I recently saw a comment somewhere, wandering through the blogosphere that said that Sarah really didn't drink powdered milk and they had fresh veggies sent up in the middle of winter. Wow, people really don't get it.
I move up here as a very small child. When I moved here, a lot of what Sarah said in her book, Going Rogue ran true. The veggies and fruit most times were absolutely disgusting. Lettuce that was either brown and wilted or starting to have that beautiful slimey look but you bought it anyway and took off the bad layers. Apples were generally small and usually brown on the inside due to the bumps they took to ship up here and oranges were hard and most of the time had been frozen. I had relatives that would send us tangerines and oranges, so we would have some fresh fruit. Most of the time we had canned veggies of some sort. The meat wasn't so bad. But the milk could be and the reason many people to this day still have powdered milk. The reason was due to the time that it took to ship up here. If it was a bad shipping week, the milk would be spoiled and the Matanuska Milk on our dairy farms was fresher but at times was to expensive to buy. It didn't really change until after the recession here in Alaska. Where the oil boom... bottomed out in the mid eighties. We then began to grow wildly, have box stores that were needed for the economy as well as the jobs.
Living in Alaska is hard. It is MUCH better now then it was when I moved up here, or Sarah when she was a child. But even if you can't understand the mind frame of how people lived up here, at least don't flick it off as though it didn't happen. To this day I do not drink milk, I do and will not eat ice burg lettuce and can not stand the taste of canned peas.
