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Mom Walker's Recipe for Pickles

 Once upon a time women wrote down recipes and shared them with their friends and neighbors. This was back in the days before the computer and, in some homes,   even the telephone. Can you believe that there was once a time when there wasn't a telephone- let alone a cell phone- in every home? There were also no televisions in homes. If you wanted a recipe, you had to swap it with a relative, friend, neighbor, or someone from church.

But you could browse magazines for recipes if you didn't get your recipes 

through the human recipe swap method. It seemed as though every woman had at least one subscription to a magazine focusing on the home and those almost always had the latest recipe fad in them, usually associated with a product that took out advertising space. You would tape it into your recipe book. Sometimes these were fancy and sometimes nothing more than a small book that didn't take up much space in your "typical American home". 

Church was a great place to swap recipes. Back then a thing called "dinner on the grounds" was popular. Church services could last for hours and people needed to have lunch sometime so why not in the middle of the day? Ladies brought their favorite dishes and desserts and shared them. Sometimes there would be ice cream freshly made with the help of children who were more than willing to take a turn churning.

    The internet has changed how we get recipes. In fact- it's almost a dangerous place to get them! It seems as though there are thousands of recipes for the same thing and if you go to most online recipe blogs, you'll spend forever reading about the recipe before you get to it! Me? I'm old-fashioned and I really just want a brief intro (if needed). Otherwise, I want to get to it! 

    But I also want- and need- an abundance of healthier recipes. Of course, nothing replaces just eating off a smaller plate (today it's called "portion control" and I wish I could say it's all the rage, but unfortunately "super-sized" still rules the day.

    Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the sizes of our plates! If you look at the image you'll get some idea as to how things have changed. The 8.5-inch plate was once considered a full plate. Bear in mind, that the 8.5 inches includes the rim which wasn't supposed to be touched by food (it was for handling the plate, only). Then notice the same amount of food on the plates we use in most homes today. But today, we don't use the same amount of food, rather, the average American fills a 12" plate as though it were an 8.5" plate! Easily twice the amount of food! 

And no, people back then didn't starve. And, for the most part, they didn't snack, either. Snacking in the 1940s and 50s was a treat, not a daily event, despite the depiction in Leave It To Beaver. Cookies, cake, and other things were for dinner time as dessert. If a kid wanted something in the mid-afternoon, they grabbed an apple or some similar fruit sitting out on the table. Or- if their family had a garden- they might grab a carrot or tomato! 

Life and eating have changed drastically over the decades and sad to say not for the better. Processed food has become a daily thing. TV Dinners aren't an occasional family treat to give Mom a break, they're now shipped to your home and sometimes under the disguise of healthy eating.

Maybe its time to get back to eating healthier and smaller.