The Season of Picking Dinner - How Times Have Changed

Today's society is spoiled rotten when it comes to food choices.  There's a fast food joint on nearly every corner and the grocery store is stocked full of quick and easy dinner solutions - all prepackaged and ready in a few minutes by using the microwave.  Heck, you can even serve the dinner in the nicely colored ready-to-serve dish.  From freezer shelf to table in 10 minutes or less. Oh, and there's no dish clean-up either - just toss the container in the garbage.  Post baby-boomer generations were handed a world of fast, easy, and convenience foods to match their lifestyles and make each day a little less-stressed for them.  I'm fortunate enough to have parents, aunts, and uncles who recall their up-bringing in the 30's and 40's - the prime years of the victory gardens - when nearly every household had their own garden.  Choices back then were limited mostly to your backyard.  The McDonald brothers were just starting to branch out and Supermarkets weren't quite super in Gratz.  Dad says they walked (no, they didn't jump in the car and run to the store for a few things) to the store for things like cereal, flour and sugar, crisco, a loaf of bread, and sometimes "canned" goods like beans or soup.  Root Beer soda pop was one of my dad's favorite things to buy at the store.   Everything else came from the garden.  Even chickens and the occasional pig would be butchered and brought to the table from "down back".  Economics was the primary reason they grew their own food and that certainly is part of my reasoning for the garden today.  Besides the money savings and being kind to the earth, the reward of heading "out back" and picking dinner is like getting a paycheck at the end of the week.  There's nothing that puts a bigger smile on my face then harvesting, preparing, and cooking what was grown a couple feet from doorstep.  To know our dinner didn't travel but a couple feet and has zilch chemicals in it, nor was it wrapped in anything but human hands, is a pretty good feeling.  So what's for dinner tonight?