Food Aplenty!

Wilson Hayward

Wilson Hayward is one of the best fishermen in Bonavista. The first few times he went in boat he got sick. The next day he would cry to go out in boat again. To him, work was fun and he loved every minute he could get on the water. He says no one went hungry in Bonavista, unless they were lazy or in poor health.

I'LL TELL YOU WHAT WE used to do in the fall of the year. My father would go fishing in the summer right up to September month. Then he would take all that he caught, and pay his fishing account.

Now, what we made from September to December, we used to buy our food for the winter. I saw a time when we had fourteen 100-pound sacks of flour.

We would have a 45-gallon tierce of molasses out in the store. When we wanted a gallon of molasses we would take out the stopper and let the molasses run out into a jug.

We had a 200-pound barrel of beef in the pantry. We had two chests of tea. Then we had two bags of hard bread for brewis during the winter.

We had thousands of potatoes. One year I remember we had 78 barrels of potatoes down in my cellar. We sold half of them. We had plenty of carrots and cabbage. We used to throw the cabbage up on the boards in our store to freeze up. We also had a full barrel of pickled cabbage. The big solid heads were cut down the middle and salted.

If you had health and strength and could work, there was no way in this world to starve a man in Bonavista. Back when I started we were in the Depression. The whole world was in Depression. But eighty percent of what we ate those years, we never paid for it. We reared our own vegetables.