Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Did the only eat potatoes?

"Did I tell you that, in response to my comment that the family was land wealthy, Kathy replied, "Mummu said all they ate was potatoes some days"?"

- Finland was a poor country until WWII. Our last real famine was as recently as 1866-67.
- Farmers, of course, ate what they produced. The traditional Finnish food has been very plain and monotonous. What my grandmother (who grew up at a fairly prosperous farm) describes being the diet during her youth, doesn't seem very appealing to me. Since I have grown up eating lasagna, pizza...

So Kathy's "mummu" quite possible ate mostly potatoes at her home in Finland, as did many other people as well. And after coming to America and experiencing a greater variety of food stuffs, her opinion of the old days could very well have been coloured as not-very-rosy.

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