What happened to our food

When many of us baby boomers started to school there were very few kids with allergies or special needs. My cousin was the only person that I knew who had diabetes. There was one kid in school with asthma. There was one family of kids who were neighbours of mine, who always went to their grandmother’s for lunch because of some food allergy, but their grandmother was an excellent cook, too.
In the 1950s there was very little processed food, very few sprays or chemicals used on crops or animals and only one little drugstore in town which sold more horse liniment than human drugs.
My favourite way to start the day was with a bowl of puffed wheat, a little brown sugar and raw cow’s milk which was about four per cent fat. The cardboard cap on the milk bottle said milk from vaccinated and TB-tested cows. In the winter I started the day with a hot bowl of cream of wheat sweetened with corn syrup.
Charlie Joe had a small farm about five miles from town and every day he milked his goats by hand and delivered goat milk to our hospital. Goat milk was known to be easier to digest than cow’s milk and often fed to newborn babies.