I remember getting a candy bar once in a while, too, and the real, honest-to-goodness tin foil that it was wrapped in was also saved and added to the ball of tin foil that my brother claimed. When the ball of tin foil got heavy enough, it could be sold for some very scarce stuff----money. Talk about recycling!
Fast forward a few years. The price of ground beef went up, of course, and it was scarce. If my mother gave me some money to buy a pound of ground beef, I would also need to have a little stamp torn out of a ration book, or I could not buy a pound of ground beef or any other meat. The meat went, rightly, to the armed forces first and then to the civilians. Gasoline was severely rationed, too, along with coffee and sugar, if memory serves.
My father learned to make a good hamburger probably when he was a cook's helper in the First World War. Today you get a rather dry patty wrapped in a rather dry bun, but in those days you dredged the bun in the frying pan grease that came from the meat that was still holding on to some of its fat and along with french fried potatoes cooked in real lard, you had something that you wouldn't believe could taste so good.
I don't remember seeing very many obese people like you see today, because even it you ingested lard, you didn't have as much to eat as people usually do today. Oh, yes, there were people who were bottomless pits, so they loaded up on potatoes and bread and put on the pounds. A couple of ladies in my neighborhood must have weighed three hundred pounds, more or less. But they didn't live long lives.
But my skinny, little fat-free grandmother lived to be eighty-seven.
People actually walked back those days, so I guess they could afford to eat some lard. Today, people drive around the parking lot looking for the closest place to park so they don't have to walk too far. They drive to a window to get their food, pay their bills, get a cup of coffee or pick up their cholesterol medication. Kids drive to school as soon as they get a car for their 16th birthday. Now their are machines you stand on and direct with your body movements. No walking required. Maybe we should walk from the back of the parking lot to buy our dry, tasteless processed food.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, go to the grocery store and the grocer would use his funny-looking big stick with fingers on the end to get the cereal from the highest shelves. And the string on his counter that went up to the ceiling an d back down, to wrap the meat in large sheets of white paper to take home. We have one of these at the place I work at now.
ReplyDeleteI remember the ration books. You really had to have a good reason to buy a tire for the automobile. And butter lost out to oleo, with the little vial you broke open to stir in some color.
My parents' generation likes to describe what life was like in their early past, and I have to admit the stories are interesting. Keep it up, Mom.
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to do the same. When I was a young man, studying engineering in college, we didn't have electronic calculators (the sound of young jaws dropping.) We had to perform calculations on a device made of two sticks of wood or aluminum marked with logarithmic scales called a slide rule. And the only way to use a computer was first to punch encoded instructions onto cards, subit them to the computer operator, and wait hours for a printout.
Image what the stories will be 60 years from now when the iPhone generation hits retirement age: "Son, I remember when electricity cost $0.11 a kilowatt-hour and our favorite entertainment appeared as 2-dimensional images on a small piece of glass called a flat panel TV!"
I love progress.
Time to start writing it all down now, Clark. Thanks for commenting!
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