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My best memories of oatmeal squares relate to Halloween. I remember that our mother used to make these quite regularly, but she would make hundreds of them every October, for the trick-or-treaters. She would put them in little plastic sandwich bags, along with a UNICEF return-address label, and seal them with twist-ties. None of the other kids' parents gave out home-made treats in those days, but there were still a few families that handed out apples and peanuts or even, sometimes, gumballs and jelly beans from the bulk-food bin. Still, our mother was one of the last to resist the little pre-packaged treats in favour of home production.

Already those were the Good Old Days. We really liked the little chocolates that some people gave out, but we hated the Tootsie Rolls and the caramels, and of course apples were just a nuisance because they weighed down your bag and you could get them at home anyway—this was in Ontario, where apples were grown locally and only cost a few cents a bushel in October. But I suppose we came to like the oatmeal squares most of all, and certainly we ate more of them than any other candy: there were always oatmeal squares left over after Halloween, so we would take them to school for snack in grade one and grade two, and it was fun even just untwisting the tie and taking out the little label that had become translucent with grease, and savouring the oatmeal and the butter.

I recently asked my mother where the recipe came from originally. She said, "I got it from my mother, but she probably got it from her mother before that. We had it a lot when we were kids."

But none of my brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles have made this in a long time. Our mother still makes oatmeal squares occasionally when it's her turn to bring snacks to some event or other, mainly because they're so easy to make; but she barely seems to eat them herself. And she gave up on oatmeal squares at Halloween over twenty years ago by now—too many kids would just put them in the garbage, she says.

Oatmeal squares—garbage! We are safer and more sanitary now. It comes with the territory of economic exchange. Food is one of the last areas of domestic production, the domain of economic activity that is not even considered "economic" (other than to Polanyi or to anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins) as it is not subject to exchange. But even here, commodity fetishism strengthens its hold: take-outs and frozen dinners and semi-prepared meals, all sterile, extracted from social life.

Organic food in boxes.

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— Eric Thrift

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