Maybe. But when various convenience foods and appliances appeared in the 40’s, along with other modern conveniences that only grew through the 50’s, my farmer grandparents quickly latched onto them because the truth is that rural farming life was brutal. They weren’t as healthy as you make out. There were goiters (big problem on the Northern Plains until salt was iodized), cancer, farming accidents, obesity (I never saw a photo of one of the old farm wives who wasn’t pleasantly plump and round despite being active in doing manual labor around the house and farm), maiming, hearing loss, glaucoma, vitamin deficiencies, low vitamin D (it’s cold and dark up here half the year), and lots of diseases. Sure, we canned a lot of our garden. But you also had to be careful to cook what you opened at least ten minutes because more than one family got sick or died off of home canning. Alcohol drinking levels were high because of isolation. Domestic abuse and violence were kept hidden. You can still go through the local cemeteries and see all the kids of a family that were taken out by scarlet fever or something similar with only a few surviving. My grandmother had T2 diabetes, and she wasn’t eating junk food.
Farming back in the day wasn’t beige and pink homesteading Instagram. We’re talking blizzards, death, smallpox, accidents, fungus and bacterial infections from farm animals (yep, I know personally), and so on. So when things like canned foods, cool whip, crackers, vitamin-fortified products (milk, salt, flour), and cereal (some of which, like malt-o-meal and those type, have been around a loooong time) came along, they embraced them. They had hard lives and it was nice if something made them easier.
So my grand father who lived into his mid-90’s ate some of this stuff—margarine, miracle whip, cool whip, canned fruits. He did get vaccines (not like today’s kids, for sure). So did my father. And so did I.
Yes, today, the vaccines, convenience foods, and screens are off the charts. The excess is normalized. I can’t and won’t argue there. But I keep seeing these rose-colored glass views of the past and it’s not precisely true. Genetics plays a huge role, and so do other odd correlations we don’t always consider. We go right to Monsanto and vaccines and miss curiosities and correlations like drinking well water instead of treated water (I did, and if you didn’t grow up on that salty iron-and-mineral liquid, you’ll throw up when you taste it), or of drought years and what’s blown up in the dust.
My mom made me cooked cereal (Malt-O-Meal and such) every day before the bus came to take me to public school, not because it was easy (you have to cook it, there’s time involved) but because I liked it and she thought it was good for me. And I still eat it today.
We have to find a better way of sorting through what’s broken today without an over-correction to our course based on an inaccurate view of what life was like in the past.
