Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The main dish for supper was a really large salad, enough to provide at least one overflowing bowl for each person. This salad was fruit or vegetable, depending on the garden resources. In a big wooden bowl we emulsified lemon or lime juice with rose-hip juice and olive oil, and into that cut peppers, celery, onion, radish, parsley, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce ... whatever was growing in the garden at the time. Sometimes we shredded raw beet, carrot, squash, celery root, and turnip and made that a complete salad, with celery, nuts and raisins, lemon and oil. In winter, white or red cabbage was the bulk item instead of lettuce. To this we added cut up apples, nuts, oranges or grapefruit, and celery. In summer we could add raw young peas, tips of asparagus, or fresh raw corn. We picked these salads just before making, and made them just before eating them. Thus the full vitamin content was retained.

In winter, before washing and cutting up the salad materials at suppertime, we put on potatoes or squash to bake. Squash, as well as potatoes, we baked whole, in the skin. The steam generated inside the skin tenderized the vegetables in record time and helped retain all the natural food values. When corn, asparagus, peas, or beans were ripe in the garden we added them to our evening meal, cooking as short a time as possible, in as little water as possible.

These food habits of ours we found simple, economical, and practicable, though they were perhaps not usual for 20th century Americans.

With advancing civilization, the American diet pattern, like everything else, has undergone a thoroughgoing change. The business of procuring the necessities of life has been shifted from the woodlot, the garden, the kitchen, and the family to the factory and the large-scale enterprise. In our case, we moved our center back to the land. There we raised the food we ate. We found it sufficient, delicious, and nourishing.

On this diet we maintained a rugged health and patronized no doctors. Our "apothecary shop was the woods and fields". "By attention to Diet, many diseases may be prevented, and others mitigated. It is a just observation that he who lives by rule and wholesome diet is a physician to himself." With vegetables, fruits, nuts, and cereals we proved that one could maintain a healthy body as an operating base for a sane mind and a purposeful harmless life.

Current practice in United States economy calls upon the person who has met his needs for necessaries to turn his attention forthwith to procuring comforts and conveniences, and after that to luxuries and superfluities. Only by such procedures can an economy based on profit accumulation hope to achieve the expansion needed to absorb additional profits and pay a return to those investing in the new industries.

Our practice was almost the exact opposite of the current one. Our consumer necessaries came mostly from the place, on a use basis. Comforts and conveniences came from outside the farm and had to be procured either by barter or through cash outlays. We bartered for some products ... chiefly food which we could not raise in a New England climate. Cash outlay meant earning additional cash income. Consequently, we endeavored to do as Robert Louis Stevenson advised in his Christmas Sermon, "Earn a little and spend a little less."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print