01/16/2026
HAVE YOU EVER.....?
Cooked three squares a day for 2-3 days? What about a whole week? A month? Have you ever cooked 90 meals in a month FROM SCRATCH? Cleaned up all the breakfast, then started on lunch? Then cleaned up lunch and started prepping supper?
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Very few can answer "yes" to that list of questions.
It may sound extreme but that's what some of our grandparents, great-grandparents and most definitely our great-great-grandparents did. And I am not envious of that lifestyle one single bit.
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Pair all that cooking, cleaning and planning back in the "good ole days" you also had to have a big garden to rely on for winter food so that meant tilling, planting, weeding, canning, preserving, etc. from April - October to make sure you had food November - April.
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People love to hearken the "good ole days" like they were easy and magical.
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Folks, they weren't that great - ask the Ingalls family during the winter of 1880-1881. They almost starved to death because there was no food in town and the winter blizzard season lasted 7 months.**
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I like to cook most of the time. I'm good at it and I love a home cooked meal. I do not, however, love planning what to eat every night. Give me a list and I'll make it for you, because my mental load is maxed out. But I digress.
When we have guests for cattle picturing weekend, Christmas or some other event, I am in charge of most meals while Hyatt is organizing/managing the cattle work. And I am not kidding you that if we eat breakfast at 8:30, it will be close to 10:00 before I get everything cleaned up, put away, dishes done, etc. Guess what - then it's time to start on lunch soon after! After lunch, there's maybe a few hours to do something productive - not in the kitchen - then it's time to start supper.
Feeding my family and guests does make me happy. I love serving up homemade mashed potatoes paired with chicken n noodles. Or my famous lasagna soup with cheesy garlic bread. But even then, not everything is from scratch - I use premade noodles for both those recipes. I don't make my own Italian seasoning or cheese, either.
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I guess my point is we make a big deal out of idolizing older, harder times because we didn't have TVs, cell phones, after-school activities, etc. but women and homemakers also didn't have any freedom.
People starved or were on the verge if the winter was bad. Or if grasshoppers annihilated the wheat crop.
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People ate only what they could grow or afford. Dairy products were not readily available - only if you had a cow, or a friend with a cow. Factor in the time to make the cheese or buttermilk or whatever else you may want from one cow's milk. Bread had to be made daily and if times were exceptionally hard, you had to grind the wheat first.
You only had meat if you had a spare animal to butcher. Like the yearly pig or a flock of chickens. But remember, you need someone to gift you a set of eggs, then wait another 6 months after they hatch to start laying their own. Hopefully you had more than one rooster in the set so you could eat one and save one for breeding.
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The life expectancy was several decades lower.
Are you catching my drift here? Homesteading aka subsistence farming, is HARD. And we can all choose what kind of hard we want to endure in our lives. I choose my hard to be rodeoing, training horses and raising the best cattle we can at High Bar Cattle Company.
Maybe your chosen hard is making all your bread, pasta, sauces, maintaining a multiple-acres garden, canning, preserving, making cheese, butchering your own chickens, etc. But that's your choice.
Y'all, our food supply is SUCH A BLESSING and privilege. It is not like this in every country in the world. Grocery stores, farmer's markets, bodegas - however you choose to get your food, know that it's a privilege you were born in a preferential timeline. One that doesn't require you to spend 12 hours per day cooking and prepping just to keep your family afloat in the days of subsistence farming.
If you would rather live that lifestyle of the 1880s and are currently embracing the homestead life, bravo for you. Seriously, bravo. I don't envy that and I applaud your dedication.
But don't look down upon the current systems we have that have allowed us access to fruits/veg year round, milk when we want it, bread anytime of the day and fresh meat everyday if desired (instead of salt pork).
Literal food for thought, my friends. Thanks for reading.
** Pa was also very clearly not a great provider and never had a stable job. He had to rely on his young teenage daughter to make money to keep the family afloat. He left behind farmland, a warm, secure cabin, constant meat/game, farm animals, a barn and a big garden so he could chase the western dream, only to bounce around because he was not very smart and also was as shifty as a fart in the wind. But that's a discussion for another time. Book club, anyone?!
