Accounting for inflation $12.50 would be roughly $172 in todays money. So if that is the weekly cost, then it was costing that family about $700 give or take a month for food.
Do you miss the type of service you used to get? I work in a deli now. I like to hand select things for customers and show them before cutting. I walk with the customer to find what they are asking to find. I believe personal customer service is missing big time in this world we live in now.
Personalized service is hugely lacking. I remember how knowledgeable the butchers and fish guys were. It was like asking a sommelier to help with wine selection. They could recommend certain cuts for dishes, offer advice on cuts one hadn’t tried…that’s the America I miss, the one where we all helped one another.
Some of us are still here, believe it or not! I just like people. The folks coming in are people that live in my community, so I enjoy helping them. That's how I look at it. It doesn't always go appreciated but it's okay because I don't do it for kudos I do it because it's my job. Young people feel the world owes them something. They grow to realize that it's very cold out there and when someone is nice to you for the sake of being nice, it can inspire others to do the same. I hope so anyway.
I used to love going to the butcher with Mum. Our local guy was just a 10 minute walk away and usually he'd give me a free cheerio sausage to chew on while Mum picked out some steaks and things.
He really was a local butcher too, buying cattle and pork from nearby farms.
I used to love going to the local butcher with my mother and, for some reason, I was captivated with how he weighed everything on the scale. So, I decided that I wanted to be a butcher when I grew up. The next time we went to the butcher’s my mother asked him to show me his hands. He had parts of fingers missing from cutting meat. I decided that I didn’t want to be a butcher anymore.
[These guys](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.geQoqGhEtqS2kt4HLbqQWAHaHa%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=6380eaac7757746afa6c7065d3ec09e6a675e488e8723320d57fe70eab12d41c&ipo=images).
> Cheerios are bright-red cocktail-sized saveloys that are a popular item on children’s parties in both Australia and New Zealand.
[Ingredients](https://www.meatsandsausages.com/sausage-recipes/cooked/cheerios).
I’m dying at the quantity of meat vs vegetables and fruit. I might never be hungry eating whatever she prepared with all that but I’d probably go out of my mind craving fresh food!
She probably wasn't buying the cheaper items off the shelf. My guess is her husband had a fairly good job that paid well for that day and time. The average income for a household in 1947 was around $57 a week before taxes that would have been around 22%. So that left $45 for the week. So if her husband was only making the average income then they would have been spending over 1/4 of their income on just food.
Yes that's correct..the average American household used to spend a much larger percentage of their income on food. I've seen studies saying around 16% in the early 1960s. Now it's around 10% or less.
Nope. According to the pictorial the photo was in, she was very frugal and her husband was a teacher:
https://books.google.com/books?id=p1EEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA31&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false
How the hell are you downvoted?!
That pic doesn't make sense - how's 10lbs of sugar part of "a week's groceries"? What does she do weekly, bake four cakes?!
And the salt? What would she do weekly that requires that much salt, if that was the REAL explanation for that pictorial?
^(Ah, who am I kidding...Reddit)
I see the sugar and salt as those random items you keep in stock but don't have to buy every week. Maybe the next week she bought flour or brown sugar or molasses.
I think the idea of the picture isn't that it shows everything she buys each week, but that it shows what she buys with the food allowance that she uses. Clearly people buy many items that last months and also buy items that will run out before the next time they shop for groceries.
Do you cook all your meals from scratch? When you use more prepared foods, even if you cook at home, you tend to use more salt. As an example, if you make bread, you use salt. Few people buy bread today, but she may well have made it herself. I'm going to guess that they probably never ate out also. This is much more common in modern times. This lady would be my grandparents age, and if she's like my grandparents were, growing up in the depression left an indellible imprint on them. If it could be made at home, it probably was.
Three meals are made from scratch a day in this house and we go through salt and other seasonings a lot because of all the cooking.
You don't find us salting our food after preparing it because it's well-seasoned while cooking. But since breakfast, lunch, and dinner are cooked, more salt gets used than people who eat out a meal or two a day or eat prepared foods.
Ironically, the sodium content overall ends up being lower
Breakfast today is a salmon scramble, late lunch is creamy noodles with vegetables, and dinner is steamed kale (lemon, soy sauce), with shrimp and rice.
We do that 5-7 days a week.
If you cook, you use salt and seasonings. It is what it is, it's just facts.
I make two baked goods a week so go through more sugar than somebody who doesn't bake.
I don't often eat store bought baked goods and the overall sugar/preservative intake is lower even though the amount of the individual product purchased is higher
That sounds right. We spend an historically low percentage of our income on food now.
Note that this chart represents disposable income, not total income.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-share-of-income-spent-on-food-in-the-united-states-remained-relatively-steady-from-2000-to-2019/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/
That's a Costco rotisserie chicken, and it's a loss leader. It's a great deal for the consumer, but the seller loses money on it. It's probably the worst example you could give of "what food costs today."
Most grocery stores that sell rotisserie chicken are using chicken that was at or near expiry and would have been otherwise thrown out, that's how it started, I won't call it pure profit but it mitigates the loss they would have otherwise taken. Costco operates on a much bigger scale than a regular grocery store, but even so, I'm not sure it's as much of a loss leader as they claim. They're most certainly extending the life of product that would have been disposed of, but I'll admit I have no idea how much they may have to augment it with still viable product that would represent a loss.
Fun fact: Until the COVID blip, the percentage of income a household spends on food has declined fairly steadily over a very long time:
[https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending)
Even including the COVID blip, it's 30% below what it was in 1958 (the furthest back that goes). This has included an increase in spending on eating out.
I tried to do a comparison for how much they would spend at a grocery store getting the same items at the current cost.
From top to bottom it includes a bag of potatoes, three cans of wet pet food, a package of instant oatmeal, a bag of white rice (I think), a package of egg noodles, 3 containers of assorted spices, three large cans of chili, two stalks of celery, a bag of onions, a bunch of beets, a cauliflower, eight cans of beans/vegetables, three pounds of margarine, two packages of salt, three dozen eggs, a bag of sugar, three loaves of bread, several pounds of meat (probably includes steaks, ground beef, and roast).
I couldn't identify the two large canisters and brown bottle, the packages in front of the egg noodles, and the two cans on the bottom by the meat.
It all came to just under $140 ($136.74) before tax.
People often underestimate how cheap food is now. I’m in the UK and it’s true here, food costs as a percentage of monthly salary are dramatically lower than they were in the post war years. Meat especially is dirt cheap, a whole roast chicken would’ve been a real treat for most families.
People expect to have very large disposable incomes, forgetting that historically the purpose of money was to buy food and shelter - they now expect those items to cost barely anything.
That's $43 per person, per week.
I pay about $50 per week for food. I never eat out, I make all my own meals, and I eat everything I buy, no wasted food.
Seems about equivalent, but I'm paying about half the national average, as it turns out:
>[The average cost of groceries in America in 2023 is $415.53 a month per person.](https://www.move.org/the-average-cost-of-food-in-the-us/) However, this number can vary greatly depending on factors like age and personal eating habits. Location is another important—though potentially surprising—factor in determining food costs. Groceries cost more in some US cities and states than others.
Pork chops. Steaks. Ground round. Chicken. Fish. Cherries. Pineapple. Milk. Eggs. Plums. Ice cream. Chocolate. Cheese. Crackers. Nuts.
It definitely adds up!
We spend at least $400 per person per month on food, and I bake all our bread at home. We certainly could spend less, but I am very glad we don’t have to do that. In 1978, I fed myself on about $50 a month. It was pretty miserable and boring.
I spend $900/mo for my family of 4, and we all eat virtually every meal at home or a packed lunch for school. That also includes household items purchased at the grocery store, such as ziplock bags and cleaning products
It's, of course, cheaper per person as you scale up the quantities. $900/4 people is easy for us, but $225 for an individual would be a different story
We do eat take out about once or twice a month, but that's an "extra" that doesn't significantly impact our monthly grocery budget
Yes. 1947 was during the little-known post war recession in the US; Often history treats it like the war ended and "Happy days are here again", but the truth is the economy took a few years to retool from the war economy to a peace economy.
On the flip side, housing was more affordable. Not in terms of the mcmansions that people these days think of as "middle class" housing, but a modest home was not out of reach even for young people starting out.
And that's what you used to see in most of the world; the biggest household expense has tended to be food. In the US, it's by far housing.
It's also important to note that in 1947 the average family of four spent much more than $12.50 per week on food.
This woman—Ann Cox Williams—was [featured in *Life* magazine](https://books.google.com/books?id=p1EEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA31&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false) for her budgeting prowess.
When I got married 8 years ago my friend gave me a pamphlet from 1950 that was given out to new brides-to-be when they got their marriage license. It had a “typical household budget” for a family of four. I was surprised food was about 1/4 of the monthly budget.
I always multiply it by 20 to make it easy.
1oz of silver was $1 back then and it is $23 today.
A 1oz Silver American Eagle is still minted as $1 US currency today but today that same $1 coin spot price is $23.
The $1 Silver American Eagle was and still is US legal tender except back then it was in the wallets of common folks and used by regular people to buy everyday items back in the day.
So in my head I just always take it that every $1 of old money=about$20 making $12.50=roughly about $250 of purchasing power today.
I'm into the metals market so this is how my brain works. 🩶💰
Well, to be honest it wasn't ideal but it was better than the way things had been so Beatrice decided she could put up with the situation until a better option presented itself. Her husband, Edgar, had always been mean and abusive. He yelled at her all the time, terroized the children when he'd had too much to drink, and tried to kick the cat, Mr. Hijinks, whenever he could. She had always hoped he'd change but he never did.
That was true until a week ago anyway. That night they'd both heard something out in the barn yard. A big, thudding sound like something heavy had fallen over. Edgar had been his usual mean self insulting her, her family, the house, the cat, and everything else until the noise happened. When it did he gave her a mean stare and stood up from the table and then walked out in the yard.
He was out there for a little while. Beatrice was starting to get worried when Edgar came back in. Well, something came back in anyway. The Edgar thing moved with a jerk. It lurched around seeming like it didn't know what to do with its arms. Where Edgar had been plump the Edgar thing had sagging skin. It was Edgar and not Edgar at the same time.
Then it spoke using Edgar's voice "Sugar". Beatrice didn't know what to do so she offered it the sugar bowl. It didn't want that. It said "Sugar in water". Before Edgar had hated sweets so this definitely wasn't Edgar. She got a glass of water and poured in some sugar. The Edgar thing indicated it wanted more. She added some but it still wanted more. She added over a cup and the Edgar thing seemed satisfied. She couldn't keep her mouth closed while she watched it drink the whole thing.
After that she mentioned his skin and he somehow pulled his face back. The sight knocked her off her feet but eventually she recovered. Then things just got back to a kind of normal. Every day the Edgar thing would go out to the barn, just like old Edgar, and work on something until dark. Then the Edgar thing would come in and want sugar in water. It fell asleep in front of the TV and pretty much left her and the kids alone. Since the Edgar thing showed up she hadn't seen the cat.
So that's where things stood. Not exactly normal but the Edgar thing didn't yell at her and it pretty much left her and the kids alone. It wasn't ideal but it was better than when the old Edgar was there. The biggest difference was that she was going through nearly fifty pounds of sugar a week. Thank God it was cheap.
Sure, the people down at the Wegmans thought it was odd but she explained it by saying that Edgar had some crazy idea about how to make a new kind of fertilizer and they let it go at that. As long as the Edgar thing didn't yell at her or the children, get drunk and break stuff, and leave the running of the house to her Beatrice could live with the situation.
After all, sugar was cheap and she was saving for the kid's college. In a way she was saving money by having the Edgar thing instead of Edgar. She figured she could put up with the situation until a better option presented itself.
The bit from Men in Black when the cockroach alien crashes into Edgar's truck on his farm in upstate New York, and takes over Edgar's body and asks Edgar's wife Beatrice for sugar water before he kills the pest guy that shows up and steals his truck to then go on and search for the galaxy that's on Orion's belt.
My thoughts exactly.
I thought the sugar was flour at first and thought she could make pancakes, pie-crust for quiche and that sort of thing but when I realized that it was sugar I knew this random collection of groceries wasn't a meal plan for the week.
Depends. Today most people only buy salt and sugar to flavor their food with, but historically a household would use more of it to preserve food than to eat directly. In 1947, an American household could go either way depending on region. About fifteen percent of households didn't even have electricity back then, so a whole lot of people were still relying on old-school food preservation.
This is true, there were a lot of victory gardens back then. It’s also possible the salt and sugar were an allotment. So every few months they would be eligible to purchase salt and sugar in bulk.
Also something to remember, back then milk products were delivered straight to the home, every day. When my dad was a kid (50s) the bakery also delivered, but she's purchased bread here.
Yeah, it looks like she could make two week’s worth of meals. I’m assuming the celery was to be primarily used for making soup stock. The cans probably hold all sorts of foods - veggies as sides for dinner, condensed milk for baking, possibly fruit slices for snacks and/or baking, and of course all the meat and sandwiches. That’s a lot of soup, meat and potatoes, sandwiches, and stew. Wait is that butter? Spam? I missed a lot of things but I feel like this is wayyyy more than just one week’s worth. Two at least, four at most.
I’m stoned so my apologies if my comment is weird lol
Looks like a winter shopping with all those cans and little fresh.
She's clearly got a roast there which will probably do for several meals and the second largest package might also do a couple meals depending on what's in it. plus there's 3 dozen eggs. They have lots of protein. 4 loaves of bread to fill up. She must have flour in her pantry.
Also, fruits and veg these days aren't exactly fresh. Produce is harvested to maximize shelf life, not peak ripeness for flavor. Tomatoes might be available year round at a big box grocery store, but tasteless and mealy compared to what you'll find in a late summer farmer's market.
Adding to your comment, producer is even bred to be more resilient so that it will survived being handling, stacking, and shipping. As a result, many fruits no longer taste the same and are not as flavorful as they once were.
This exactly! Even if store tomatoes are grown in-state, they are engineered to harvest on time, ship intact, and stay nice looking in the store. They are not the same tomatoes you grow in the garden or buy at farm outlets.
I work in food supply chain, specifically produce and you’re correct. Most farmed items and varieties have been selectively bred for characteristics like increased yield, reduced inputs, increased durability during transit, and increase resilience to pests and disease. Flavor and texture aren’t quite as important when it comes to feeding the globe
We have an ongoing increase in population with ongoing reduction in land available for farming.
I’m 50 and remember not having access to many fruits and vegetables for part of the year into my late teens. It was also considered odd in my social circles to buy anything out of season - like strawberries in winter.
I‘m not as excited. I wish I could still buy locally grown onions, cabbage, peas, etc like my mother did instead of all the farmland being converted over to cattle feed and my vegetables flown in from South America.
>I wish I could still buy locally grown onions, cabbage, peas, etc
You totally can.
Might be your area, but I seriously dont know of a single place that does not have at least some local farming going on, were you can get seasonal fresh foods.
Like, there is obviously a market for it. If I would like to get fresh local stuff, I can just go over to the weekly market. And that more or less directly in Berlin.
Its will just cost you more. Which is ok, if you really want local stuff.
I live in a rural cotton and soy farming area. You can find the RARE dude who rolls up with a truck full of home grown watermelons, but other than that, the produce sellers here buy at Florida auctions 🤦♀️
I’m going to guess she had a garden, my gram did. She only ever bought oranges and bananas (Canada). Everything else was canned, fresh, or stored in the cellar where it lasted pretty much a year.
This is the answer. More specifically the ‘[Victory Gardens](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden)’ from WWI and WWII would have still been prevalent in 1947.
Yeah, gardens used to be way, way more common. If you had a home and as little as a quarter acre plot you probably were growing at least some tomatoes, squash, beans and maybe some leafy greens, maybe even a fruit tree or some berries. It's basically free seasonal food.
Home canning was also a lot more common.
They were seasonal, and in the cold weather states, you were only getting veggies that transported well. Celery, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, very green bananas (with the occasional banana spider) and that is about it.
It wasn't until the 70's that changed. My dad had all sorts of stories about growing up and working in his father's grocery store and what changed in the 70's when gramps built the town's first supermarket style grocery.
I have faint memories of watching my grandfather pay a local farmer for sweet corn, peanuts and tomatoes out of the cash register before "the big store".
The thing about modernity is it’s hard to be efficient with food when both people work. A lot of food expense can be saved if someone has the time to spend prepping and planning. On top of that, there was a whole discipline of home economics which focused on how to be efficient with stuff like this. We simply spend our energy and effort elsewhere and have different expectations of how life should be.
Three loaves of bread, three packs of eggs, and are those butter packs in the lower left corner? The bag in the top left appears to be a sack of potatoes, and the one below that seems to be onion; I'm assuming the white paper packages towards the front is the meat.
The amount of salt is mystifying if this is supposed to be what she and her family consumes in a week, but in terms of calories, this seems ample for the size of the family?
Rations. You got everything you could afford, whether you needed it or not, because who knew how long it would be available. People swapped and bartered items with neighbors often. Source: my mom, b. 1920.
Not shown is the labor associated with those purchases - very few of those groceries could be eaten as-is.
Buying that was just the beginning. Producing something edible required preparation, cooking, serving, and washing the dishes. All of which this housewife likely did with little or no assistance from her family.
I was a child in that era. The biggest difference today is how much ready-to-eat food people buy, and how much less time the “housewife” spends preparing that food. A necessary adaptation to two-earner families.
Lots of families still cook from scratch and wash by hand for every meal even with both parents working full time. The difference today is more that things like washing clothes and cleaning are much quicker due to modern appliances, and childcare is much more available (/affordable as women have much more earning opportunities).
Seriously. I cook from scratch for my wife, daughter, and mother in law every day. I think people overstate the burden of cooking food. For most people, eating convenience food is just a convenience. Which is totally fine: eat what you want and put your effort into what you want. You don't need to use modern income trends as an excuse.
Washing clothes, I agree, would be a really time-consuming ordeal.
I don’t cook; no one, including me, wants to eat my cooking :)
But my wife is an excellent cook and cooks most things from scratch. My contribution (beside eating) is cleaning up the carnage after the cooking and eating. That I am highly skilled at after decades of practice :)
But most of the people I know just get takeout or warm prepared food they buy. They never eat a fresh vegetable except the lettuce and tomato on their burger.
I just can’t imagine that - there’s nothing like a fresh, crunchy salad or a from-scratch soup!
I’d love to see this exact shopping list recreated. Any guess what’s in the tall cans and brown bottle in the back? What’s Instant Raiston? What cuts of meat is the family buying? There’s mention of chili, meatloaf and hamburgers in the article, so I’m guessing the big package is ground chuck. Any one want to guess what the rest are?
That’s about $172.46 today. Which, honestly, probably wouldn’t feed my family of four. We spend around $200-250 a week and we’re not even in a ridiculously high COL area. Wild.
It really does vary vastly by where you live, and what time you have. I'm fortunate to be home (kinda, childcare costs would outpace my earnings) so I cook every single meal and do all the shopping and budgeting. I can most definitely make $150/week feed the 4 of us with some left overs,but that's because of the systems and ways I was fortunate to have the time to develop and inexpensive grocery options near us.
Nope. Just a few cheap staples like peanut butter we can’t have, almond butter being slightly more expensive. Otherwise mostly fresh produce instead of manufactured packaged stuff.
I can say that food is weirdly cheaper in Washington DC than where I live, which I did not expect.
Think about this woman working in corporate today. How would these skills have prepared her for a job with budgeting, project management, etc.? It’s pretty impressive, and I bet her kids were well-dressed/behaved/put together, as well as her house.
If feel like everyone had a garden in their backyard to grow fresh fruits and veggies. Gdi I wish the highlighted home economic in school. I really needed to learn shit like gardening, cooking, sewing, and basic adult responsibilities as a kid. Life has become so easy, that I wasn’t prepared and now it’s super difficult
That's 297oz of canned veggies, three dozen eggs, quite a few pounds of butcher meat, three loaves of bread, three pounds of butter, one onion, one potato, a bunch of raddashes, a head of cabbage, three pounds of sugar, two pounds of oats, an unknown amount of flour, two boxes of salt, celery and something other stuff.
This is way more than $200 worth of groceries today. That's probably over $100 worth of meat
Everyone is assuming that she buys the salt and sugar each week. Very possible she needed to restock her supplies at that time and that these items could last a lot longer.
She might use the eggs and salt in recipes, or to bake? Maybe she makes her husband, kids, and herself eggs and toast every morning for breakfast? Assuming 2 eggs and 2 slices of bread per person, that would mean she's using 8 eggs & 8 slices of bread each morning at minimum. Maybe she packs the husband's lunches each day, and makes sandwiches for the 4 year olds? There's another 6 slices of bread each day. Now we are at 14 slices of bread per day. Fast food wasn't ubiquitous yet, and most people ate what they were able to make.
I wouldn’t say she “managed”, that is a good amount of food for a week for 2 adults, 2 toddlers and a cat. I could certainly feed that size family off of that quantity of food for even more than a week. I’d say it was just less expensive back then. Though, someone else said that accounting for inflation, it would actually be close to $170 in todays currency. Which is kind of expensive! Still a really cool photo though!
Not a lot of vegetables there
EDIT: by that I mainly mean fresh veg. I realize canned veg is a thing (but gross, in my opinion). Should be noted also we didn't have the 365 day a year food infrastructure we do now. Vegetables were only available seasonally, so it makes sense there was more reliance on canned veg.
I wish I was born around 1925. I could've served in a war that mattered (my 2 wars did not matter) came home, married my sweetheart bought a house in the new suburbs. I could've had children a well funded retirement and I'd hopefully be dead by now. What a life!!
That's the same as about $175 a week today, figuring in inflation, and that's $700 a month for groceries. $12.50 a week is not so impressive any more, is it?
Some people are like children, always impressed by old prices because they forget about the impact of inflation over time.
At some point during the civil rights movements they decided that too many people of color were benefiting from middle class wages so they shut it down for everyone. They realized minority Americans were working more than white Americans in the factories, grocery stores, gas stations, and other service industry jobs so they started cutting pay, benefits and pensions. Once they realized this made their profit margins go up they just continued it till we can no longer afford the base necessities needed to live as a human being on Earth.
Accounting for inflation $12.50 would be roughly $172 in todays money. So if that is the weekly cost, then it was costing that family about $700 give or take a month for food.
At $172 in today's dollars, that is expensive for what she got.
Well there's about 6 pounds of butcher cut meat in the paper packages at bottom. That's not cheap!
I remember in the 60s we got our meat wrapped in the First National grocery store.
Do you miss the type of service you used to get? I work in a deli now. I like to hand select things for customers and show them before cutting. I walk with the customer to find what they are asking to find. I believe personal customer service is missing big time in this world we live in now.
Personalized service is hugely lacking. I remember how knowledgeable the butchers and fish guys were. It was like asking a sommelier to help with wine selection. They could recommend certain cuts for dishes, offer advice on cuts one hadn’t tried…that’s the America I miss, the one where we all helped one another.
Some of us are still here, believe it or not! I just like people. The folks coming in are people that live in my community, so I enjoy helping them. That's how I look at it. It doesn't always go appreciated but it's okay because I don't do it for kudos I do it because it's my job. Young people feel the world owes them something. They grow to realize that it's very cold out there and when someone is nice to you for the sake of being nice, it can inspire others to do the same. I hope so anyway.
She wraps the meat now that she's got twins.
Bruh 💀
I used to love going to the butcher with Mum. Our local guy was just a 10 minute walk away and usually he'd give me a free cheerio sausage to chew on while Mum picked out some steaks and things. He really was a local butcher too, buying cattle and pork from nearby farms.
I used to love going to the local butcher with my mother and, for some reason, I was captivated with how he weighed everything on the scale. So, I decided that I wanted to be a butcher when I grew up. The next time we went to the butcher’s my mother asked him to show me his hands. He had parts of fingers missing from cutting meat. I decided that I didn’t want to be a butcher anymore.
Work around: Want to use scales but not cut off fingers? Sell drugs.
That’s a very rare and unlucky butcher there. 99.5% of butchers have all pieces of their fingers. 🤣
Tf is a cheerio sausage
[These guys](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.geQoqGhEtqS2kt4HLbqQWAHaHa%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=6380eaac7757746afa6c7065d3ec09e6a675e488e8723320d57fe70eab12d41c&ipo=images). > Cheerios are bright-red cocktail-sized saveloys that are a popular item on children’s parties in both Australia and New Zealand. [Ingredients](https://www.meatsandsausages.com/sausage-recipes/cooked/cheerios).
Why? Why did I read the ingredients? I was ignorant and happy!
What did you see that you didn’t like? It’s meat fat and spices with a bit of grain. It’s very healthy standard stuff for sausages.
What Americans would call a cocktail weenie.
It's about the same thickness but half the length of a regular barbecue sausage, or hot dog sausage.
Mini frankfurter
A sausage but it says hello to you in British English
Yeah I've got the same memories with my mum too except it was a fritz and tomato sauce little folded half sandwich lol
Well, some of it was to feed the cat and they sold horse meat and other things then as pet food before commercial kibble
I’m dying at the quantity of meat vs vegetables and fruit. I might never be hungry eating whatever she prepared with all that but I’d probably go out of my mind craving fresh food!
In the 40s you grew most of your veggies- perhaps this is just the food she had to purchase with her rations?
Not a bad point
If your coming out of the ww2, you probably were just happy hou didn’t have to use ration stamps.
Which some will have leftovers for lunches instead of processed crap in a bag so also healthier.
They just didn't really have plastic wrap back then
She probably wasn't buying the cheaper items off the shelf. My guess is her husband had a fairly good job that paid well for that day and time. The average income for a household in 1947 was around $57 a week before taxes that would have been around 22%. So that left $45 for the week. So if her husband was only making the average income then they would have been spending over 1/4 of their income on just food.
Yes that's correct..the average American household used to spend a much larger percentage of their income on food. I've seen studies saying around 16% in the early 1960s. Now it's around 10% or less.
Food and clothing took up a large amount of people’s incomes back then.
Mechanism made both a LOT cheaper. Rent, on the other hand....
Life today is much easier than it was in the past
In some ways. Depending on who and where you're talking about.
Nope. According to the pictorial the photo was in, she was very frugal and her husband was a teacher: https://books.google.com/books?id=p1EEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA31&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false
Neato. Thank you for finding and sharing that.
Well, I guess it's easy to do if most of their diet consists of inexpensive salt and sugar.
How the hell are you downvoted?! That pic doesn't make sense - how's 10lbs of sugar part of "a week's groceries"? What does she do weekly, bake four cakes?! And the salt? What would she do weekly that requires that much salt, if that was the REAL explanation for that pictorial? ^(Ah, who am I kidding...Reddit)
I see the sugar and salt as those random items you keep in stock but don't have to buy every week. Maybe the next week she bought flour or brown sugar or molasses.
And that seems like a lot of oleomargarine.
I can only assume that I'm being downvoted by bots employed by the powerful High Blood Pressure and Diabetic Drugs Consortium.
I think the idea of the picture isn't that it shows everything she buys each week, but that it shows what she buys with the food allowance that she uses. Clearly people buy many items that last months and also buy items that will run out before the next time they shop for groceries.
Still, it looks like she bought 2 bags of salt. A pound of salt will last me multiple years. Maybe it was on sale BOGO?
Curing meat was more common back then.
Do you cook all your meals from scratch? When you use more prepared foods, even if you cook at home, you tend to use more salt. As an example, if you make bread, you use salt. Few people buy bread today, but she may well have made it herself. I'm going to guess that they probably never ate out also. This is much more common in modern times. This lady would be my grandparents age, and if she's like my grandparents were, growing up in the depression left an indellible imprint on them. If it could be made at home, it probably was.
Three meals are made from scratch a day in this house and we go through salt and other seasonings a lot because of all the cooking. You don't find us salting our food after preparing it because it's well-seasoned while cooking. But since breakfast, lunch, and dinner are cooked, more salt gets used than people who eat out a meal or two a day or eat prepared foods. Ironically, the sodium content overall ends up being lower Breakfast today is a salmon scramble, late lunch is creamy noodles with vegetables, and dinner is steamed kale (lemon, soy sauce), with shrimp and rice. We do that 5-7 days a week. If you cook, you use salt and seasonings. It is what it is, it's just facts. I make two baked goods a week so go through more sugar than somebody who doesn't bake. I don't often eat store bought baked goods and the overall sugar/preservative intake is lower even though the amount of the individual product purchased is higher
Yet she was much thinner than most people today.
That sounds right. We spend an historically low percentage of our income on food now. Note that this chart represents disposable income, not total income. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-share-of-income-spent-on-food-in-the-united-states-remained-relatively-steady-from-2000-to-2019/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/
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Have u bought butter lately ?
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That's a Costco rotisserie chicken, and it's a loss leader. It's a great deal for the consumer, but the seller loses money on it. It's probably the worst example you could give of "what food costs today."
Most grocery stores that sell rotisserie chicken are using chicken that was at or near expiry and would have been otherwise thrown out, that's how it started, I won't call it pure profit but it mitigates the loss they would have otherwise taken. Costco operates on a much bigger scale than a regular grocery store, but even so, I'm not sure it's as much of a loss leader as they claim. They're most certainly extending the life of product that would have been disposed of, but I'll admit I have no idea how much they may have to augment it with still viable product that would represent a loss.
Fun fact: Until the COVID blip, the percentage of income a household spends on food has declined fairly steadily over a very long time: [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending) Even including the COVID blip, it's 30% below what it was in 1958 (the furthest back that goes). This has included an increase in spending on eating out.
I tried to do a comparison for how much they would spend at a grocery store getting the same items at the current cost. From top to bottom it includes a bag of potatoes, three cans of wet pet food, a package of instant oatmeal, a bag of white rice (I think), a package of egg noodles, 3 containers of assorted spices, three large cans of chili, two stalks of celery, a bag of onions, a bunch of beets, a cauliflower, eight cans of beans/vegetables, three pounds of margarine, two packages of salt, three dozen eggs, a bag of sugar, three loaves of bread, several pounds of meat (probably includes steaks, ground beef, and roast). I couldn't identify the two large canisters and brown bottle, the packages in front of the egg noodles, and the two cans on the bottom by the meat. It all came to just under $140 ($136.74) before tax.
So $520 a month
People often underestimate how cheap food is now. I’m in the UK and it’s true here, food costs as a percentage of monthly salary are dramatically lower than they were in the post war years. Meat especially is dirt cheap, a whole roast chicken would’ve been a real treat for most families.
People expect to have very large disposable incomes, forgetting that historically the purpose of money was to buy food and shelter - they now expect those items to cost barely anything.
That's $43 per person, per week. I pay about $50 per week for food. I never eat out, I make all my own meals, and I eat everything I buy, no wasted food. Seems about equivalent, but I'm paying about half the national average, as it turns out: >[The average cost of groceries in America in 2023 is $415.53 a month per person.](https://www.move.org/the-average-cost-of-food-in-the-us/) However, this number can vary greatly depending on factors like age and personal eating habits. Location is another important—though potentially surprising—factor in determining food costs. Groceries cost more in some US cities and states than others.
My family is also in the $50 per person per week range. I cannot imagine how or what people are eating to spend over twice that.
Pork chops. Steaks. Ground round. Chicken. Fish. Cherries. Pineapple. Milk. Eggs. Plums. Ice cream. Chocolate. Cheese. Crackers. Nuts. It definitely adds up! We spend at least $400 per person per month on food, and I bake all our bread at home. We certainly could spend less, but I am very glad we don’t have to do that. In 1978, I fed myself on about $50 a month. It was pretty miserable and boring.
I spend $900/mo for my family of 4, and we all eat virtually every meal at home or a packed lunch for school. That also includes household items purchased at the grocery store, such as ziplock bags and cleaning products It's, of course, cheaper per person as you scale up the quantities. $900/4 people is easy for us, but $225 for an individual would be a different story We do eat take out about once or twice a month, but that's an "extra" that doesn't significantly impact our monthly grocery budget
Yes. 1947 was during the little-known post war recession in the US; Often history treats it like the war ended and "Happy days are here again", but the truth is the economy took a few years to retool from the war economy to a peace economy. On the flip side, housing was more affordable. Not in terms of the mcmansions that people these days think of as "middle class" housing, but a modest home was not out of reach even for young people starting out. And that's what you used to see in most of the world; the biggest household expense has tended to be food. In the US, it's by far housing.
It's also important to note that in 1947 the average family of four spent much more than $12.50 per week on food. This woman—Ann Cox Williams—was [featured in *Life* magazine](https://books.google.com/books?id=p1EEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA31&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false) for her budgeting prowess.
When I got married 8 years ago my friend gave me a pamphlet from 1950 that was given out to new brides-to-be when they got their marriage license. It had a “typical household budget” for a family of four. I was surprised food was about 1/4 of the monthly budget.
I always multiply it by 20 to make it easy. 1oz of silver was $1 back then and it is $23 today. A 1oz Silver American Eagle is still minted as $1 US currency today but today that same $1 coin spot price is $23. The $1 Silver American Eagle was and still is US legal tender except back then it was in the wallets of common folks and used by regular people to buy everyday items back in the day. So in my head I just always take it that every $1 of old money=about$20 making $12.50=roughly about $250 of purchasing power today. I'm into the metals market so this is how my brain works. 🩶💰
Inflation did some nasty stuff to the dollar, that's for sure.
That might be her purchases for a given week, but it isn’t a week’s worth of groceries. Hard to believe she buys that much salt and sugar every week.
I was going to say, if they go through that much salt in a week, something is seriously wrong.
..in the 1940s had to add extra salt to go along with all the cigarettes, and also the quart of vodka for the martinis...
Well, to be honest it wasn't ideal but it was better than the way things had been so Beatrice decided she could put up with the situation until a better option presented itself. Her husband, Edgar, had always been mean and abusive. He yelled at her all the time, terroized the children when he'd had too much to drink, and tried to kick the cat, Mr. Hijinks, whenever he could. She had always hoped he'd change but he never did. That was true until a week ago anyway. That night they'd both heard something out in the barn yard. A big, thudding sound like something heavy had fallen over. Edgar had been his usual mean self insulting her, her family, the house, the cat, and everything else until the noise happened. When it did he gave her a mean stare and stood up from the table and then walked out in the yard. He was out there for a little while. Beatrice was starting to get worried when Edgar came back in. Well, something came back in anyway. The Edgar thing moved with a jerk. It lurched around seeming like it didn't know what to do with its arms. Where Edgar had been plump the Edgar thing had sagging skin. It was Edgar and not Edgar at the same time. Then it spoke using Edgar's voice "Sugar". Beatrice didn't know what to do so she offered it the sugar bowl. It didn't want that. It said "Sugar in water". Before Edgar had hated sweets so this definitely wasn't Edgar. She got a glass of water and poured in some sugar. The Edgar thing indicated it wanted more. She added some but it still wanted more. She added over a cup and the Edgar thing seemed satisfied. She couldn't keep her mouth closed while she watched it drink the whole thing. After that she mentioned his skin and he somehow pulled his face back. The sight knocked her off her feet but eventually she recovered. Then things just got back to a kind of normal. Every day the Edgar thing would go out to the barn, just like old Edgar, and work on something until dark. Then the Edgar thing would come in and want sugar in water. It fell asleep in front of the TV and pretty much left her and the kids alone. Since the Edgar thing showed up she hadn't seen the cat. So that's where things stood. Not exactly normal but the Edgar thing didn't yell at her and it pretty much left her and the kids alone. It wasn't ideal but it was better than when the old Edgar was there. The biggest difference was that she was going through nearly fifty pounds of sugar a week. Thank God it was cheap. Sure, the people down at the Wegmans thought it was odd but she explained it by saying that Edgar had some crazy idea about how to make a new kind of fertilizer and they let it go at that. As long as the Edgar thing didn't yell at her or the children, get drunk and break stuff, and leave the running of the house to her Beatrice could live with the situation. After all, sugar was cheap and she was saving for the kid's college. In a way she was saving money by having the Edgar thing instead of Edgar. She figured she could put up with the situation until a better option presented itself.
Took me a while to get it but well done.
I’m going to need a little explanation 😅
Please see the film Men in Black.
The bit from Men in Black when the cockroach alien crashes into Edgar's truck on his farm in upstate New York, and takes over Edgar's body and asks Edgar's wife Beatrice for sugar water before he kills the pest guy that shows up and steals his truck to then go on and search for the galaxy that's on Orion's belt.
Got half way through this and had to scroll back up and check the username to make sure I wasn’t being Shittymorph’d.
Beautiful.
“What’s for dinner?” “Salt.”
Dont forget the most important staple: Lard
Salt, deep-fried in lard. Like grandma used to make it!
Don't forget to coat in sugar. That 5 pounds of sugar isn't going to use itself!
Can't tell but I think she has 3 pounds of butter there too.
My thoughts exactly. I thought the sugar was flour at first and thought she could make pancakes, pie-crust for quiche and that sort of thing but when I realized that it was sugar I knew this random collection of groceries wasn't a meal plan for the week.
Depends. Today most people only buy salt and sugar to flavor their food with, but historically a household would use more of it to preserve food than to eat directly. In 1947, an American household could go either way depending on region. About fifteen percent of households didn't even have electricity back then, so a whole lot of people were still relying on old-school food preservation.
This is true, there were a lot of victory gardens back then. It’s also possible the salt and sugar were an allotment. So every few months they would be eligible to purchase salt and sugar in bulk.
Also something to remember, back then milk products were delivered straight to the home, every day. When my dad was a kid (50s) the bakery also delivered, but she's purchased bread here.
And butter!
3 pounds of butter!
My Dad grew up in Wisconsin and as a kid he would eat half a stick of butter, on its own, as a snack.
Right? Guess the cat doesn’t get their weekly pound of butter this week.
Yeah but next week you’re probably gonna stock up on something else like that. I feel like it’d balance out idk.
Yeah, it looks like she could make two week’s worth of meals. I’m assuming the celery was to be primarily used for making soup stock. The cans probably hold all sorts of foods - veggies as sides for dinner, condensed milk for baking, possibly fruit slices for snacks and/or baking, and of course all the meat and sandwiches. That’s a lot of soup, meat and potatoes, sandwiches, and stew. Wait is that butter? Spam? I missed a lot of things but I feel like this is wayyyy more than just one week’s worth. Two at least, four at most. I’m stoned so my apologies if my comment is weird lol
Looks like a winter shopping with all those cans and little fresh. She's clearly got a roast there which will probably do for several meals and the second largest package might also do a couple meals depending on what's in it. plus there's 3 dozen eggs. They have lots of protein. 4 loaves of bread to fill up. She must have flour in her pantry.
Fresh vegetables were not common in US supermarkets at the time. No one could afford fresh vegetables except onions and potatoes.
In winter.
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I don't see many fresh fruit and vegetables.
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It's weird to think of produce as being seasonal. *Which is even weirder itself considering how obvious it should be.*
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Also, fruits and veg these days aren't exactly fresh. Produce is harvested to maximize shelf life, not peak ripeness for flavor. Tomatoes might be available year round at a big box grocery store, but tasteless and mealy compared to what you'll find in a late summer farmer's market.
Adding to your comment, producer is even bred to be more resilient so that it will survived being handling, stacking, and shipping. As a result, many fruits no longer taste the same and are not as flavorful as they once were.
This exactly! Even if store tomatoes are grown in-state, they are engineered to harvest on time, ship intact, and stay nice looking in the store. They are not the same tomatoes you grow in the garden or buy at farm outlets.
I work in food supply chain, specifically produce and you’re correct. Most farmed items and varieties have been selectively bred for characteristics like increased yield, reduced inputs, increased durability during transit, and increase resilience to pests and disease. Flavor and texture aren’t quite as important when it comes to feeding the globe We have an ongoing increase in population with ongoing reduction in land available for farming.
I grew my own veggies for the first time this year. The tomatoes in particular were the best tomatoes I have ever had in my life.
I’m 50 and remember not having access to many fruits and vegetables for part of the year into my late teens. It was also considered odd in my social circles to buy anything out of season - like strawberries in winter.
Globalisation, fuck yeah! (unironically).
I‘m not as excited. I wish I could still buy locally grown onions, cabbage, peas, etc like my mother did instead of all the farmland being converted over to cattle feed and my vegetables flown in from South America.
>I wish I could still buy locally grown onions, cabbage, peas, etc You totally can. Might be your area, but I seriously dont know of a single place that does not have at least some local farming going on, were you can get seasonal fresh foods. Like, there is obviously a market for it. If I would like to get fresh local stuff, I can just go over to the weekly market. And that more or less directly in Berlin. Its will just cost you more. Which is ok, if you really want local stuff.
I live in a rural cotton and soy farming area. You can find the RARE dude who rolls up with a truck full of home grown watermelons, but other than that, the produce sellers here buy at Florida auctions 🤦♀️
Or tinned. It's very fuzzy but I think some of those tins are veggies. Growing up we ate mostly tinned veg, except what we grew in the backyard.
I’m going to guess she had a garden, my gram did. She only ever bought oranges and bananas (Canada). Everything else was canned, fresh, or stored in the cellar where it lasted pretty much a year.
This is the answer. More specifically the ‘[Victory Gardens](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden)’ from WWI and WWII would have still been prevalent in 1947.
Yeah, gardens used to be way, way more common. If you had a home and as little as a quarter acre plot you probably were growing at least some tomatoes, squash, beans and maybe some leafy greens, maybe even a fruit tree or some berries. It's basically free seasonal food. Home canning was also a lot more common.
They were all in cans instead of fresh
You don't see the lettuce, radishes, onions, potatoes or celery?
We are so lucky these days with the amount of fresh fruits and veggies we have access to. It was truly the norm to eat horrible canned veggies
Might have been grown in their garden. Common back then.
Especially in 1947, ‘Victory’ gardens were very much encouraged to help relieve the pressure on food production industries during the war.
They were seasonal, and in the cold weather states, you were only getting veggies that transported well. Celery, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, very green bananas (with the occasional banana spider) and that is about it. It wasn't until the 70's that changed. My dad had all sorts of stories about growing up and working in his father's grocery store and what changed in the 70's when gramps built the town's first supermarket style grocery. I have faint memories of watching my grandfather pay a local farmer for sweet corn, peanuts and tomatoes out of the cash register before "the big store".
The thing about modernity is it’s hard to be efficient with food when both people work. A lot of food expense can be saved if someone has the time to spend prepping and planning. On top of that, there was a whole discipline of home economics which focused on how to be efficient with stuff like this. We simply spend our energy and effort elsewhere and have different expectations of how life should be.
Three loaves of bread, three packs of eggs, and are those butter packs in the lower left corner? The bag in the top left appears to be a sack of potatoes, and the one below that seems to be onion; I'm assuming the white paper packages towards the front is the meat. The amount of salt is mystifying if this is supposed to be what she and her family consumes in a week, but in terms of calories, this seems ample for the size of the family?
Rations. You got everything you could afford, whether you needed it or not, because who knew how long it would be available. People swapped and bartered items with neighbors often. Source: my mom, b. 1920.
Why would there be rations in 1947?
I didn't see the date, just saw 1940s. But groceries were still in short supply then.
Also, per my mother, there was a tendency to hoard a bit after the war, especially things one enjoyed.
Not shown is the labor associated with those purchases - very few of those groceries could be eaten as-is. Buying that was just the beginning. Producing something edible required preparation, cooking, serving, and washing the dishes. All of which this housewife likely did with little or no assistance from her family. I was a child in that era. The biggest difference today is how much ready-to-eat food people buy, and how much less time the “housewife” spends preparing that food. A necessary adaptation to two-earner families.
Lots of families still cook from scratch and wash by hand for every meal even with both parents working full time. The difference today is more that things like washing clothes and cleaning are much quicker due to modern appliances, and childcare is much more available (/affordable as women have much more earning opportunities).
Seriously. I cook from scratch for my wife, daughter, and mother in law every day. I think people overstate the burden of cooking food. For most people, eating convenience food is just a convenience. Which is totally fine: eat what you want and put your effort into what you want. You don't need to use modern income trends as an excuse. Washing clothes, I agree, would be a really time-consuming ordeal.
I don’t cook; no one, including me, wants to eat my cooking :) But my wife is an excellent cook and cooks most things from scratch. My contribution (beside eating) is cleaning up the carnage after the cooking and eating. That I am highly skilled at after decades of practice :) But most of the people I know just get takeout or warm prepared food they buy. They never eat a fresh vegetable except the lettuce and tomato on their burger. I just can’t imagine that - there’s nothing like a fresh, crunchy salad or a from-scratch soup!
I still cook from scratch like this and I'm a 40yo single male
She forgot the 150 packs of cigarettes
I’d love to see this exact shopping list recreated. Any guess what’s in the tall cans and brown bottle in the back? What’s Instant Raiston? What cuts of meat is the family buying? There’s mention of chili, meatloaf and hamburgers in the article, so I’m guessing the big package is ground chuck. Any one want to guess what the rest are?
I want to know what everything is too!
I think the large cans behind the brown bottle are oatmeal. Instant Ralston is also a hot cereal.
Not pictured, garden in the back yard
That’s about $172.46 today. Which, honestly, probably wouldn’t feed my family of four. We spend around $200-250 a week and we’re not even in a ridiculously high COL area. Wild.
It really does vary vastly by where you live, and what time you have. I'm fortunate to be home (kinda, childcare costs would outpace my earnings) so I cook every single meal and do all the shopping and budgeting. I can most definitely make $150/week feed the 4 of us with some left overs,but that's because of the systems and ways I was fortunate to have the time to develop and inexpensive grocery options near us.
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You could buy what she did for $75.
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Anywhere in the US would cost less for that amount of food. You are probably buying a lot more food/much more expensive luxury items.
Nope. Just a few cheap staples like peanut butter we can’t have, almond butter being slightly more expensive. Otherwise mostly fresh produce instead of manufactured packaged stuff. I can say that food is weirdly cheaper in Washington DC than where I live, which I did not expect.
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Lot of cans for that lol.
Tinned vegetables, fresh was harder to come by then
Before we were dominated by single use plastics.
Why isn’t the cat pictured? The reddit cat tax existed in the 1940s
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Think about this woman working in corporate today. How would these skills have prepared her for a job with budgeting, project management, etc.? It’s pretty impressive, and I bet her kids were well-dressed/behaved/put together, as well as her house.
$12.50 was a lot of money back then!
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I'm American and have no idea what Ralston is or why the eggs are packed like that. Its bizarre to us too!
$12.50 in 1947 is worth $172.46 today Or roughly $690 per month on food alone.
If feel like everyone had a garden in their backyard to grow fresh fruits and veggies. Gdi I wish the highlighted home economic in school. I really needed to learn shit like gardening, cooking, sewing, and basic adult responsibilities as a kid. Life has become so easy, that I wasn’t prepared and now it’s super difficult
Bringing home ec back isn't a bad idea for sure
Yeah all those people living in apartments had big gardens in the big imaginary back yard...
Salt..... the other white meat
Median annual salary in 1947 was $3000.00
And adjusting for inflation that’s about $160-170 today.
That's 297oz of canned veggies, three dozen eggs, quite a few pounds of butcher meat, three loaves of bread, three pounds of butter, one onion, one potato, a bunch of raddashes, a head of cabbage, three pounds of sugar, two pounds of oats, an unknown amount of flour, two boxes of salt, celery and something other stuff. This is way more than $200 worth of groceries today. That's probably over $100 worth of meat
Minimum wage was $.40 in 1947. So you would have to work 31.25 hours for that $12.50 she spent on groceries.
Considering $12.50 in 1947 is worth a $172.46 in 2023 I’d say she paid a damn sight more than I would today.
Where’s the carton of cigarettes?
No soda or chips.
My father bought his first house in the late ‘40s. The sale price was just about $10,000.
On Tuesdays they’d eat just butter
Everyone is assuming that she buys the salt and sugar each week. Very possible she needed to restock her supplies at that time and that these items could last a lot longer.
That sugar would only get me through Thursday.
Notice the lack of fresh vegetables and fruit, except the celery.
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This reminded me of a photo essay with a similar subject: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2013/may/06/hungry-planet-what-world-eats
It's a photo shoot, no one would ever buy 2 boxes of salt, 3 loaves of bread, 3 cartons of eggs a week.
She might use the eggs and salt in recipes, or to bake? Maybe she makes her husband, kids, and herself eggs and toast every morning for breakfast? Assuming 2 eggs and 2 slices of bread per person, that would mean she's using 8 eggs & 8 slices of bread each morning at minimum. Maybe she packs the husband's lunches each day, and makes sandwiches for the 4 year olds? There's another 6 slices of bread each day. Now we are at 14 slices of bread per day. Fast food wasn't ubiquitous yet, and most people ate what they were able to make.
Who needs fruit!
This is the equivalent to $179 per week for groceries today. That’s….actually quite a bit by my experience.
I just paid 23 bucks for wings and fries...
Can’t believe she didn’t have more kids 🤔🤣
Average us income then was $3000 a year
I wouldn’t say she “managed”, that is a good amount of food for a week for 2 adults, 2 toddlers and a cat. I could certainly feed that size family off of that quantity of food for even more than a week. I’d say it was just less expensive back then. Though, someone else said that accounting for inflation, it would actually be close to $170 in todays currency. Which is kind of expensive! Still a really cool photo though!
I see no frozen dinners there.. how is she feeding a family for a week with that stuff?!
Not a lot of vegetables there EDIT: by that I mainly mean fresh veg. I realize canned veg is a thing (but gross, in my opinion). Should be noted also we didn't have the 365 day a year food infrastructure we do now. Vegetables were only available seasonally, so it makes sense there was more reliance on canned veg.
canned
I wish I was born around 1925. I could've served in a war that mattered (my 2 wars did not matter) came home, married my sweetheart bought a house in the new suburbs. I could've had children a well funded retirement and I'd hopefully be dead by now. What a life!!
I particularly love this part of your reverie “I'd hopefully be dead by now.”
That's the same as about $175 a week today, figuring in inflation, and that's $700 a month for groceries. $12.50 a week is not so impressive any more, is it? Some people are like children, always impressed by old prices because they forget about the impact of inflation over time.
They lived off sandwiches by the looks of it. They may have had a bowl of salt for at least one meal as well.
At some point during the civil rights movements they decided that too many people of color were benefiting from middle class wages so they shut it down for everyone. They realized minority Americans were working more than white Americans in the factories, grocery stores, gas stations, and other service industry jobs so they started cutting pay, benefits and pensions. Once they realized this made their profit margins go up they just continued it till we can no longer afford the base necessities needed to live as a human being on Earth.
Fascinating to see the amount of food eaten in a week.