Demeter is a typical identify within the grain commerce. For instance, Indiana-based Demeter LP was a family-owned regional grain enterprise for greater than 50 years earlier than being acquired by Wisconsin-based DeLong Co. in 2019.
One other Demeter-themed firm, Demeter Grains, presently exports “animal feed, grains and legumes for human consumption” from Perth, Western Australia, to a lot of East Asia and the West Coast of the US.
It is no coincidence that these corporations (and lots of extra) all share the identical identify. Instructively, Demeter was the Greek goddess of agriculture, grains, and bread, who was believed by fantasy to “maintain mankind with the riches of the earth.” She is “depicted as a mature girl… holding a sheaf of wheat or a cornucopia and a torch…”
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Individuals make the cornucopia the focus of at the moment’s Thanksgiving celebrations. We’re not the primary. I wrote within the 1937 version of the Oxford English Dictionary that the traditional Greeks crammed their cornucopias—goat horns they referred to as “horns of a lot”—with “flowers, fruits, and corn.”
Nonetheless, the Oxford College spun some myths of their very own out of this clarification. There was no corn in historical Greece – certainly, all of Europe – till Christopher Columbus introduced it again from Mexico in 1493.
There have been no cornucopias (or goat horns) at Thanksgiving dinners on the dairy farms of my youth in southern Illinois. In reality, I distinctly keep in mind spending Thanksgivings on the farm not more than a couple of times whereas I used to be rising up. My mom was a superb prepare dinner and had different family do the vacation treats when she visited in the course of the holidays.
Who can blame her? For her, true Thanksgiving is any day that does not contain spending most of her time within the kitchen cooking a meal for her husband, six kids, and her beloved uncle who’s all the time there for her dad.
I turned conscious of my mother’s Thanksgiving sample of “going to grandma’s home” early on, typically voluntarily staying house in order that my dad or one in all my brothers would not be pressured to go away the occasion round mid-afternoon for a night milking session.
This isn’t a sacrifice; I appeared for it for a number of causes.
First, I’m a free chook from late morning each Thanksgiving till milking time at 4pm. The thought alone is sweeter than grandma’s pecan pie, because it holds the promise of journey, like mountain climbing into the woods by the river, consuming a lunch of thick, freshly made chocolate pudding, or setting dad on hearth An unfiltered camel for a dizzying puff of smoke, or two.
Then there’s cash. I used to be paid 50 cents an hour for farming, and my brothers and I fought for hours per week so long as they’d admit it. A small earnings is important to sustaining my modest independence. They paid for the garments I wished to put on, the films I wished to see, and the $1 per week church donation my mother and father wished to see.
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It wasn’t till a lot later that I discovered these days had been actually about love. I really like being on the farm. I like being relied on by my father. I really like being on my own anytime, wherever, whether or not it is planting soybeans at two miles an hour on a sizzling summer time afternoon or milking cows so my household can have a enjoyable, stress-free time on the farm one winter trip Afternoon and night.
Loneliness additionally gave me permission to daydream, and I later got here to imagine that these goals weren’t daydreams, however actual prospects and achievable hopes.
I actually loved spending time with Howard, he was a quiet, type pastoralist who I had been round since my grandfather employed him once I was slightly boy. Milking cows with Howard day-after-day meant three hours of pipe smoke and lengthy, incessantly interrupted tales about his upbringing on the backside of the Mississippi River 50 years in the past.
Perhaps I used to be too naive or too self-righteous to really feel or see that love, nevertheless it was there.
I believe it nonetheless exists, and I needn’t pay 50 cents an hour to relive it at some point once more.
Alan Gabbert is an agricultural journalist. See previous columns: farmandfoodfile.com. © 2023 Agricultural E-newsletter