It's staggering when you think about how far we've come in so little time.
Yeah, I know.  I've heard people making the same stupid comment more times than I care to even consider.  And in one sense it is a stupid comment.  What does that even mean?  'Progress', change has been happening steadily since history has been documented (arguably therefor it was going on before we began documenting), this we know.
However, when I think about the difference that 75 years has made in the way we eat, the way we think about food, the way we consume energy and goods... that's when my head starts to spin.  I could argue that the wars changed everything.  I could argue that cars and the switch from coal to oil changed everything.  Thing is though that everything changed... one way or another.


My Dad grew up on a farm outside of Belleville Ontario.  A little place called Thomasburg.  He was in high school before they got running water in the farm house.  In my Dad's day you had a big garden and you had the garden because you had a root cellar to fill and if you didn't fill the root cellar than you had to pray that you had friends that could help you out because at the grocery store there was maybe sugar and spices and then a few other things that were insanely expensive and that was it.... (yeah, I know that's a run on sentance).  You killed your own (you don't kill in the spring when babies have just been born - they'll have no mother to feed them) meat in the fall and stored it at the local butcher shop by renting freezer space.  Remember, no running water... and either no electricity or not enough money to use it for a chest freezer.
My Mom was a Minister's kid.  She moved from place to place in rural Ontario.  She also grew up with a garden, as much as they could establish with all the moving around that they did.  They also relied on parishioners to give them food from their gardens.  A bag of onions, a cabbage, potatoes, maybe even a chicken.  However, there were times when there just was not food.  No food!  Imagine.  Maybe it was a tough growing year.  Or it was either financially not feasible to buy the bulk of your food from a grocery store or the grocery store itself just didn't have the food.  Sometimes all they ate was onion sandwiches and boiled cabbage... because that's all there was.
Just recently, I've been reading phrases that go something like:  'There's nothing like sitting down to a locally sourced, home cooked dinner with friends and family.'  This is something we have to work towards now.  We have a new vocabulary for this kind of eating.  Less than fifty years ago once strawberry season was over you didn't get strawberries until.... next season.  Now, locally sourced is a big deal.  We have to look for it outside of the grocery store for the most part.  We don't really grow any of our own food.  We walk into a grocery store and buy most of our 'food' from a box with a list of ingredients and nutritional information on the side.  Home cooked is a subversive kind of thing when you consider that about 50 percent (yeah, I wrote that correctly) of the average household food budget is spent on fast food.  Fast food, not even 'sit-down-order-something-from-a-waiter-kind-of-place'.  We don't have to cook, some of us don't even know what a tomato looks like growing on the vine.
The disconnect is staggering when I stop and really ponder.  I'm sad that things are the way they are.  I hope that they change.  I hope that I can be a part of it in my own little way.  Somehow knowing makes a difference.


I made this cake with rhubarb from my back yard and frozen blueberries from last years harvest.  One small step.


Rhubarb and Blueberry Streusel Cake
adapted from Canadian Living

1/2 cup unsalted butter at room temperature
2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup (make it a generous one) chopped fresh rhubarb
1/2 cup (generous) blueberries (fresh or frozen)

Streusel
3 tbsp all purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup melted butter

Grease and flour a 9 inch springform pan and set aside.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Combine all the ingredients for the streusel and mix until it forms a crumb.  Set aside.
Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in another bowl and set aside.
Beat the butter and brown sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs one at a time and continue to beat together.  Add in the vanilla and mix well.
Add the flour and buttermilk alternately to the egg/butter mixture.   Begin and end with the flour.  Mix thoroughly after each addition.
Add the rhubarb to the batter and mix.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan.  Sprinkle the blueberries on top of the batter.
Sprinkle the streusel on top of that.


Bake for about 1 hr and 10 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean.
Cool for about 20 minutes before removing from the pan.