Eat Like A Pioneer

A few months ago, I introduced the world to the Fake It Til You Make It Diet.  If you haven’t had a chance to read about it yet, that post will probably pop up at the bottom of this page.

Now I’ve come up with a new, cheaper, and more, er, classically American diet.  The Eat Like a Pioneer Diet.

I got this idea from reading the Little House on the Prairie books.

This diet is pretty simple, because it is based on the Ingalls’ family diet.  Which was very simple.

The Ingalls didn’t have a lot of money, but they had six mouths to feed.  Also they worked hard every day, so they needed lots of energy, too.  And not to mention that the Ingalls were very hospitable so they were always prepared to feed just about anyone who came to their door.

So how did they do it? First of all, they hardly ate meat or sweets.  Pa would go out and hunt when he could, but that was chancy.  The girls usually got a stick of candy (ONE STICK) in their Christmas stocking, and Ma would make a pie or some other baked goodie as a VERY occasional treat.

Every day meals, though, were usually pretty monotonous.  They were biscuits, bread, or cornbread, some sort of bean main dish, maybe bacon or sausage, tea, coffee, milk (if it hadn’t blown out of the pail), homemade butter (from the milk, when possible), and maybe molassess to flavor the bread.  That was pretty much it.

The Ingalls were wheat farmers mainly, but they usually had a kitchen garden, too.  So they might have potatoes, carrots, onions, etc.  But many times it seems as if things didn’t work out too well for them weather-wise, so they didn’t get much from any of their crops.  Then it was mostly beans, beans, beans.  And some sort of bread.

Is this a healthy diet?  I don’t know.  But I can tell you how long everyone lived.  I have a book right here beside me called Laura: the Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Donald Zochert that has that information.  Let’s take a look:

Pa 1836-1902, 66 years old

Ma 1839-1924, 85 years old

Mary 1865-1928, 63 years old

Laura 1867-1957, 90 years old

Carrie 1870-1946, 76 years old

Grace 1877-1941, 64 years old

Well, I’d say that’s a pretty good spread of lifespans for a pioneer family of six.  Of course, in all the pictures I have seen of them none of them are ever smiling, so I can’t tell what kind of shape their teeth were in.  I wonder about that because it seems like they weren’t getting a lot of vitamin C.  Or had any access at all to dentists.

So maybe the Pioneer Diet has something to recommend it.  Even in our times beans, flour, root vegetables, and milk are among the least expensive staples.  But with so much variety available to today’s consumer, it is easy to be led astray by delicious convenience foods.  And restaurant meals.  Believe me.  I know.

It’s interesting to contrast the Ingalls’ typical daily fare with that of Laura’s future husband, Almanzo Wilder.  His family were prosperous farmers in New York state, where Almanzo was born and raised.  A typical meal for the Wilder family would run something like this: all-you-can-eat pancakes, sausage, bacon, butter, pie (three different kinds, at every meal), fried apples ‘n’ onions (Almanzo’s favorite), doughnuts, cookies, cake, candied carrots, some sort of meat, and on and on and on.  Three gargantuan meals a day.  By the way, Almanzo  lived to be 92 and also survived a diptheria-induced stroke when he was about 30 years old.  So I guess those early years of high-fat, high-cholesterol eating didn’t harm him too much, either.

Whew!  After writing all that, I’m hungry!  Cornbread and beans, anyone?