[pf] Tea-leaves, bones and squash-skin

· I was throwing out the tea-leaves in the bottom of my cup just now, (I
use loose tea, with a teapot having a partially-effective strainer at the
bottom of the spout), and realised that the tealeaf between my teeth was an
actual leaf, that had been growing on a bush, and here it was in my mouth.

· I grew up with stews and roasts (we ate a lot of mutton, and some beef)
and the bones were there in front of you on the meat dish. As a junior man,
I was expected to do the carving quite often, sharpening the carving knife
beforehand.

· One of our regular vegetables was pumpkin or squash, mainly because it's
cheap, but also because it's a "yellow" vegetable and we knew we should
regularly have yellow as well as green vegetables. After some practice, you
got quite good at either cutting the skin off first, or scooping the flesh
out from the skin. The bones and bits of skin were left on your plate, to
be later scraped into the "food-rubbish" bucket that I've mentioned having
to empty in the compost pit.

· My point is that our food (and tea) quite clearly came from living
things, with leaves, bones and skins left over to remind you. It gave us a
subconscious connection with other living things and the land.

· In contrast, we rarely had manufactured food: just Kraft cheese slices
and Marmite, on a regular basis (I'm talking about the 1950s, here, in both
New Zealand and Canada).

· What's the attitude, now, to such food scraps? _Is_ there much of that
anymore, or are most people aged under 40 so used to manufactured food that
"real food" is slightly barbaric, and certainly less welcome?

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
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