Was Life Easier in the Good Old Days?

By Catherine Canzani

I sigh as I unload the last of the supermarket grocery bags from my car. Two hundred dollars for a week’s groceries, how could that be? I start unpacking item after item: canned goods, cereals, snacks for lunches, fruit, veggies, yogurt, cheese, and three frozen chickens for the freezer.

As I begin putting groceries away, I think about the fast pace of my life and the rising cost of living, and I find myself longing for “the good old days” when life was more simple and things didn’t cost so much.

Home grown hot peppers Photo Denis Boulanger

Later that day, I sit with my grandmother’s autobiography on my lap, wondering if life really was easier for her in “the good old days.” I flip through the pages, until I see something that catches my attention…

Our entire income was 10$ a month, sometimes less. In the winter months, there was no income at all. We were only able to buy the most necessary food items. The price for 100 pounds of flour was $2.60 back then, and 5 pounds of oatmeal cost 25 cents. I had to make a pound of butter last for a week. Our breakfast was usually oatmeal, and we tried to fill up on that. I counted out the slices of bread, so that they would last for seven days. In that first winter, we only lived on potatoes, soup, and oatmeal.

I think about my full freezer, my bulging kitchen cupboards, our breakfast choices of bagels, cereal, oatmeal (flavored), wonderful bakery bread, muffins, and I begin to wonder if my grandmother’s life really was so much easier than mine. I read on…

As winter approached, Paul dug a hole outside and placed vegetables such as carrots and turnips in the sand and covered them with straw. We pulled our Brussels sprouts and endives up with all their roots attached and put them in the cellar. Paul collected wild apples to keep for the winter and for drying. We dried our own beans and apple slices. We used maple syrup as a sweetener. A friend also told us how to make coffee out of carrots. The finely grated carrots are dried, and they actually taste like coffee when you brew them. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Suddenly I feel deeply grateful for all the things that facilitate my life: my oven, my microwave, my fridge, my coffee grinder, my coffee machine, and even the milk-frother, which makes great lattes. Who needs the simple life, when you can have appliances?

I flip through several more pages, marveling at the difficulties my grandmother faced in those wonderful “good old days” (which included World War II and the depression), when I come across another anecdote of hers. (My grandmother ran a restaurant and Auberge on top of running a farm!)

"I especially remember one Sunday during this time. We had twenty reservations for dinner, all from Montreal. There was a woman in Glen Sutton who sold chickens, whom I heard about from Linda. I went to her and bought five chickens for dinner. When it was time to serve the meal, the chickens were not done. I couldn’t understand it, since they had been in the oven since 9:00 a.m. I began to get nervous and quickly put some more wood on the fire in our old wood-burning stove. We always served the noon meal at 12:30, when the dinner bell rang, and I always liked to be punctual too.

But the chickens were still tough as they could be. Every other minute, one of us would stick a knife-point in to see if they were done. Finally it occurred to me that these were very old chickens, and that they were not going to get any more well-done.

Then I had to act quickly. I ran down to the cellar to get some veal to make Wiener Schnitzel. My guests were already eating their soup, while I was out in the kitchen, pounding veal cutlets. In the end, everything turned out fine, and the guests were none the wiser, but I was upset by it all and ended up in tears."

Thank God for those three nicely frozen supermarket chickens, nestled downstairs in my freezer. I know exactly how they’ll turn out.

I close the book and head to the kitchen to reheat my cold tea in the microwave. Maybe my $200 grocery bill isn’t so bad after all.