Eating Habits Ain’t What They Used to BE
I remember the 1950s
I write — a lot — about how to practice self-reliance in the modern world.
A world that I contend has become more dependent on the system to provide its citizens with everything they need than any other era in history.
There are lots of different ways to become dependent. How we think about food is one of them.
My grandparents survived The Great Depression. It left them scarred. My grandfather had one winter as a child when the family was forced to eat turnips for weeks. Fortunately, they had plenty of turnips in the root cellar, but how desperate were those childhood memories. For the rest of his life, he felt the most secure with a larder full of food. More than money, he needed food. Food in the summer kitchen, food in the pantry, food in the freezer, food in the garden. He never left food up to chance. They usually had enough food to feed a family for a year.
But even I can remember different times.
Oh, my. When I was a kid in the 50s, my dad and mom almost never went out to eat. Mom cooked three meals a day. She shopped with coupons and made out a very detailed grocery list built around actual menus for the week. If she could squeeze a little money out of the grocery funds, then that was hers to keep.
She was good at making the money stretch.
Once in a very, very great while, my dad took us out to eat. It wasn’t at a sit-down restaurant. It was usually at a burger joint or an ice cream stand. If we were on the road, we might get a McDonalds, but mom was just as likely to pack food in the car for us. Fried chicken, tuna salad sandwiches, cookies, apples, and potato chips. We’d stop and eat at the side of the road, picnic style, or sometimes just keep driving while munching.
Trust me. I’ve lived long enough to say with certainty that times have changed since I was a kid.
Recently, I became aware of a few statistics that gave me food for thought. No pun intended.
- Most Americans eat fast food 1–3 times a week.
- ⅓ of Americans are eating fast food on any given day.
- The average American household spends 10% of their annual income on fast food.
- 34% of children eat fast food on any given day.
And don’t get me started on the amount of food that is wasted in American homes and before the food even reaches American tables. It’s such a stunning amount that I can’t fathom it.
- The average U.S. household wastes 31.9% of its food. The total annual cost of the wasted food was estimated to be $240 billion or $1,866 per household.
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the waste.
It’s also hard for me to feel sorry for a lot of Americans when they complain about the rising cost of food. I want to offer a course on how to stretch a dollar, cook a one-pot meal that can feed the family for more than one night, or demonstrate how to make a shopping list. I want to show them how to find a use for the food that they so casually throw out. I want to say, why are you eating out when you have food that’s starting to go bad in the fridge because you refuse to stay home and cook?
I want to suggest that they not eat out for a few months and rediscover the good old days.
And don’t give me the argument that mom works and is tired when she gets home. Unlike my mom’s generation, my generation was the first to claim all hail to working moms. I worked full time, earned two degrees, and still managed to pack my kids’ lunches for school every day. We rarely ate out.
Soaring prices, recessions, shipping jobs overseas, high interest rates were around back in the day, too.
Oh, yes, I can remember when car loans came with interest rates as high as 21%. We were poor. Living in rural Maine, everyone knew how to bait a hook, clean fish, hunt for their annual deer, heat with wood, do their own home repairs, and stretch a dollar. Maybe there weren’t many restaurants in town because people didn’t eat out all that often. A sandwich or a pizza were considered a treat.
When I go into modern homes to find that the refrigerator is bare but there’s a swimming pool out back, I scratch my head in wonder.
I’m wondering how modern society got their priorities so mixed up. When did food and shelter take second place to swimming pools and restaurants. How much debt are these people willing to accrue? Do they have enough money to get through six months if they lost their jobs? How long could they feed themselves if tomorrow the grocery shelves were bare?
Maybe my grandparents, parents, and I were better able to make sacrifices because we had never enjoyed the high life in the first place.
Modern life was barely making a go of it when my grandmother married my grandfather in the hills of Kentucky all those years ago. Our expectations were lower, I reckon.
Oh, and here’s another little sickening statistic. About 30 percent of food in American grocery stores is thrown away.
Doesn’t that blow your mind? We have refugees all over the world who are desperate for food, who would work their fingers to the bone for food, even as the US retail stores generate about 16 billion pounds of food waste every year. Heck, we have homeless people, our own citizens, who are in need of food.
The value of wasted food from the retail sector is about twice the amount of profit the stores make. TWICE!
Modern life has produced a culture of waste. If a person is born in the right country, they see themselves not as lucky but as entitled. The rest of the world, where food insecurity is an issue, is told to make our junk and give us their natural resources.
Waste becomes a way of life when food is no longer considered a top priority.
To engage in lifestyles that assume food will always be there to waste is a sign that we’ve become far too dependent and trusting upon a system that is increasingly more fragile. Climate change and dwindling resources are catching up with us. We aren’t paying attention, because we think we’re immune to food shortages.
It’s time to get our priorities realigned with a sense of self-reliance and personal responsibility.
Teresa is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
