traumatising, it did not turn me into a  a serial killer. Nor did it make me sick and want to become a vegetarian.

I grew up knowing that milk come from cows, these cows were dairy cattle and were not used for eating. 
Beef cattle were different, they were stockier and only produced milk to feed their young. They are bred to be eaten.
I could tell the difference by their colour and build, oh and also the massive udder of so full of milk that it made it hard for some of the poor cows to walk.

As I said earlier, almost every part of the animal was used. Which brings me to the offal.

I was never a fan of offal, to this day I am sure the word Offal is Latin for Awful, but some people love their offal.
Lambs Fry, Kidneys, Sheeps Brains, Tongue, Tripe, shall we go one, you all know what I mean.

Nowadays Celebrity Chefs will whip something up with, give it an exotic name, charge a fortune for the "gourmet" delight made of what was once the cheapest "meat" from the animal.

In some cultures they will eat eyeballs, testicles and the such, they are used for everything from  delicacies or medical remedies.

I think of all the adventures had as a young child, which inadvertadley was related to food.  Not only was it life on the farm.
My friends and I would wander off on a Sunday afternoon, with our buckets and pocket knives.
No we weren't the local gang looking for some trouble, we were off to the paddocks in our area to go mushrooming.
We would walk through the paddocks looking for the biggest or the most mushrooms we could find.
We would come home when our buckets were full.
I never liked mushrooms at the time, pity because I love them now, and we used to get heaps of them.

I think people should educate their children better to understand life on the land. Don't keep them sheltered from things that are the truth.
Take them on a holiday to a real working farm, not just a petting zoo, let them know that this chop they are eating comes from baa baa sheep.
They will not be traumatised from it if you tell them the truth.

Let them pick a carrot from a garden and wash it under the garden tap and eat.

Kids seem to have more illnessness and allergies nowadays than ever before, surely this would be because we live in such a sterile cotton wool world.

We got dirty, ran under the sprinkler, made mud pies, swam in farm dams, ate from the garden and very rarely got sick.

There is a saying that comes up when someone is sick, it goes "maybe you didn't eat enough dirt when you were growing up"

I think that says it all.

BB