The Way We Were, By Necessity

There have been many changes in how we buy and keep our food over the decades of my life, although there has been a gradual return by some consumers to the use of fewer preservatives in certain foods. I thought I'd jot down a few things to let younger folks read how things were, and to perhaps give their parents and grandparents a chance to say, "Yep, that's what we did back then." It's nice to look back, at times, to things from the past, as long as we remember to return to the present and look to the future.

Back when I was a kid, bread went stale within a day or two, and it would get moldy, even faster in warm weather. Not much air conditioning back then, as not only were the air conditioning units themselves expensive, but the amount of electricity the units used could have caused a horse to drop dead, if a horse could have read the electric bill. There were supermarkets back then, but not as many as there were a little later, and they were generally not as large as those of more modern times. There were many little "mom and pop" grocery stores in most places, and in cities, there were apt to be a couple of these stores, if not more, within a short walking distance across city neighborhoods. Most had deli cases with various lunch meats (also called "cold cuts") and cheeses, which they would slice to order for you, and some even would grind meat for you, or cut up pork for pork chops. Separate butcher shops were common back then too, and you could get fresh cut meats of just about any type, as well as sausages and smoked meats. The southern part of my neighborhood had a large Polish and (western) Ukrainian population, and one family store there made their own kielbasa, which drew in people from all over. Further, depending upon your state or local area, many bars sold basic food products like bread and milk, and also that great staple food of childhood, candy! With the money value so different back then compared to now, there was a section in each candy display case with "penny candy," as the term was. Little grocery stores and bars put your candy into little brown paper bags, and if your were lucky enough to have a dime, you could get one of these small bags pretty much filled up. My paternal grandfather once gave me a DOLLAR! I was the richest kid on the block; well, for a little while, at least. Most candy bars were like about 3 cents to 5 cents. Whether you called it soda or pop, some was a nickel a bottle, but others were 6 or 7 cents. The famous Coca-Cola bottles were 6 1/2 ounces, if I remember right, but some other brands were maybe 7 or 8 ounces. Beverage companies then increased the size of the bottles to 12 ounces, and even to 16 ounces, if my memory is right, but of course, the price was a bit more. There was a penny deposit on the bottles, as they were returnable glass bottles, although again, some companies later began using non-returnable bottles. We kids would go through the neighborhood looking for discarded bottles to take in so we could get candy from the pennies we got back for returning those bottles. Maybe some of you remember, but I don't recall soda/pop in cans (12 ounces) until somewhat later, especially so in the 1970s, when their use became common.

Besides bread being sold in stores, bakery trucks came through the neighborhoods selling various kinds of bread, pies, cakes and other baked goods (ah, I guess that's why they called them bakery trucks). Customers could order special baked goods when they were produced and the driver might tell people, "Thursday, they're making apricot sweet rolls. Do you want to place an order?" They naturally could only fit so many items on a truck, so he took orders for these specialty items. Often the deliveryman would ring a bell to let people know he was in their neighborhood.

Milk was not always homogenized back then, so it separated and you had to shake the bottle before using it. Milk also spoiled within a few days, so just like with bread, trucks traveled through neighborhoods and rural areas to deliver milk and dairy products. Other trucks had produce, and the driver would yell out the various fruits and vegetables he had on sale on that day. If I remember right, there was a truck with fish, and because of religious beliefs, many people ate fish on Fridays in those times, a practice which even carried over to other folks who just got used to eating fish on Fridays, even though they didn't hold those religious beliefs. The practice was so prevalent, neighborhood bars did a banner business on Fridays by having a fish fry. And, just as you may have seen in movies about the "Old West," bars still had spittoons all around the barrooms, as tobacco chewing was still a common practice. Bars also had "back rooms" with tables where ladies and families could sit, as it wasn't considered "proper" by many people for women or children to sit in the main barroom in those days. Bars even had side or rear entrances so that ladies wouldn't have to be seen entering through the front door, which usually was on a main street, as this would likely lead to neighborhood gossip among some people, and perhaps even a condemnation to Hell by some self righteous religious zealots.      

Ice cream and popsicle trucks were around back then, a business which continues to this day. Some trucks only sold frozen products like popsicles, ice cream sandwiches or fudge bars, but others sold ice cream cones, sundaes, milkshakes and banana splits, with the ice cream dispensed right in front of the customers from machines inside the trucks. Of course, you could also go to a pharmacy, often simply referred to in the U.S. as, "drug stores," to get some ice cream, as they had "soda fountains" in those days. Oh, and they too had candy display cases with penny candy and candy bars. We had a food truck, actually more of a van or RV from more recent times, run by "Harold," a man in our neighborhood. I can't remember everything, but I believe he sold many early morning items like: doughnuts, pastries, coffee, tea and hot chocolate, and he may well have sold sandwiches and lunch items too, I just can't remember. Of course, this part of the food business has really expanded in more recent times, as trucks selling all sorts of fresh, refrigerated or frozen products are big business nowadays, with many specialty foods now being sold, including pizza, a food item that was growing in popularity when I was a kid, but at that time, pizza shops hadn't sprung up on many street corners, as yet, but they were around, just not in anywhere near the numbers we have today; and off hand, I don't recall any national pizza chains at that time; at least, not in my area. Certainly pizza's popularity stemmed from soldiers who had served in World War Two in Italy, which gave Italian-Americans a good way to go into business, especially in cities with Italian neighborhoods, particularly in the eastern half of the U.S. But it didn't take long for the popular, delicious and easily eaten food to spread all over the country.

As the years passed, more and more supermarkets were opened all over, putting a bit of a crimp in some family owned grocery stores and butcher shops. Preservatives were added to many foods, air conditioning and refrigeration became more widely used, and the need for things such as milk and bread delivery declined to the point where most were just unnecessary, although some hung on for awhile, and some might still be in existence in places? Improved roads and highways made rural deliveries largely unnecessary too, and I'm not sure the last time I heard, "Peaches, onions, cabbage on sale today," yelled out by a driver on a produce truck. Changes happen, often they creep up on us, and we eventually accept them, however grudgingly, but it sure can be nice to think back on the way we were, but then we need to move on. 

WORD HISTORY:
Spit-English has more than one word of this spelling, but this form is closely related to "spew" and goes back to Indo European "spyu," which meant "to spit, to discharge fluid from the mouth," but its exact history is a bit cloudy. The Indo European form gave its Old Germanic offspring "spitjanan," ^ seemingly a parallel development with the ancestor of "spew," as it had the same meaning, but it was not as commonly used. This either gave Old English, or the West Germanic dialects that later came to form Old English (Anglo-Saxon), but while still on the Continent, both "spæten"and "spittan," dialectal differences, although as noted under the original Old Germanic form, these forms were also not as common in usage as the ancestor of "spew." The Old English forms then melded to become "speten/spitten," before the modern form. The noun came from the verb circa 1300. Danish and Norwegian have "spytte" (to spit, Danish noun "spyt" and Norwegian noun "spytt"), Swedish has "spotta" (perhaps a dialectal "spetta?" and the noun "spott"), Icelandic has "spýta" (both verb and noun form).

^ It's possible that this was rather a form developed in the North Germanic branch of Old Germanic, or perhaps a survivor from Old Germanic in the North Germanic branch. It is unclear, but forms are only found in modern North Germanic, with the exception of English, which is West Germanic. The West Germanic dialects of what are today northern Germany and the Netherlands, as well as southwestern Denmark, had much contact with North Germanic speakers, which remained true, even after many of these West Germanic speakers migrated to Briton and founded England. As a guess, I would lean to a borrowing from North Germanic after the Anglo-Saxons were in Briton, which might account for the more sporadic use of the word compared to the ancestor of "spew," which was the common word among the West Germanic dialects/languages for "to spit." If "spit" had been borrowed while Ango-Saxon was still on the Continent, it begs the question, "Where are forms in Low German and/or Frisian," as they likely would have borrowed it too, but I found no forms of such, not even from centuries ago. Low German and Frisian are both the closest relatives of English, and they were especially close (linguistically and geographically) when the Anglo-Saxons were still on the Continent.