Fake Foods No Appalachian Grandmother Would Have Carried Home (She Could Tell by the Smell)

Last month my wife sent me into the grocery store in town for one thing, a single jar of honey, and I came home without it. I stood in that aisle with the lid off a jar that said pure honey on the front, and I smelled it, and there was nothing to smell. My grandmother Ada would have said that jar has never met a bee. I grew up at the head of a hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, in a house where eleven people sat down at one table. We raised almost everything we ate, and what we did not raise came from one little store a mile and a half down the road, paid for with eggs and butter and cream. My grandmother could walk into that store and tell you which jar was the real thing, and most of the time she did it with her nose. She did not read labels. She smelled, she weighed things in her hand, she held them up to the window light, and she knew. So I am going to walk you through a grocery store the way she taught me to. The honey that turns to sugar by Christmas. The sorghum my grandfather cooked down in October with a mule walking circles around the mill. The one bottle of real vanilla a year, on the top shelf where no child could reach it. The meal from the stones at the mill. The vinegar crock with its mother. The country ham, the bacon, the egg in a bowl of water. And I will tell you about the summer the store man set a block of white margarine right next to her butter, and the Wednesday she put on her church dress and walked down there with two plates and a pan of biscuits. And I will tell you about the one thing she never bought from any store in her whole life, and what she did the one time somebody carried it into her kitchen. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was.