Buying basic groceries is becoming more and more expensive. Even though the cost of living has improved, more families struggle to feed and clothe their children than ever before. It’s a strange phenomenon. How is it that we can be earning so much more and paying so much less
for things than our parents and grandparents did, when they had twice as many mouths to feed, and yet we still struggle to put a meal on the table? It’s simple. We have more, so we think we need more, and we don’t think the way our grandparents did.
When my grandmother (who was born at the turn of the century) was raising her children, the idea of having an electric kettle was unheard of. The house eventually got electric lighting and they even got a wireless radio at one stage, and the whole family would gather around it to hear the cracking voice of the newsreader each evening, and they thought they were so spoiled and lucky to have that. My grandmother thought that getting a refrigerator/freezer, and a gas copper to boil water so she could wash the clothes – by hand with a washboard – in warm water was a miracle! It really wasn’t that many years ago when we look at how long mankind has been living as “civilised” nations, but it still seems like a whole other world.
I consider myself lucky. I was visiting my grandmother during school holidays as a young child and learned how she lived. By this time, she still had the gas copper in the laundry, had a gas stove and oven, and an instant gas hot water system in the bathroom that we had to light the pilot flame and turn the handle and it would ignite the gas and start heating the water as it went through the pipe. A bit different to just turning on a tap now, and a huge step forward from having to bucket hot water to the bath from the copper! The shower was over the bath tub and we had to shower with the plug in the bath to save the water, then bucket the water onto the garden that provided some of the fruit and vegetables for the household. Grandma had an electric kettle and sewing machine by then, as well as what is now considered an old-fashioned wringer washing machine, and eventually she got a little black and white television. She thought she had it so very easy in her later years, and she still didn’t have a telephone. We look at that now and gasp in shock at the thought of living like that.
Now days, because we CAN have a large colour flat screen TV and big home entertainment system, Xbox, Playstation, several computers, microwaves, dishwashers, clothes dryers, electric toothbrushes and mobile phones for every member of the family, and a car or motorcycle for every person that has a licence, we think that we HAVE to have those things. We behave almost as if we’d die without them. It doesn’t make a lot of sense really, after all, they’re relatively recent inventions and people have been living and raising kids for a lot longer than those things have been around.
When you think about it for a while, if we could do without all those extra things that our grandparents didn’t have, we’d save so much money it would be astounding. Not only would we not have to buy those things and thus save money, but all the electricity these things use we wouldn’t have to pay for either. But do we really want to go back to living like that? I know I don’t, but I could if I had to. I know what it’s like to wash laundry by hand – I did it for years – and then I got an automatic washing machine and never looked back. I only learned how to use a microwave 5 years ago. Not having to defrost my freezer is something I’m still getting used to after finally getting a frost-free one last year, and I now have a clothes dryer for the first time in my life. I actually had to ask someone to show me how to use my dishwasher 6 months ago. OMG! Life is so much easier!
Okay, so there are some things that make life easier that may not really be needed, but we still consider them modern necessities. But do you need a huge entertainment system or would a regular TV and a DVD player suffice… or just a library card? Stopping to think about these things and their priority in our lives can make saving money a lot easier. But how can we improve the grocery bill? Well, consider the way my grandmother survived…
Many fruits and vegetables were home grown. That cut down the food bill a lot. My grandmother grew apricots, almonds, grapes, and lemons. She would always end up with more of each thing than the family could eat, so she would trade with the other neighbours that grew their own produce; and between the whole neighbourhood, we’d have strawberries, plums, figs, peaches, pumpkins, various fresh herbs, watermelons, peas, and corn. If one of the neighbours had enough apricots trees to have enough left over to give to you, you would grow something different instead so that you had something to trade. After all, in a neighbourhood full of apricot trees you couldn’t give them away if you tried! Barter worked. If you gave your neighbour some of your excess peaches when your tree was in season, they would give you their excess plums when they were in season. It didn’t matter exactly who owed who what or exactly how much each thing was worth, so long as everyone had a bit of everything to share around.
Of course, even in a community where every house has a fruit and vegetable patch, it’s not always possible to grow everything in large enough quantities for everyone, so fresh produce would still have to be purchased. People would usually shop at the markets and buy in bulk. It seems absurd for a regular family to go and purchase 50kgs of potatoes. Most of them would end up just rotting and going to waste. What about 20kgs of bananas? That’s absurd! How about 10 loaves of bread? Not likely, right? Yet this is how people used to shop! Buying in bulk like that works out cheaper per kg. But how are you saving when you have to buy 50kgs of potatoes for $20 when you wouldn’t use that much and would be better off buying 5kgs for $4? Isn’t that just wasting money? We’d be better off re-selling the other 45kgs! Therein lays the secret. Sure, one regular family might only use 5kgs of potatoes, but 10 families would use 50kgs between them. So one family would collect $2 from 10 families, buy 50kgs of potatoes, and each family would get 5kgs of potatoes for $2 – half the cost of buying 5kgs at the shop. If you could buy all your fresh produce like that, you could save a lot of money.
Unfortunately, most people don’t think like that now, but many will if you suggest the idea to them. I have a friend that lives a few blocks from me that occasionally asks me if I want to split with her a bulk purchase of something. If it’s something I know I’ll use I’ll pitch in. When her neighbours and other friends do the same, we can end up with 5 or 6 families all pitching in to get a large order of just about anything to divide between us really cheaply. And it doesn’t even have to be that big of a deal. I used to have a friend that lived alone and didn’t eat a lot of bread. He’d buy a loaf and by the time he’d eaten half of it, the other half was stale or growing mould. My family used to eat heaps of bread and we’d get it in bulk for $1 a loaf. We also used to eat a lot of fruit, and he grew a lot of fruit. So I used to trade half of one of our loaves for some fruit whenever he needed bread.
Barter isn’t dead yet, and the way our grandparents survived wasn’t all bad. In fact, some of it is still very useful today, even if it has been all but forgotten. Learning to live without, creates a greater appreciation for what we have. When things break down and can't be replaced for a while, learning to cope without those things can be a very useful skill to have. Teaching our children the value of this could very well mean the difference between them surviving or not, if they ever ended up in a situation where not everything was readily at hand.
(June 2008) (
