Lulubelle? Is That You?

I grew up in a small city in northern Michigan.  The high school I attended was the only one for our entire county, serving a total population of 30,000 or so souls, about half of whom lived in the city (where my own family resided), and the other half were spread throughout the county, mostly on farms.  Thus, during the course of the school day, I was studying and otherwise rubbing shoulders with both city kids and farm kids, and the sports teams I played on were similarly diverse (mainly football and baseball; tennis and golf, not so much).  In my Driver's Ed class, most of the farm kids had been driving tractors since they were ten or so, and a stick-shift was not an exotic concept to them.

We generally got along pretty well with each other, and there wasn't this huge 'city/country' divide.  Most of my closest friends tended to be city kids, like me, but that was far from hard-and-fast.

In fact, one of my good friends was a fellow honor-student, who eventually attended the US Naval Academy, whose family lived on a farm many miles from town (you may recall him as the fellow with whom I shared a small adventure with a train during our senior year).  One time, I was having dinner with his family at their house, when I came starkly face-to-face with one of the sharp cultural differences between city-dwellers and farm-dwellers.

We were having steak for dinner (nothing like a good, hearty farm dinner, for sure), and as the steaks were being plated and distributed, my friend's younger sister turned to their father and asked, "Is this Lulubelle?"  'Cuz, you know, Lulubelle was the name of one of their cows, who had recently been butchered. . .

Now, even us city kids weren't so 'citified' as all THAT.  We were a long, long way from the 'big cities' down south, and we knew where meat came from, beyond simply 'The Store'.  But it was the least bit disorienting to me, to think that I might be eating something that had had a name, and not all that long ago. . .