Ready to Eat!

Yes it is harvest time on the prairies !

 These are the times when lights traveling across the field in long angled trails, sometimes twirling, sometimes seeming to magically   multiply as combines, tractors, and trucks join together only to part again and continue on to  travel on imaginary highways avoiding sloughs and rocks, while  momentarily disappearing behind softly rising hills and dips on the prairie landscape.

These are the days when tomato sandwiches and mayonnaise taste the best.  Purple plums eaten with hands that have handled the hose of diesel fuel, messed with greasy pulleys,  and  probably swept out at least one mouse nest  from the grain truck have a flavour and savouriness not found anywhere else on the planet. 

Yes, harvest meals are truly a unique experience and  are  almost  a welcome challenge to the meal makers as they prepare, pack, and transport meals to the harvest field.  Pots full of mashed potatoes, roasters of fried chicken, casseroles of hot buttered corn, along with a fresh pie or two are only a small example of the nutritious fare travelled out to the back forty; packed in newspapers in cardboard boxes, along with 'real' dishes and metal utensils...all in accordance with  that  heretofore little known by urbanites harvest meal law  that  somewhere on some grain box is sketched out in a combination of axle grease and barely dust:

  Items such as cold Cheese Whiz sandwiches on white bread, canned fruit, and bags of potato chips are NEVER EVER to be disguised as a meal for a Harvesting Prairie Farmer.

 Alas,there was once a time when I, as a mother of two preschoolers, married to a then farmer who was 'out combining in his field'  mistakenly and yes ,  brazenly, thought that this above previously unproven agriculturally based law could be broken.

I thought of this because I was tired, busy, and wanted to cut corners...soooooo...I went to the nearby rural general store and purchased some bottles of Coke, a bag of Doritos,  a few chocolate bars, and some garlic sausage and proceeded to travel fifteen miles out to the field, with the children strapped in their seats, over gravel and dirt  roads  until I finally reached the approach closest to where the combine and  more importantly my combiner was busily traveling around and around on the field.

  I remember distinctly that it was an almost festive time.  The children played in the dusty stubble as my husband sat in the car eating Doritos and hunks of sausage listening to the sound of grasshoppers and children laughing. All too soon it was time to pack up paper and wrappers when alas, alas, alas, as I picked up the plastic label that had once protected the garlic sausage I saw these words:

This is a RAW meat product.  Do not consume until it is fully cooked.

The  truth of  the Harvest Law of  the Meal had made itself evident.

For the last 30 years I have always always checked for this sign whenever I purchase over the counter meat products.