When I was a kid, I assumed most families from my small hometown in northwest Iowa did things similarly, like furnishing their kitchens with harvest gold, avocado or coppertone appliances, spending discretionary money on like items and where we worshipped. I knew there were differences between households but thought we all ate alike. I should have known better. John’s family didn’t eat at all like we did. He took cold fried egg sandwiches to school. Blech. If there was not enough meat in the house before pay day for supper, his mom made something called ‘milk-pop’ for their family of seven. It was heated milk with torn pieces of bread in it and topped with cinnamon and sugar. I never heard of this. I was so naive.

Now well into the 4th quarter of my life (or overtime, I refuse to call it sudden death) I realize the Gerritson’s might have eaten significantly different than a lot of folks and nothing like the reminiscent food posts I see on Facebook. Fluff (I believe this is marshmallow cream from a jar) on bread? With peanut butter? What? Gross. How come it took a half century of adulthood for these oddities to dawn on me? Where was I? Raised by wolves? No, anything I’ve read about wolves eating habits does not include brown sugar sandwiches, which were common in our house.

1. One of the frequent posts on Facebook is a picture of a cast iron frypan (no, mom didn’t use one of those either). Sizzling in the middle of the pan is a slice of bologna lunch meat with slash marks around the edge to maintain flatness. Now there’s no one that appreciates an old commercial jingle more than I do. “My bologna has a first name, it’s O-s-c-a-r. My bologna has second name, it’s M-a-y-e-r. Ohhhhhh, I love to eat it everyday, and if you ask me why, I’ll sayyyyyy-‘cause Oscar Mayer has a way with b-o-l-o-g-n-a!” I sang it to my kids and babies when I worked in daycare. But never realized we didn’t have sliced bologna in our house. We ate ring baloney for supper with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut, and it was as red as Santa’s suit. We never had the lunch meat variety in the house.

As newlyweds Hubs brought Oscar Mayer Bologna into my world by introducing me to a fancy meal called The Denver. One egg, beaten, one slice of cheap, finely diced bologna with a smidge of diced onion, fried on both sides. He eats them as a sandwich on toast (with ketchup-gag) but I prefer them open faced on bread.

2. The first (and only) time I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was about 10 years ago. We were watching our teenage grandson Landon play basketball when our 4-year old grandson Graham walked into the gym and sat beside me. He had a lunchbox with him and asked if I wanted to share his sandwich? Wouldn’t you know it was something I had never eaten before? A peanut butter & jelly sandwich, which was pretty good. When I was young we got the peanut butter out of the cupboard for 2 reasons. Mom was making peanut butter cookies or Special K bars. We never added peanut butter to fudge or No Bake Cookies. That would have ruined both of them.

3. Three things we never had on our supper table when we sat down for a meal. Salt, pepper or ketchup. We didn’t add salt to sweet corn, baked potatoes or heaven forbid watermelon! Yikes. And ketchup was never glopped on a good cut of meat like roast, steak or pork chops. Double yikes.

4. Ketchup came out of the fridge for 3 reasons. Mom had fried hamburgers, or made homemade French fries (my favorite) or she was making “Taverns” which is browned hamburger and onion with a titch of mustard, brown sugar and enough Heinz ketchup to semi hold it together. It’s a northwest Iowa thing served on buns. (The rest of the country calls them sloppy joes)

5. We never kept Kool Aid or Tang in the house. We bought Hershey’s syrup to make chocolate milk or top my ice cream, plus walnuts (mom called them ‘nutmeats’ not walnuts or pecans and that still makes me smile). We had Nestles Quick chocolate in the house, (I used that dry powder stuff on ice cream too).

6. We never bought margarine. We used butter for everything.

7. I drank pop most every day. (Yes, mom was lenient on some issues) Either RC Cola, Tab, 7-Up or Pepsi.

8. Mom never (ever) made macaroni and cheese.

9. We rarely ate eggs as a meal whether it was breakfast or supper.

10. I never heard of ‘Spam’ until I got them in emails and on Facebook. It’s actually something you eat (part ham I think) and has been around for decades. We didn’t eat Spam and I’m not sure if my friends ate it either.

Mom made homemade soups and casseroles for supper, so often my lunch would be a bowl of leftover soup, goulash, spaghetti, tuna salad or a slice of American cheese on Hillbilly bread (yup buttered). Once in a while soft boiled eggs, cut up with the oozing yolk on bread, not toast. We did keep several varieties of Campbell’s soup on hand like chicken noodle, bean with bacon or vegetable beef (with its one minuscule piece of beef).

Guess I’m not too old to learn what others ate when they were young and ponder my past. Or I think about food way too often which is probably the case…