Market daily??

My mind has been blown: people buy food every day to eat That Day.

I have food storage. I have food storage that other families have given me when they moved away. I have canned dry wheat enough to bathe in. I have bottles of ketchup, bags of rice, lots of dry pinto beans. I have extra cans of corn and green beans and chili.

My parents, children of the Great Depression, devoted half their yard to growing vegetables. When fruit trees failed, they set up a business where a grower in Utah would send truckloads of fruit to their home in Wyoming. I had the job of calling everyone on the list to say, "The fruit truck has come in! Come pick up your fruit!" Then we spent days canning and drying the produce and carrying the jars down to the basement.

My parents are in their 90s. They stopped canning many years ago. They still have boxes of canned food that they took with them to Utah.

My husband and I moved 10 times in 26 years; we had seven children. The only time we were even briefly in danger of going hungry was in the first couple years, when we were both college students. Shawn's mother sent us cans of food, and rather than eat it immediately, I set it aside to be a back-up. We ate it as needed, but I have stored food all my adult life.

Our small children ate canned vegetables rather than fresh, because they were willing to eat canned peas, but also because it ticked me off that salad would only last a day or so in the fridge. If I happened to forget it (practically guaranteed), it would be brown mush, wasted.

Now that I'm feeding only older children, I can set salad out on the table with some apples and it will disappear, into their mouths, not onto the floor. I serve cucumbers sliced, mini bell peppers, baby carrots, grapes, as they come from the store, because it requires less effort. But I have to consciously set it out the day I buy it, or it will disappear from my mind.

I buy a lot of canned and frozen food. Friends and store employees comment on the sheer quantity. But I will be eating on that stock of canned corn for months, possibly next year. And I eat a wide variety of foods; they're just all in cans or boxes or frozen.

My German teacher in high school told us that Germans in the 1970s went to the market every day to get food for that day; that you didn't touch the produce yourself but the seller would hold it up for your inspection; that their big meal was generally at noon rather than evening. I could not wrap my head around going to the market every single day.