We Need REAL Home Economics Now More Than Ever!

Smart choices at the supermarket and practical skills in the kitchen have always been important, but with the price of everything is going up, home economics are more important than ever!

The price of groceries has increased a lot in recent years. According to Canada's Food Price Report 2022, they will go up from 5 to 7% in the coming year - and this is part of a multi-year pattern. In general this means that a greater proportion of household incomes are going towards grocery bill, leaving less money for other things - and by the way - “others things” are costing more too!

Why does everything cost more?

Many reasons are suggested for the increases, such as inflation, labor market challenges, logistical supply-chain issues related to COVID-19, and transportation/oil costs. While all of these issues might be solvable in time with forward-thinking industry changes and government policy, I am not optimistic about prices coming back down in the near future. Sadly, I see no meaningful action currently in play on a macro-level that might be sufficient to meet challenge of this scale. While many people are suffering right now, I don’t think the people that make the decisions are really feeling that pain, so I am inclined to think that it will have to get worse before it gets better.

We are where we are

I could wax philosophically for hours about how we might get out of this mess - but the last time I checked, no one cares what I think about such things. Put simply - we are where we are until the powers that be decide to take us in a different direction - so how do we deal with that? For me, the solution for regular people is to re-learn many of the household skills that everyone had just a few generations ago. This means learning about how to make nutritious meals with inexpensive ingredients; learning how to buy in bulk when prices are good and store things for later; and learning how to process whole foods with basic kitchen tools. In short - we need home economics.

What is home economics?

I remember taking something called home economics in school. We learned about sewing, and we did some stuff in the kitchen. The sewing part was practical; we learned how to use a needle and thread, how to use a sewing machine, and how to take a pattern and fabric and actually make something. I have used those skills many times over the course of my life to repair and make things. By contrast - and I can only speak to my experience - the kitchen part was mostly useless. All I remember was making muffins and cookies. From what I recall, we learned nothing about making good choices at the grocery store, we did not learn how to prepare nutritious meals from basic ingredients, and we were not taught how to proficiently use basic kitchen tools. That was about 35 years ago, and every time I stand in line at the supermarket, when I see the preponderance of ready-made and prepackaged food that people tend to buy, I’m convinced that my generation and those after it did not learn real home economics in school or from their parents.

Wikipedia defines home economics (aka family and consumer sciences), as

“a subject concerning human development, personal and family finances, consumer issues, housing and interior design, nutrition and food preparation, as well as textiles and apparel.”

This is a good definition, but for the purposes of this article I want to focus on the aspect that speaks to nutrition and food preparation and how they relate to family finances and consumer issues.

It all starts with value

I have a big garden, but like everyone else, the majority of my food comes from the grocery store. The idea of “homesteading” has gained a great deal of popularity in recent years, and there are numerous televisions shows and YouTube channels that depict rugged individuals living “off-grid”, and living of the land. This is a romantic notion that may work for some people, but for most of us it is a fantasy. We buy our food at stores. That is our reality, so we must make the best of it. When I buy food the goal is always to achieve maximum nutrition and flavor for minimum price. The secret to achieving that goal is buying basic ingredients and buying in bulk (especially when there are good deals). Forget about cutting coupons; they mostly serve to help the vendor unload merchandise that is not selling and they rarely offer deals on basic ingredients. This means buying large amounts of flour, oatmeal, rice, and vegetables that keep a long time like potatoes, carrots, cabbage, squash, turnip, frozen foods peas, beans and corn, etc. This means buying large cuts of meat and butchering them down by hand, buying whole chickens and cutting them up and buying frozen fish instead of fresh. This means buying canned goods like tomatoes, and if there happens to be a deal on these, buy a lot because they keep a long time. This means buying dried goods in quantity, and learning how to prepare them. By thinking in this way, and always being conscious of the price that is being payed per weight, you become a value conscious consumer - and the money you spend goes farther. Preparing food from basic ingredients will result in savings on every meal. For any given meal the savings might just be a dollar or two, but this adds up over the course of a year.

Food preparation is an essential, lifelong skill

With the basic ingredients many nutritious meals can be made, but the trick to using basic ingredients is having the knowledge of how to turn them into delicious meals. Fortunately, if you are reading this article, you have everything you need to be an amazing and resourceful cook. The internet has millions of recipes, and and millions of videos showing how to do everything. When I was in my twenties the only resources were cooking shows on television and cook books. The cooking shows rarely went into enough detail (with some exceptions), and the cook books would cost money, and would never offer the experience of actually watching a person cook from start to finish. With YouTube you can learn how to make porridge from scratch, or how to make something as sophisticated as coq au vin. There is also the opportunity to learn from cultures all over the world - and this broadens the culinary options that your basic ingredients have to offer. Not only that, but for any given dish you can watch five different people make it and compare notes. The knowledge of how flavors work and how to prepare food takes time to acquire, but it pays off over a lifetime, and can be passed down to the next generation.

Knife skills save time

The catch with using basic ingredients is that they have to be processed, and that means learning how to use your hands and a knife to prepare food for cooking. The difference between skilled and unskilled hands is night and day. A skilled person can do something in minutes that might take an unskilled person half an hour. Thankfully, again, due to the resources on the internet, a person can learn these skills. Learning to use a knife is all about learning to use your hands, and to use the knife as an extension of your hands. It takes time and practice, like any skill, but like many skills, over time, what seems impossible slowly becomes easy to do. Before long you look like a magician in the kitchen, but it all starts with making the decision to learn, and trying something new. You have a lifetime’s worth of meals to prepare. Doesn’t it make sense to learn how to use the main food preparation tool effectively?

What about all the time it takes!?!

I am always perplexed at how quickly people bring up the issue of time when I suggest making things from scratch. We live in an age of amazing time-saving devices. We have dishwashers, clothes washers, clothes dryers, water heaters, heating systems, stainless steel utensils, automobiles, public transit, refrigeration, and the list goes on and on. Simply put, my great grandparents had practically none of this, and made everything from scratch. Yes, most of that work back then was being done by home-makers, but I would argue that when you take away all of those time-saving devices, they probably had even less time for cooking than us, especially when you consider the number of children that people had back then. Also - I did a quick google search of articles about how much time people currently spend on social media and the result was the we (North Americans) tend to spend about 2 hours a day on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapschat, etc. I don’t how much if this time could be traded in for time in the kitchen, but I would hazard to guess that it would be time better spent!

Final Thoughts

From what I see most people buying today, it seems that food preparation is becoming a lost art, and this is mystifying when one considers how many popular cooking shows are on television. There is no need of this. Cooking and preparing food is not hard, and does not take a lot of time when done with proper knowledge and skill. It is nothing for me to come home after a full day’s work and whip up a tasty, healthy three dish meal for the whole family in less than an hour. In fact, I find it relaxing, and I usually have a cold beer and listen to a podcast while I’m doing everything - so while I’m making the meal, I’m unwinding and being entertained! Home economics are more important than ever, but that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice good eating to save money. It’s all a question of learning to make the most of basic ingredients, and thanks to the internet we have more ways to o this than ever!

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