Blogpost: My fruit started out in a pie

Most of us did not start our lives eating just vegetables and fruits. We ate the “American Diet” which was a meat, a starch and a vegetable. In my grandmother’s house there was usually desert and most of the time there was a choice of pie. Fruit pie or filled pie. Why pie? Because it was a way to stretch out ingredients. Some of my fondest summertime memories with my grandmother and cousins revolved around picking berries. In early June we would walk up the country road where my grandparents lived and find small bright red berries nestled in the weeds. Four of those strawberries were probably the equivalent of one commercially grown berry so it took time and a lot of berries to fill a bucket. So if you ate them while you picked it took longer to fill the bucket. So in order to move on to other exciting adventures we had to get the buckets filled. Don’t eat while you pick. Save the berries for the pie. And so the summer progressed with wild raspberry picking in July and blackberries in August. If we did a good job the extra berries went into the freezer for pies during the winter. There were always pies in the winter. Apples came from the tree in the backyard. They were small and green. Not that sweet to just eat. Not bad for throwing at your cousin, but those had better have been bruised already because they could have been used for a pie.
Making that pie was a labor of love for my grandmother. Everyone raved about her pie crusts. Flaky and sweet thanks to a lot of sugar and the lard she used to make the dough. You see if we had eaten those berries by themselves there would not have been as many to go around. The pie allowed more people to enjoy the berries and taste the artwork created by my grandmother.
Where her pies as unhealthy as pies today? Did the fact that we were outside and more active make them less harmful? Was the special care and attention that went into picking the berries and making the pie worth the unhealthy aspects? I would not trade those times for almost anything.
The one exception would be the health of my family. As we learn the benefits of those berries and the harmful affect of the processed sugar and lard, I would like to think we can have even more special times and new memories of working together as a family to make healthy meals and great memories.