Anyone who remembers those days remembers, too, that it was all quite time-consuming, and that a lot of the burden fell on Mother Dearest and the eldest daughter.

Everyone makes fun of the convenience-food crazes of the 50s and 60s… but man, it had to have been a relief not to have to come up with a giant family meal from scratch night after night after night after night…. women moving into the paid workforce probably accelerated those trends a hundredfold. Whether this is for good or for ill is much too complicated to get into here, I think.

Part of what that means is that keeping your family stocked in homemade bread is a LOT more time consuming than keeping them stocked in store bought bread. It’s not just like, instead of going to the grocery store, you spend that hour baking bread. You’ll probably need to bake bread 2-3 times during the week, to make sure your family has edible bread each day. And if you have the time (which I often do) and enjoy making bread (which I do), then it can be fun and not something you mind, but it’s certainly not feasible for many people.

I notice my family elders are actually much less likely to scorn processed foods than their great-grandchildren are.

That generation that grew up before every house had a refrigerator don’t turn its nose up at canned food, which the nice yuppie moms of my generation seem to view as near-poison. lol.

I’ll never forget watching a bunch of twenty-something girls mocking green bean casserole “made with CANNED beans!” like it was so far beyond the pale they couldn’t imagine actually EATING it.

Even things like whole-wheat flour have a significantly shorter shelf-life than white does– some of this pickiness about food is pretty much just a real tired form of status-seeking.

“But if we could just reward people for fill-in-the-blank (eating organic produce, breastfeeding till toddlerhood, going to yoga classes, baking their own bread) then that would solve the problems before they even began!”

Um, sure! lol.

That was actually part of my point. The other part was that so far as I’m aware, there’s no region or country where politics etc. do not affect food prices and availability.

Money and political influence. Massive soy growers have it, tomato growers do not. The idea of a free market in the U.S. is, as you pointed out, a complete joke.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/the-shangri-la-diet-between-hard-covers/

WTF? I think I didn’t make it beyond page 5. Was I supposed to find this kind of thinking subversive? I just found it horribly offensive. So it’s not surprising to see these tools come with the fat hate. Nor is it surprising to read the smug comments. I tried to get a comment posted yesterday, but in my anger, I spouted off about how I’d missed my calling and all I needed to do to get a blog on the NYT site was concoct some bogus theory to be lapped up by the masses.

That post and the comments that followed it just confirmed the hate-hate relationship i have with the NY Times content. Far from being a cutting edge, forward thinking publication, it’s lately been a repository for all kinds of hucksterism.

Tea vs Coffee: Given equal brewing time, apparently tea has MORE caffeine than coffee. Certainly I can drink more of it without getting stomach trouble.

Cheap nasty food: My mother’s last year with a dependent adult child at home, who was finishing school, she lived on the cheapest foods, and turned diabetic. She has since controlled her diet – at first rigidly and now just “back to pre-poverty levels” but will never feel safe again eating exactly what she pleases. Highly processed supermarket own-brand white bread and noodles and sugar-laden instafoods are cheaper than cook-your-own type things even in farmtastic Ireland.