MELFORT, Sask. — Halfway down the mall from the co-op grocery store, a crowd packed an alcove to listen to food celebrities.
Famed home economists Emmie Oddie, a 48-year columnist with The Western Producer, and Lillian McConnell, a.k.a. Penny Powers of Sask Power, were speaking about their years of working with farm families.
The squawks and sudden death of two sound systems didn’t deter about 100 people from staying to listen about past lifestyles.
The March 21 nutrition event was sponsored by the Melfort and district museum.
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Margaret Brown of Melfort was first to arrive, 45 minutes early. Sitting in the centre seat of the front row, she was flanked by two sisters from Meskanaw, Sask. — Grace Wilton and Betty Lawrence — who each clutched a copy of a 40-year-old cookbook.
“We came out to show our Penny Powers book and we used to read Emmie’s column in the Producer,” Wilton said.
“We thought it would be good to hear her.”
The Penny Powers character was created in 1956 to help farm families adapt to electrical appliances that were arriving along with the power lines being strung across rural Saskatchewan.
McConnell was the first Penny Powers. She took her knowledge to fairs, schools and community hall cooking events to show rural homemakers how to use the new gadgets and adapt their recipes. It was a switch for many women who were using coal or wood stoves, and who were canning most of the vegetables that grew in their gardens.
“To have power in the home, what a difference.”
Sask Power had her out on the road five days after she was hired to promote electricity and natural gas.
“The first thing homemakers wanted was an iron. The second thing was a refrigerator.”
Widespread presence
McConnell said Penny Powers was the best known name in the province for 15 years. Manitoba’s power company had a similar fictional character called Elizabeth. On occasion, there were four Penny Powers working the summer fair route, which caused some confusion for people who knew the character as McConnell.
But despite the labor-saving devices that came with rural electrification, McConnell said women are as busy as their mothers were. The modern generation has substituted an off-farm job for more housework.
Oddie spoke with gentle humor about her life. Despite teenage years spent during the penniless Depression, fun was made by the Cheerio Club in Dundurn, Sask. The young people would put on plays, hold group discussions and sleigh rides. Food was plentiful on the farm, but the lack of money meant no new clothes — just made-over ones.
Oddie went to live with her older sister in Saskatoon but took the train home on weekends. On Sundays she would return to the city with a suitcase full of food from the farm.
Oddie was not always a professional home economist. She told a story of the families’ two-burner kerosene stove that would get “lively flames” and blacken the wall.
The nutrition event didn’t focus only on the past.
Local public health dietician Kathleen Hangs talked about food of the future. She said the price of food is less important to consumers than its taste or convenience. While people like watching TV cooking shows, it is for entertainment, not to learn skills. Children are becoming disconnected from food as a nutrition source. Popular foods include gummi sharks, glow-in-the-dark food and dinosaur candy eggs in cereal.
Hangs said Canadians are looking for quicker ways to prepare meals and noted two trends — 32 percent of people snack instead of eating supper, and many urban dwellers are eating at least one meal in their cars.
In the future, food will become more of a health factor as people turn to orange juice enriched with calcium, or soup with St. John’s wort to cure their ills.
