Good News: No Gnomes

Well, the good news is, there was no family of gnomes living in the back of my pantry cupboard.  The bad news is, I have to admit to finding quite a number of things that were expired – some of them as long ago as 2008 and even 2006!  (Seriously, who keeps things that expired that long ago??)  I hate, hate, hate that I wasted a whole bunch of stuff.  The organizing is done now, though, so there is no use crying over it.  I just have to move on.

Fortunately, I am not stuck with a lot of prepackaged foods.  Almost everything I have left happens to be grocery items that would have been available during the WWII era.  Rest assured that the few things that would not have been available in the 1940s will not go to waste.  My husband will be all too happy to eat them.

I have to admit that I really would like to try sticking with ration allotments for an extended period of time.  People were much more budget conscious during the war years.  Additionally, because diets focused more on locally grown fruits and vegetables (with nothing left to waste), people were healthier.  I could definitely do with a dose of that.

For anyone wondering, my decision to undertake this little experiment was not one I made on a whim.  While I have been thinking about rationing a lot lately, it is not the first time that I have taken the time to do research on the subject.  It is something that has been in the back of my mind for the past nine or ten years at least.  I think what spurred me to make the decision to try it now is another little project which I was putting off for years but just recently completed.

Several years ago, I was fortunate to be given the 1956 edition of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook that belonged to my mother in her younger days.  It was falling apart and stuffed with recipes she had clipped from magazines.  I finally got around to picking up a three ring binder, 100 top load page protectors and load of hole reinforcement stickers.  I went through the cookbook and pulled out all of the recipes my mother clipped from magazines and organized them into the binder.  After that, I started going through the cookbook and reinforcing the holes on the pages that were falling out. 

As I was going through my mother’s cookbook, looking at the recipes, it really made me think about how differently we cook today.  We have been taught to think about foods in terms of labels – low-fat, high-cholesterol, sugar-free, etc.  We are told that foods are so much more nutritious today than they were in the past.  If that is true, though, then why is there such an increase in obesity, cancer, autism and other illnesses?  Could it possibly be because we live in a time when we eat foods loaded with preservatives and chemicals?  I am not a scientist so I cannot say for sure but if I was a betting woman, I would put my money on that being the exact reason we have so many health issues today.

The more I thought about making use of vintage recipes, the more it made sense.  Unfortunately, I have a tendency to overindulge when it comes to good, home-cooked food.   That is where the idea to try eating a WWII ration diet came into play.  With a weekly ration on the line, I will have a set amount of basic foods to cook with and eat each week.

My plan is to start with rations on Monday.   I decided to start on Monday instead of Sunday because I had already promised my husband a big Super Bowl feast on Sunday.  Seeing as we live in Seahawk country and the Seahawks are in the Super Bowl this year, reneging on that promise might put my life in danger.  We had plans to go to the grocery store to stock up on Super Bowl feast food at the crack of dawn on Saturday so I will pick up my week one rations at that time.