"First Signs We’ll Soon Be
Eating Depression-Era Foods"
by Madge Waggy
Excerpt: "My grandmother kept a cupboard she called the just-in-case, and for most of my childhood I read it as a harmless eccentricity rather than what it was - a wound made edible. She had been a girl during the Depression, and somewhere in her twenties she had learned to keep tinned beans, sacks of flour, jars sealed with wax and paper, all of it rotated with the humourless discipline of a quartermaster provisioning for a war that had already ended but might, at any hour, resume. Nothing in that cupboard was ever eaten first. It sat at the back of the shelf like a private insurance policy against a world that had once taken everything from her family and could, she believed, do so again at a moment’s notice.
For years the cupboard looked like a relic. The country around it grew fat. Food in America became cheap in a way that no other civilisation in history had ever managed, cheap enough that a family could throw away a third of what it bought and call it a lifestyle, cheap enough that the word hunger retreated into the vocabulary of charity drives and faraway places. We built an entire national identity on the assumption that the shelves would always be full, that the price would always be bearable, that the great problem of food would remain a problem of excess rather than of want. To doubt that assumption in the middle of the nineties was to be faintly embarrassing, like a man who keeps a shotgun in a suburb.
Then the erosion began, and it began so quietly that it registered less as a crisis than as a mood. A receipt that used to total forty dollars now totals sixty and buys less. A bag of chips feels lighter in the hand. A cut of beef that was once a weekly habit becomes a monthly occasion, and nobody announces the change because there is nothing to announce - the change simply happens, and the new state of things becomes the baseline against which the next change will be measured. This is the particular cruelty of slow decline: it is always, at any given moment, almost bearable, and so it is never quite urgent enough to resist.
What follows is an attempt to take the temperature of that decline, using what can be measured and admitting plainly where measurement fails. The argument is not that America is about to re-enter 1932, with soup kitchens on every corner and men in cloth caps hiding their faces in a breadline. The argument is subtler and, in some ways, more disturbing - that the country is sliding back toward the conditions that produced the Depression diet, that the slide is visible now to anyone who bothers to look at a scale, a price tag, or an empty shelf, and that the most likely future is not collapse but a long, grinding narrowing in which abundance survives as an appearance while it dies as a reality."
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