Learning from our elders...

There's a great piece on NYTimes.com in which people that were alive during the (first) Great Depression are interviewed about the experience. There are, as you might expect, some standout quotes:

There was nothing thrown away. We’d make soup out of the feet that was delicious. The gizzard, oh, man, that was choice meat, everybody loved the gizzard. We used to make featherbeds out of chicken feathers and geese, but we’d pick the goose without killing him: all you do is pick him up, yank the feathers off when he was still alive. He don’t mind it. It grows back in two or three months...

...When you got hungry, you could take a walk out in the mountains. There was always something to eat — all kinds of berries — and in the winter you got pecans, hickory nuts, walnuts. We used to eat bullfrog; that’s a delicacy. And we used to eat squirrels and rabbits.

And possums. Ever eat a possum? Don’t try it. I’ll never forget the first possum I ate.

We are so not ready for this.