“So, are you going to stoke up the barbecue this weekend?” Dave Winston asked Molly Whiteside as she passed out the menus at Mabel’s Grill on a sunny morning recently.
“Barbecuing? Are you kidding? With the price of beef these days I may become a vegetarian,” Molly replied.
“Well if you do, you might have to do without my business,” George MacKenzie grumbled.
“Well, as a beef farmer, you’re to blame,” Molly shot back. “I read the other day that the price of beef is up 34 per cent since January.”
“Well read a little more,” Cliff Murray suggested. “I read that crop prices were so bad last year that farm income dropped 23 per cent. If things don’t improve I may miss out on our regular coffee sessions.” And that morning turned out to be a preview as he skipped breakfast and just ordered coffee.
“This is how we end up with a recession, with everybody cutting back,” Molly grumbled after she noted their orders and headed back to give them to Mabel in the kitchen.
“You better watch what she brings you,” Dave warned George as she left. “She might pull off what that woman in Australia did.”
“What was that?” George replied.
“Didn’t you hear? She was convicted of murder after she fed her in-laws beef wellington, only she used death cap mushrooms to spice it up. She killed her mother-in-law, father-in-law and her husband’s sister.”
“Sounds tempting,” Cliff grumbled.
“You having in-law problems?” George asked.
“Sometimes I wonder how such a sweet woman like my wife can be brought up in a home by parents like hers. They were visiting from the city last weekend and talked about how fortunate the Americans were to have Donald Trump as president.”
“What’s wrong with that?” George wondered. “At least some people in this country have sense.”
“Well I’m too busy for the next while harvesting wheat to be talking politics,” Dave said as he tried to change the subject. “I’ve got a couple of hundred acres of wheat, then it will be almost time for soybeans. And I’ve got 300 acres of them.”
“How things have changed,” George sighed. “Dad was telling me about how he and his friend Bob, when they were growing up, would be enjoying eating Astrachan apples right from the tree in August when the threshing gang arrived to thresh the oats and wheat and barley.”
“What about white beans?” Cliff threw in. “Our family often visits the Zurich Bean Festival in August. I don’t even know anybody who grows white beans since soybeans came in. But I read the other day that the Bean Festival has been going since 1965.”
“We hardly ever eat pork and beans anymore,” George said. “I was rereading this book by the former Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman the other day and he was remembering how this old World War II veteran who served as police chief in Port Carling in the early 1950s and lived alone, ate canned pork and beans almost every night. If you wanted to tempt him to come to your place for supper, you told him you were planning to serve home-baked beans.”
“I remember the so-called pork in each can used to be almost pure fat,” Dave added. “We don’t have that much fat on pigs these days.”
Molly arrived back with their orders.
“I was thinking that if the price of crops dipped so much last year and the price of beef went up so much, there’s a double reason to become a vegetarian,” she said.
“Yeah, well I told you, if you want people like me as your customers, people better keep eating beef,” George reminded Molly.
“What, you mean I might have to do without your gigantic tips?” Molly smirked.
“Yeah, well see how cheap vegetarians are with tips,” George shot back.◊