can’t Wait for the Government to Fix Corporate Greed?

The morning after paying $4.99 cents for a dozen eggs at my local grocer, I awoke to the sound of a rooster in my neighborhood. My city-boy husband was not amused (we do not live in the country). I felt a rather nostalgic tug from my childhood on a small southern farm.

Mom (born in 1920) was a child of the depression and World War II. She knew what it was to do without. She understood hunger and the fear of hunger.

My father was in the military, but his sergeants pay did not go far in feeding a family of six. My parents bought a house with a small amount of acreage (6 acres with a small barn). My mother was the master of frugality. She grew a solid garden, traded a number of antiques for a milk cow, a dozen laying hens and a pair of breeder pigs. Nothing went to waste. Any left over food scraped from the plates of picky children was fed to the pigs and the chickens. At the end of the season, the garden’s remaining bounty was canned to be used through the winter.

Typically, during hard times there is a downward shift in consumer purchasing. Those that shopped at high end retail chains like Belk or Dillard’s tend to shift of more moderate entities such as Sears or Target. When times get rougher, we may move further down the socioeconomic ladder to Walmart and if need be the local Salvation Army or GoodWill.

Grocery prices (for the average consumer) in America has increased by over 30% in the last 4 years. What is behind that kind of an increase that out-paces inflation? Now, egg prices hitting the ceiling can be accredited to a nation wide outbreak of bird Flu. Millions of laying hens are having to be destroyed. I get this. However, the bird flu is not behind the average price of white bread rising over 30% in the past three years (Post Pandemic).

Growing consolidation of huge food companies are creating an opportunity for price gouging. Consolidation of food companies has resulted in only four corporations controlling 80% of our countries food.

What can we do? In the following article written for the Boston Cookery magazine in 1919 (In the midst of hard times of WWI) a good argument is made for the housewife (I know this is a cliché, but please bear with me) being able to meet the challenge of needs verses budget in her home. If you feel that it is

typecasting to portray the woman of the house as the bread buyer and the male as the bread maker (money earner), keep in mind that whatever your thoughts, women make or influence 85% of consumer purchases in America. So don’t chuckle at the “Beware the Woman” title of the Boston Cookery article.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, bread prices are 138.59% higher in 2024 versus 1997 (a $6.93 difference in value). During the 2020 Pandemic lockdown making your own sourdough bread was the rage as a deterent to mind numbing boredom. Now, making your own bread can cost an average of $.53 cents to $1.09 per loaf. If you don’t want to commit to the labor intensive art of breadmaking, you can shift from the more expensive name brand loaf of bread to a more cost efficient generic brand. If the women who survived wars and depressions learned to deal with food profiteers, so can the women of today.

Beware the Housewife

American Cookery Magazine August/September 1919 (Page 111)

“There,” said a housewife proudly, looking at sixteen glasses of a home-made table-sweet, “they cost six and a half cents a glass, and they’re selling in some shops at three dollars a dozen.” In such justifiable boasts as this lies the doom of the food-profiteer. Man-made laws have often failed to reach him, have sometimes reached, instead, his honest competitor, and man-and-women-made laws may be no more effective, but the American housewife, once thoroughly aroused, will bring about what the most cumbrously elaborate penal legislation, in the premises, has failed to accomplish.

Food-profiteers seem to forget that the things they do wholesale in huge factories were once mere household arts, practiced in every domestic kitchen. Not one of these is an art lost beyond recovery, and labor-saving machinery and processes adapted to domestic use have, within recent years, gone far to close the gap between the cost of production in factories and in the Home. If the profiteer will not be good, the American housewife will snap her fingers at him, and return to the arts of her grandmother. More than this, housekeepers, under the pressure of recent conditions, have learned the trick of co-operation. Not every village home need maintain its lye-vat, its smokehouse, its preserving kitchen. Fish, flesh, fowl, fruits, vegetables, syrups all can be made at home and without the killing labor that has exhausted the housewife of two generations ago. Soap candles, and half a dozen other household necessaries and conveniences are within the scope of the domestic arts. Already cheap American dyes are freely used in the homes, urban and rural, and in hundreds of thousands of American kitchens faded recipes in the handwriting of an earlier generation have been type-written by brisk modern women.

At every economic crisis, after war of financial panic accompanied with industrial depression, the women of America have nobly come to the rescue. What they did during and after the revolutionary war and the war of secession is a matter of history. When the world-war came on, American women of the

comfortable classes had long been accustomed to the convenient luxury of factory-made foods, while the poor of great cities had accepted the conditions imposed by tenement-house life, and neglected the household arts with their luckier sisters. Thousands of the latter, spurred to patriotic endeavor by the exigencies of the world-war, turned to these almost forgotten arts, practiced them with intelligence, added to their labor’s voluntary self-denial, and cheerfully taught all these things to such of the poor as were willing to learn. Whatever luxury and easy money may have don for the men of America, it had not enervated all of the women.

Now, as ever, the economics fate of the country lies in the hands of the American housewife. Fortunately, many great captains of industry realize that she must be considered, renounce the privilege of profiteering at her expense. Meanwhile, the unrepentant profiteer, whether employer or wage-earner, should remember that the American mother, who would cheerfully sacrifice her husband for the good of her children, will not be tender of mere outsiders whom she suspects of taking bread from the mouths of her little ones. Truly, in this matter “the female of the species is more deadly than the Male.” – The Boston Herald