I love vegetables. My mother's side of the family are renowned gardeners. Their gardens are huge. Much of the year, when I was young, we were vegetarians, eating little or no meat. When I was young, we had an acre of tame strawberries. It was us kid's job to weed the strawberries. This probably kept me from having a great interest in gardening. I put up the "three sisters" every year (squash, corn, beans), and about a dozen tomato plants, but that, and apple trees, is the extent of my gardening.
I also love meat. Being a generation, two at the most, from hunter gatherers, at least on my mother's side, I like to eat meat. As autumn and hunting season approached, I remember my mouth watering with the thought of the fresh meat we would soon be eating. I grew up in a hunter culture - where a good hunter was praised - and a poor hunter was the butt of many jokes. During fall hunting and butchering time - we ate prodigious amounts of fresh meat. Our extended family could easily eat a whole deer in one sitting. I have put that in the past tense, but it is still true.
When I first started college - and ran into people who thought hunting was bad - it was a culture shock moment. I still have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to eat all vegetables instead of a mix of vegetables and meat.
This diet doesn't seem to have hurt us any. One of my grandfathers lived to 96, the other to 101. Many of my ancestors have lived past 100 years, one g-grandmother was the oldest woman in our state at the time she died at 105. She was mad for bear meat. Many in our family believe you can live on bear meat alone. Personally, I don't care much for bear meat - unless it is canned - but I do wake up sometimes craving venison or brook trout or moose or grouse. I have the same cravings for sweet onions, fried mushrooms, sweet corn, steamed cabbage, rutabages, or my mother's home made bread. They are all so good!
