I’m on a Mommy Board and - while this has been a noticeable background noise there for years - with the economy its really noticeable. It seems somewhere we have lost - for a lot of women (possibly people, although I suspect it was the rare man who got it to start with) the skill of running a household on very little money.
They can’t bake bread - even pointed to the easy “no knead” bread recipe the recipe is overwhelming. They don’t know what a soup bone is. Lunchmeat has gotten expensive, but it never occurs to them to buy a ham and slice it, or make a turkey on Sunday night and get a weeks worth of sandwiches and soup. They don’t have a basic cookbook in the house (not even the Betty Crocker!). And improvising is an arcane skill. The lack of improvisation skills means leftovers go to waste.
Their children are picky and they allow that to be an excuse for takeout pizza and McDonalds - because “my kids would never eat a stirfry.” Their husbands are worse - when pointed out that the occasional vegetarian meal can be good for the budget, we learn that their husband expects a piece of beef on his plate every night (maybe chicken or pork) and refried beans or lentils would cause a household revolution. Even the frugal staple of “breakfast for dinner” is a trick that can only be pulled off if their husband isn’t home.
They have no idea of how to make a meal on the cheap using starch as the filler (yeah, from a health perspective, not great - but half the world lives off some combination of rice, corn, pasta or potatoes as their main source of calories). Stews are as big a mystery as soups.
Snacks need to be kept in the house in quantity and need to be purchased - because they don’t bake. One woman recently posted her success with a boxed brownie mix (which - good for her, she did it rather than buying the Little Debbies). Storebought snacks are consumed in great quantities - apparently by the whole neighborhood - without limit. And questions like “how do you afford all the juiceboxes the neighborhood kids go through?!” come up.
I wonder where I learned these skills. Some of it was my mother - who fed us on the cheap. Some of it was reading books. Some was experimentation. Some of it was the early realization that if I didn’t keep juiceboxes in the house, I’d save the gross national product of Cameroon over the course of my kid’s childhood.
Yikes! I don’t think I know anyone like that. My parents did a pretty good job of teaching me how to cook frugally and my sister-in-law is the master of making the dollar stretch. Most of my friends and I are frugal by accident, because we try to be environmentally conscious. That results in us buying reusable water bottles/food wrappers/etc., making our own cleaning supplies, and buying few packaged foods. My grocery bill was greatly reduced when I stopped buying Windex and paper towels. My husband grew up pretty poor (he’s 41 and his family didn’t have indoor plumbing until he was a teenager), so he’s on board with any cost-cutting we can accomplish.
Do these women work? If they’re stay-at-home Moms, sure, I think it’s reasonable to expect at least a bit of time/effort spent at making inexpensive food from scratch.
Working full time? Less so. When I was working full time out of the house, it was a LOT harder to find the time & energy to cook from scratch, and 1) cooking is my main hobby, I have lots of skillz and 2) I don’t have kids, it was always only myself & hubby to feed.
I can totally see a woman with 2-3 kids and a husband saying “screw it, I’m not spending my free time grocery shopping & cooking. Let’s just order a pizza.”
I stay-at-home, so I can’t speak from my experience as an adult, but my mom went back to work when I was six weeks old. My parents didn’t seem to have any problem cooking dinner and raising a couple kids while working full time +. Sure, we sometimes had scrambled eggs and toast for dinner, but if we’re talking frugality vs. spending money on packaged stuff, they definitely were able to maintain that standard while working. Cooking frugally does not have to be time consuming and stuff like filling up a reusable water bottle instead of handing a kid a juice box does not really take up much extra time.
I don’t mean to discourage PeskiPiksi’s idea for a blog, but there are websites and blogs out there for frugal moms and frugal living - just google. I have to take these sites in small doses, though, as I start to feel some mixture of guilt and annoyance because I can’t share their extreme enthusiasm for frugal living. :eek: Every little bit helps, though.
I’d like to comment on this part, too. Snacks drive me insane. At what point did it become necessary for kids to snack constantly? Whether they’re homemade or packaged, it seems like parents have a constant stream of snacks coming, which is not something I remember from my childhood. If we meet someone at the playground, we’ll be there for five minutes and all the kids are begging for something to eat. All the other mothers pull out these elaborate snack spreads while I dig for some pretzel crumbs in my bag. At my son’s tee-ball games, we had an assigned snack schedule. Instead of everyone bringing some water and an orange for their own kid, one person would bring individually wrapped bags of chips or cookies and juice boxes or Gatorade. Totally ridiculous.
I don’t carry snacks around with me and my kids have learned not to ask. If we’re home, they can have a couple pretzels in a bowl or an apple or something if they’re starving, but I don’t keep a supply of snacks for them.
There ARE plenty of blogs. Googling also seems to be beyond some of them so they ask things like “what is a soup bone” to the site.
Some of them work outside the home - but I work and I can still manage to slice up a ham for ham sandwiches or make chicken stock. But many are stay at home moms whose husbands got laid off, or took a substantial pay cut - they might bring in some income, but its - in the old fashioned term - “egg money.”
I suspect the real issue is that approximately half the people have below average intelligence. The Dope skews high. That board is probably more representative. And if Mom didn’t teach you to pinch and you’ve been lucky enough to never need to pinch, what seems like obvious common sense (don’t buy juiceboxes and don’t feed the neighbor kids! Make up a big jug of kool aid.) is something you just have no idea where to start. You hear that a big pot of soup and homemade bread can feed your family for next to nothing, but you haven’t followed a recipe since 8th grade Home Ec and the ingredients (soup bone, turnips) are strange and distasteful sounding.
And they seem to be big on “keeping up with the Joneses.” Everyone else lets the neighborhood have endless juice boxes, I can’t look cheap. There is a certain amount of dragging of feet compounding the problem. “I don’t want to make my chili without meat!”
Yep, snacks at home are carrots, cut up apple, banana, hard-boiled egg, cheese or milk. SidneyJunior would pretty much prefer popcorn or goldfish crackers so we try not to keep those in the house very often (also, then I don’t eat them either).
The snack thing drives me nuts as well. My kids don’t need cookies and juice boxes at the end of the baseball game. The parents have a money problem, the kids have a weight problem, and there is a constant stream of potato chips, cheezits, and 100 calorie packs of Oreos going into the kids - and its like there is no connection between these three things. (That isn’t a board thing, that’s watching and listening to my neighbors thing.)
Look, I don’t have kids, granted, but I work full time and I’m the only one bringing in any money and I still manage to cook most of the time. I learned a lot of it through books, of course, because I have eyes in my head and learned to read in school. From what I’ve seen, mommy boards are populated almost entirely by absolute and total morons. I mean, they’re more stupid than my brain can really take in in one go.
When my grandfather died in June he left behind a notebook of memoirs he had been keeping for several years before his death and I’ve been reading about some of his earliest memories and the stories he tells of his childhood. It is amazing to me to read these things and yesterday I learned that I am the 3rd generation of my family to have moved beyond subsistence farming. If you go back to my great grandfather’s generation they were farmers and while they were always fed and clothed and all that jazz they didn’t have much money for extras. It would boggle his mind that I have money to go to the opera or to get a manicure. My not knowing how to grow a tomato or make a dress would make him think I was pretty extravagant (and he would be right) but I’ve never known the world the way he does. Money for these things has just always been there for me. I am sure a lot of the women you are talking about feel the same way about juice boxes. I’m not saying they aren’t wrong because they totally are but it must be frustrating for them to not know how to work with their family to reduce their expenditures.
Weird, I was thinking that we weren’t the most frugal family, but damn, we don’t have ANY of the problems you’re referring to. I mean sure sometimes we fit into the categories you described but not in general.
You’re making my head explode. Seriously?? I hang out on two boards–they’re homeschooling boards but obviously that includes a lot of parenting, and they’re open to all so there are a bunch of other people–and the frugality that prevails is pretty astounding. These folks know how to live on nothing. They’re mostly really smart too, though.
I agree there would not be much point in starting a blog or anything–they are proliferating anyway. (I read the Simple Dollar guy and the Prudent Homemaker website.)
We just went through 8 months of unemployment, and learning to bake bread was the easy, fun part. But I guess I knew, basically, how to do it–I just didn’t because as long as we’re buying cheap Costco bread, I don’t eat it. Homemade bread, I do eat, and I figured I didn’t need more to eat. It was trickier to develop a whole new arsenal of recipes based on what we were getting rather than what I was in the habit of buying, and that in the middle of summer, when I’m at my worst, cooking-wise.
I guess this is why I think everyone needs to know how to cook at a reasonably proficient level–when you’re stressed out is not the time to learn a bunch of new and unfamiliar skills.
90% of these people have never heard of Home Ec, much less taken it. We are seeing the results of the third generation of “people who have never learned to do for themselves.”
The kindest thing would be to let them all die off. Thin the herd of the stupid and lazy.
Seriously…although this is a selection of the idiotic issues - no one individual is this screwed up completely. Juice boxes for the neighborhood" is not the same person as “what’s a soup bone” or “I can’t follow that recipe” or “husband needs steak twice a week or he’ll divorce me.”
But many of them can’t cook anything more complicated than spaghetti with jarred sauce and frozen meatballs. Dinner comes from the freezer section every night - if it isn’t takeout or going out to dinner.
I should also say that the people there who do have these skills have been very patient in sharing their knowledge. And that these women have been often willing to learn. From “where do I get canning jars” to actually turning out batches of jam and applesauce. (Those of us who have canned steer them away from anything that requires a pressure cooker as a year one canning project).
Has anyone suggested that learning to cook really yummy meals is a good way to make your husband like you more, not less? Even if you put beef strips in your stir fry, it’s still cheaper than takeout. Homemade spaghetti sauce, even with meat, is still cheaper and yummier.
It really is sad to see people who have no idea how to fend for themselves–and our society has placed no value on those skills for 30+ years so it’s not really their fault–but skills can be learned. Come on sisters, you can do it!
I’m a little confused as to whether you’re referring to me. I hope not. Basically I’m agreeing with you - learn to cook, people, and buy some healthy inexpensive snacks instead of that processed stuff. There’s information out there on the web to help. Some of those sites can get a bit annoying (to me), but the information is still useful. If I find the sites annoying, it’s because they can get too cheerleadery for me, not because I think the readers or suggestions are stupid. I’m sorry if you felt like I was being insulting in some way.
Speaking of soup bones … I was rummaging around in the freezer the other day (mostly stuff [bread, butter, bacon] bought in bulk when it was on sale) and found a ham bone that’s got to have been in there at least a year, maybe more – some serious frost on that puppy. Is it worth making soup out of at this point?