Knot Pining: Just a quick grocery trip ...

It broke the bank and nearly broke my spirit. The other day, hankering for some good old chili on a brisk, er, hot, fall day, me and the kid went to the store. My mind just happened to be on point, so, with a working list in my head, I made a few other purchases beyond the soup recipe I also keep in my brain.

I knew it would be a mistake. There were paper products and batteries involved, along with the need to find mid-morning school snacks for the kid for the next few weeks.

For the first time in my life, I spent more than $200 on a single grocery trip. And I was able to carry most of it out by myself. The kid helped with the bulky paper stuff.

These are the days we are in. But instead of wallowing, I put my mind to another time, to another inflation riddled era, the late 1970s, early 1980s.

It was vital to hit the way-back-machine to distract from the current state of stretching money to keep from going hungry. You’d think I would have learned from experience in my youth, but times are different. I no longer live on a farm.

I asked my mother once how much she figured she spent in those lean years keeping her family of 10 fed. Remarkably, she perfected her grocery trips to less than $4 a kid per week. We only shopped about once a month. We had a large garden and raised chickens, pigs, cows and more, so that kept costs down.

We paid through labor back then. Chores, including hours weeding that garden and feeding and watering the animals. Then there was a long week of butchering chickens. There was also prepping vegetables and fruit in putting up quarts and quarts and quarts of canned goods, filling the basement shelves with Perfect Mason jars.

Going to the store was a big deal. It’s when I’d watch my mother spend the most money I had ever thought of, something close to $100. Again, we paid through labor, because where we shopped was one of those food warehouses, Bonanza, that kept all of its items in cases on the shelves with no individual price stickers. This was way before UPC codes. They had grease pens and you wrote the price on each item for checkout.

Mom also had a produce guy who sold her bulk items. I didn’t know as a child what bags of apples or oranges were. We got everything in crates and boxes, some of which I still have today.

My mother laughed when thinking about Mr. Hunt. The first time she visited his Quonset hut full of fruits and vegetables, he saw all of us ragamuffin kids. From that point on, he’d call my mom if any special deals came along. He was a gruff but kindhearted guy.

When it came to meals, you didn’t dawdle. You ate what Mom put out there. This is something my child has no concept of. I cater to her whims, for now, but Mom’s old mantras are beginning to rise in my parenting repertoire. There were seconds, but not before everyone had a round. It is amazing to think how she knew just how much to make for 10. And it’s also amazing to think of the time it took to prepare those meals. We’d wolf it all down in minutes.

We learned about meal prep as we got older, becoming part of the assembly line. These were lessons for life.

We knew where our meals came from as well. I recall various siblings asking, on Salisbury steak night, “Who are we eating tonight,” and then the list of the cows each of us were assigned to, animals that we knew — despite all of them getting names from us — would eventually end up in the bulk freezer.

So when I wind up spending $200 at the store, I know I could do better. Because I once did. I have plenty of room in the backyard for vegetables, but have chosen ornamental over functional. I could shop around, cut coupons, have a more rigid weekly meal list. I could buy in bulk.

My brain hurts.

The world, of course, was different decades ago. Convenience food wasn’t nearly as prevalent. I wish I would have appreciated more then just how things came to our table.

But I can’t rue. I can smile at those old days, and perhaps look on the good fortune back then coming home to roost on me now.

I took a year of economics courses in college and thoroughly enjoyed them. The fickle winds of commerce gave us quite a good ride free of oppressing inflation for nearly 40 years. Long forgotten was the stagflation and inflation that plagued the U.S. economy for 20 years beginning in the mid-1960s. My family was well-accustomed to the winds of economics. But 40 flush years can make one forget.

I’m remembering now.

Mike is a reporter and page designer for the Pine Knot. He can be reached at [email protected].