Oatmeal for Breakfast

It is winter again and naturally the time to bring the glass jar of oatmeal out of the pantry and put it out on the counter along with the bottle of cod liver oil. The one-gallon jar of 0ats will stay there until the last vestiges of winter disappear into spring when it again gets relegated out of sight behind the pantry doors. The oatmeal is our typical winter warm-me-up breakfast and the fish oil makes up for the lack of sunlight during the dark winter months.

Some call the stuff rolled oats, mush, cereal or use a more personalized idiom for it and it now comes in “fast”, “instant”, “traditional”, and “wide rolled” format. Whatever you call it or in whichever form you buy it, oatmeal has been around for a long time and will be with us for some time to come.

Except for the packaging and the so-called convenience formulas it hasn’t changed since the days of our famous gold rush. In the early 1900’s the packaging was cotton or burlap and the weight was given in the good old imperial measurement and it came north by the barge load. Oatmeal provided a welcome change of diet for the gold seekers that didn’t quite make it to the Klondike land of plenty that first year and ended up wintering in one of the many small makeshift settlements along the route. Their diet consisted mainly of whatever they trapped or hunted prepared boiled, fried, roasted over an open fire or stewed beyond recognition in the ever simmering pot on the back of the stove.  A bowl of oatmeal, some canned milk and a sweetener of any kind must have provided a pleasant change to the constant high protein diet of moose, caribou, beaver, porcupine and other imaginable critters. No doubt it also brought back some nostalgic memories of breakfast back on the farm but I’ll bet mother would cringe at the way some of it was served up.

These small outposts of humanity were usually anchored by a central trading post of sorts, stocked haphazardly by one of the established northern trading companies and a goodly amount of left behind goods of would be millionaires that had the good sense to abandon the chase before freeze up.  I had the opportunity of going through the account book of one such remote trading post. The trader kept a meticulous accounting of people’s purchases throughout the winter of 1898 that was by all accounts a very cold one. The amount of 25lb bags of rolled oats that went out the door was phenomenal for the small community involved. It was obviously a staple food in many diets although I don’t believe it did much to alleviate the problem of scurvy that ran rampant amongst the pilgrims during the first few years in the Klondike.

In its traditional form it is disgustingly good for you. One of our neighbors has a cat called Oatmeal obviously named for its affixation for the stuff. I have solved a dogs diet problems by substituting oatmeal for a commercial dog food and yes, I have used it in my own battle with a threatening cholesterol level.  It is safe to say that oatmeal deserves to be recognized for its contribution to the well being of mankind. I’m all for it.