Butter and Onions

At the grocery store this past week, the cashier asked if she should pack the pork loin in a separate bag. "You know...contamination," she continued, "I'm a child of the eighties, after all."

"Well," I said, "I'm a child of the fifties. If the meat looked slimy, we rinsed it off. If it still looked slimy, we fried it in butter, and if it smelled funny, we added onions."

We both laughed.

But what I said wasn't a joke. It was the way it was. The memories of fried onion and bologna sandwiches remind me that food was never just about nutrition. It was about making do and making sure no one went hungry.

My parents grew up during the Great Depression, when wasting food simply wasn’t an option. In our house, leftovers—questionable or not—were eaten without hesitation, and none of us kids ever got sick from it. Back in the 1950s, we didn’t talk much about germs, handwashing, or cross-contamination. Those concepts hadn’t yet made their way into everyday kitchens.

When I was growing up, most food was homemade. In the decades that followed, processed and packaged foods became available. I remember when my parents purchased TV dinners for the first time. "Not as good as your mother's cooking and kind of skimpy," was Dad's response.

But convenience came in many forms.

A Scranton drive-thru, which we enjoyed on a rare trip to the city, featured hamburgers for a quarter. To my youthful surprise, Dad could eat four of them! The fast food culture brought concerns about reduced nutritional quality, but unlike frozen dinners, fast food was acceptable to my parents.

Times have changed, and so have our habits. Nowadays, conversations center around plant-based diets, organic foods, sustainability, food allergies, gut health, and cultural cuisines. We may live in a world of hand sanitizer and expiration dates, but somewhere deep down, I still believe a little butter and a few onions can fix almost anything.