This is an example of the kind of story you can write about for our food writing contest. This piece takes the form of a blog post. To qualify for the $50.00 gift certificate to a local food business in your area, your piece should follow these rules:
- Your topic is food and family.
- Within the topic, you can write about a dish, or an ingredient, or an event, or a family tradition, etc.
- Please keep your topic and words within a family friendly style (rated G)!
- Your piece should be 400 – 600 words.
- If you give me permission, I will post your writing on MontanaWebmaster.com and the Cookin’ and a’Codin Facebook page. To protect your privacy, I will only use your initials to identify the author, but you will know who you are and you can give people a link to show that your story is online!
- Your teacher will determine what the writing deadline is for your class.
During my Jr. High and High School years, my family was very poor. There were six of us in a single wide trailer. My Mom worked hard to feed four teenagers on the little money she had available. We ate a lot of potatoes with hamburger gravy.
At that time, I thought all the other kids in my school were much, much better off than I was. After all, most of them lived in real houses. School was a happier place than home for me, and it took many, many years for me to even look at those years of my life. Tucked into those memories, some of them are like bright little funny stories. One of those is Captain Crunch for Christmas.
We couldn’t afford name brand breakfast cereal. In those days, the cheap brands only came in corn flakes. So we ate a lot of corn flakes … and oatmeal. I associated corn flakes with being poor. The truth is, when you add bananas to corn flakes, it’s pretty tasty. The expensive sugared cereal was just something to look at in the grocery store, and in the TV ads, and the newspaper ads and all those other places that let us know what we were missing.
My favorite sugared cereal was Captain Crunch. I had had it at a friend’s house, and on special occasions and if there was a great special price, my Mom would buy sugared cereal too. But, how do you get four teens to agree on which cereal to buy. My Mom came up with a solution. Each Christmas, one of our presents under the tree was a wrapped box of our favorite sugared cereal. It was ours to eat. We didn’t have to divide it four ways.
I still like Captain Crunch. Every few years, I give in and buy a box and don’t share it with anyone. But, it will never taste as good as it did those Christmases when I knew I could have a second bowl. Responsible adult thoughts of all that sugar coating my teeth and the effect of the sugar high lurk in the background of my mind. Now that I can buy Captain Crunch any time I want, I mostly like it as eye candy when I pass it by at the grocery store.
And, now it’s time for me to get back to the Codin’ part of my life. The “poor” part of my life played a big part in what I can do today!