My mother had seven children and seven jobs, all of them involving being the mother of seven children. Her husband was a farmer and while he was a very good one, feeding. clothing and educating seven children was a fiscal challenge.
One of my mother’s jobs was minister of finance and she had to be creative. As the one who kept the cupboards full of food, she needed to be strategic in her relationship with the grocery store. One item we all had a fondness for was breakfast cereal and in this department, Mom was also minister of resource development.
To this end, she kept a careful watch on which cereals were most popular with her brood. Occasionally she would bring home some new box of crispy goodies and it would catch her attention when the box would be empty by morning, not even having a chance to provide the breakfast meals it was intended to supply. A box of flakes that were frosted, for example, disappeared quicker than a wildebeest caught by a pride of lions. It would be a long time before another wildebeest wandered once again past our pond.
By such a process of careful study and merciless elimination, my mother eventually ensured that our cupboards were filled with boxes of the least appetizing cereals. We never seemed to learn.
Attempts were made by some of us, from time to time, to convince the hungry siblings to show a little less ravenous interest in the goodies that sometime were discovered in a shopping bag on grocery day. But there would always be an outlier or two who just couldn’t get with the program and who, in fact, realized that the restraint being shown by the brothers and sisters was simply an open invitation to double up on his or her consumption. The effect was always the same. Empty box by breakfast. That cereal, henceforth, was banned from the larder.
I well remember in my teenage years when getting ready to leave with the car on a heavy date, how I would wait for my Dad who had gone to the local country store on Saturday night to pick up a few essentials. He always held in his hand a document on which was recorded the food items to be purchased. At the end of the list were a number of extra items, recorded there in handwriting which looked nothing like my mother’s. In those days, the shopper handed the store owner his list and the owner would fill a bag or two with items listed on it. Therefore, Dad would eventually walk in the door with illegal contraband which had been acquired by skullduggery of the highest order.
As he entered the house, I rushed to get out to the car as he always spent too long discussing world affairs at the corner store on my date nights. I would glance into the bags in his arms to see what treasures might reside within and almost always there would be some form of what we affectionately called “treats.” This always raised a difficult question for me and more than once I considered cancelling my date to stay home and join the feeding frenzy. Because there would be nothing left of the illicit ice cream or cookies by the time I got home.
Yes, I might have scored a kiss or two from a wonderful young woman over the course of the date, but I always came home to find that those who were dateless had found their own form of Saturday night entertainment.
I thought of all this tonight as I went on a search of our cupboards for potato chips. The only thing I could find was a partially consumed bag of dill pickle chips. That same bag has been in the cupboard for weeks and I wondered if my mother’s budget tricks had somehow been passed on to her daughter-in-law who perhaps has discovered the economic value in stocking the cupboards with things no one actually wants to eat.
It is nothing short of a crime that for sale on the grocery store shelves are jars of dill pickles, the most ridiculous food since bread pudding or even pumpkin pie, both of which are totally inedible concoctions. But an even higher misdemeanor is the manufacture of potato chips that taste like dill pickles. That is like mistaking a bowl of mashed potatoes for a dish of vanilla ice cream, another psychologically damaging human error.
©2015 Jim Hagarty
