Serious, serious gravy from two books I've been reading recently. The ways of the past are the wave of the future...

"Everyone knows what ails our economy is the distribution system and the great spread between producer and consumer. it looks to me as though the way to beat that is provide certainly easily produced necessities, such as vegetables, for yourself.

We offer wonder about the efficiency of chain stores. Not that they don't perform a service for the helpless ones. They do and naturally one must buy what if one does not produce. But why be a helpless one if one can avoid it?

We are our own best market. When we eat it ourselves we get it for less than we could buy. All we can make of it is that we are happily constituted so that raising food makes us strong and happy and gives us aesthetic delight as well as gustatory pleasure. (pages 196-197)
Green Mountain Farm - Elliot Merrick.

Written about their time farming in Vermont in the 1930s.

"Martha Ballard brought home '6 galn Rhum, 2 lb Coffee, 5 lb sugar & some Tobacco & 1 bushl of 1/4 salt from Joseph Williams for me for assisting his wife in travil with her Last Chld.'

A few days later she reported sending twenty-one skeins of tow yarm to Mrs. Chamberlain to weave."(page 30)

A Midwife's Tale - The Life of Martha Ballard based on her Diary 1785-1812

This is about a woman in post-revolutionary Maine who delivered babies. Her payment was in product. NO SALES TAX!

The irony of all ironies is that she delivered MANY healthy babies. Yet "science" took over in the 1800's and all of a sudden, moms and babies dying all over the place. See the book on Ignac Semmelweis by Sherwin Nuland. It will tick you off, though.

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