Maybe I focus too much on food, Idk. I guess a combination of all the smells today in my house (my wife has been on a baking tear since last night for some reason), the fact that I just dropped more sale meats in my freezer chest, and some recent discussions here about poverty and food, really made me think of this stuff. Also, I post this at the risk of sounding self congratulatory, but this is not meant to be.
Now good food is more or less a daily thing for us since both my wife and I both cook and she is downright fantastic at it, but days like today remind me of just how lucky we are. They also remind me of why I learned how to cook in the first place. When I was younger and poor, with very limited resources, I figured out that cooking is the great equalizer. If you can cook, you can always live well with healthy and delicious food, even on a very tight budget. Even folks with tight schedules can eat well by cooking freezer friendly dishes that can be re-heated on days that they cannot cook, which I had to do often when I was single (I used to cook my ass off on Sundays, lol).
I guess that these lessons became hard coded and carried forward to better times, which is one of the reasons why my grocery bill is still low by comparison to others and why nothing gets wasted in our kitchen (bones become stock, fruits on the way out get made into baked goods, etc.). Unfortunately I was well into my 20s before I stopped being so helpless and started learning to feed myself well, but I won't let the same thing happen to my kids. We are already making them watch what we do and, soon enough, they will start doing some of the basics themselves. Should they ever become poor as adults, they will have the skills to transform even the cheapest sale meats and veggies into great meals rather than relying upon shit from cans, jars and frozen food containers, like I did for many years.



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