The Aroma of the Sweet Potato

Last night, the snow was flying, the wind was biting, my wife and I returned from my daughter's house drinking, just ready to enter the neighborhood, suddenly smelled the smell of baked sweet potatoes in the distance, the unique aroma could not help but make my heart thumping, so I dragged my wife rushed over, although the stomach has been propped up like a chirping frog, but also could not help but let my wife buy two of the largest.

Sweet potatoes, also known as yams in our hometown, is one of the most hated food when we were children, but nowadays, it has become a favorite, according to the "Compendium of Materia Medica", sweet potatoes have "fill the deficiency, benefit energy, spleen and stomach, strong kidney yin" effect, so that people live a long life and less disease, but also to fill the middle, and blood, warm the stomach, fat five organs, etc.. The contemporary Chinese Materia Medica also says that it is "sweet in taste and flat in nature. It belongs to the spleen and kidney meridians."

Now, it is not like the past, the living conditions of every family are better, let's say breakfast, my family every morning there are at least five kinds of more, and always changing the pattern, even so, in the evening also have to supplement a glass of milk and some fruit. When we were young, life was very hard, not to mention nutrition, it was difficult to fill our stomachs, especially in the winter, in the morning, we got up and hurriedly stuffed a few hot sweet potatoes into our small school bags, that was our most important breakfast. Every day when we went to school, the kids and I walked in front, and the family dog followed us every inch of the way. We ate yams along the way, and the dog waited to eat the yam skin - because of the yams, the dog became our most loyal protector. Sometimes we got to try a hard-boiled egg, but that had to be shared with my sisters. One egg, me, my two sisters, and my father, a quarter each, and my mother always had the high spirits.

In our village, I had a young man named Daqing, whose family was also poor and had to go hungry from time to time. In those days, once the annual spring sowing arrived, farmers would bury yams and peanuts as seeds into the soil, waiting for germination, in order to prevent these seeds from being eaten by tigers (a pest growing in the ground), they often mix the yams and peanuts with a pesticide called "six-six powder", as a result, the disaster unfortunately came, only ten-year-old Daqing midnight After the hospital's best efforts to save his life, he became cerebral palsy. Now, more than 50 years old, poor Daqing is still crazy, do not know how to take care of themselves, thanks to his kind-hearted brother and sister-in-law are taking care of him wholeheartedly, otherwise ......

The actual fact that I am the oldest child in the family, and the only boy in the family, in addition to yams, but also occasionally in the morning to eat half a bowl of rice, and only half a bowl, rice is placed in the sweet potato steamed, because that bowl of rice with special treatment, my two sisters do not know how many times and mother quarrel, all say mother biased.

Nowadays, children really live in paradise, they have caught up with the good times of no war and reform and opening up, no worries about food, no worries about clothing, life is getting better and better, where can they still appreciate the hardships of our childhood? I once saw a skit on TV called "Eating Dumplings", which was performed by Zhao Lirong and Li Wenqi, and it was about the psychological changes caused by the changes in modern society. When we were young, we never dreamed that the sweet potato, which everyone had enough of, was now a nutritious meat and potatoes.

I'm not afraid to believe it, life is changing fast, as the saying goes, "the wave after the river pushes the wave before". Sometimes, I also foolishly think, a few decades later, when our children like our age, their children and rare what to eat?

I was thinking, thinking, but my heart was filled with a thick drunkenness ......