Yesterday evening while finishing a tube of toothpaste, I was reminded that my mother was not satisfied to just squeeze the tube empty. When it reached the point shown above, she would get out a pair of scissors, cut off the bottom, and then reach into the tube with her toothbrush, retrieving enough material for another couple brushings. (I've tried that on occasion, and it does work)
One of my cousins told me that her mom (my mom's sister) did the same thing. Both those ladies grew up on a Norwegian family farm, coming of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the farm they had no problems with food security, and even offered meals to passing hobos, but my mom explained that they often lacked for "ready cash." They would take a can of milk to town to the creamery to get spending money or swap eggs for goods at the local store.
What's interesting is that both my mom and her sister carried that ultrathrifty toothpaste habit well into a comfortable middle-class adulthood. It makes me wonder what habits the coronavirus pandemic will instill into young adults, and how long those new financial and social patterns will persist.
Addendum: Apparently in response to this blog post, The Atlantic published an article today with the lengthy title "How the Pandemic Has Changed Us Already. The Great Depression permanently altered many people’s behavior. Could COVID-19 do the same?" The article mentions handwashing, caution re strangers, household chores for children, personal hygiene, clothing choices (bras, leggings, jammies), use of alcohol, hobbies, etc. They note that the Great Depression had a greater effect on people's behavior than the 1918 flu pandemic because it lasted for several years. The current pandemic is having an effect; the question is how long those behavioral changes will persist.
My father was the same way, child of the depression as well. But I am the same way as well and I have never lacked for anything. Maybe frugality and not wanted to waste things are in some peoples DNA. You can't get a pin heads worth of toothpaste out of my finished tube:)
ReplyDeleteThis is a very good question. We carry a lot with us. I'm routinely appalled at how much food my kids throw away. But I know that food is so cheap and getting obese by finishing everything on your plate would not be.
ReplyDeleteAs for COVID, handshakes are probably gone as a reflex. And it will probably be less important to have multiple cars in the same household.
My karate dojang reopened for in-person instruction, but we aren't doing any grabs and holds. It took a long time before we even reintroduced sparring. I'll test for black belt in a year or two, but the grabs and holds parts of the curriculum probably won't be on the test.
I haven't done any research, but I suspect that the pandemic will have a long term impact on the martial arts, especially grappling-focused arts.
I've wondered the same thing, though I think (hope) the pandemic is shorter-lived than the great depression was. So perhaps this group of young adults won't get set in their ways?
ReplyDeleteMy father (born 1932) is very similar and showed me how to squeeze out the tube with a rod like a pencil (better than fingers). But I think I've taken it to the next level as your mom did, as a challenge. I pride myself on getting every last bit of consumable out of its packaging. I'm the same with shampoo bottles - I dilute the remnants of the shampoo at the bottom so that it all washes out, and there is not a milliliter of shampoo left, and it all goes into my hair. And this has nothing to do with money; it is just an obsessive challenge. Like "hypermiling" driving.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother taught me to always find a way to use the last of everything. Old food went into the soup. And if there was a can of store soup and you were to add water, you ran the water into the empty soup can and rinsed it into the pan on the stove. When you made orange juice from a frozen paper can, you added the water the same way, using the can to measure it and rinsing the last of what you'd paid for into the juice at the same time. My grandmother made good food out of parts of plants I've never seen anybody else use. She made the special spumoni ice cream for the restaurant out of all the different last of the leftover flavors, and chopped up candied fruit peels. She mixed that with her fingers that had giant painful knuckles from arthritis.
ReplyDeleteMy modeling clay to make rockets and dinosaurs was stale dough from the restaurant. I'd sit on the floor in the back and make things, and then use the things in little dialogues and plays in the jungle of plants out the side door in the vacant lot there. And when my grandmother was busy with something in the house, counting money, doing the books, whatever, when she was supposed to watch me and I was bugging her, she'd send me off to hunt for this or that seemingly unrelated item, but it would all end up making a toy. Rubber bands, an empty thread spool, toothpicks or paper clips, thumbtacks, mucilage glue. That makes a wind-up toy car that rolls by itself across the table. She'd point at the parts and tell me what to do next. And if something broke in the house they'd fix it; a lamp, cups, anything. If they didn't know how to fix it and it had to be right there were several storefront shops nearby that specialized in whatever particular thing that was-- shoes, for instance, or the record player or radio, or the mower.
At school, in second grade, I sneaked into the bathroom to throw away the sandwich of my lunch for two weeks straight so I could be first back into the schoolroom to get a ball, to be able to decide what game was played with it at recess. One day after school my grandfather showed up to walk me home. It was a long way on perfectly safe sidewalks and only one big street to cross and I'd always go by myself --I must've been six or seven years old, so probably 1965; they started me in school early-- but this time my grandfather, who had one all-white eye that they gave me several conflicting stories about how he'd got that, each one with a lesson attached about how to behave, was waiting at the schoolyard gate. He just started walking home, next to me. He didn't say anything the whole way. By the time we were almost home I was frantically logical, confessing-explaining. We got to the front door of the house. He put his hand on the knob, bent down and /looked/ at me with that one all-white eye; he said gravely, "We never throw away good food," and he stood up and went in. I went in. All the adults were there, sitting around, talking (my mother, grandmother, a waitress and/or some other friends). I knew they all knew, because it must have been that the teacher called them, the one who I lied to when she asked about my only having an apple for lunch, but they never said a word about it.
Many years later I was talking to my mother on the phone and I brought it up, about the sandwiches, and she had no idea what I was talking about. "I think you must have imagined that," she said, "You would never throw food away."
love that story thanks
DeleteGreat story Marco! I am a compulsive non-waster myself.
DeleteWhen our boy was 9 or 10 we got fed up with the nutritionally balanced lunch box coming back unconsumed, so we put lunch on him. He'd come shopping on Saturday and we'd get what he said he'd eat. Mornings he was let make his own lunch. Whc was great: one less two-working-parental chore in the morning rush. Until the head teacher approached his mother tactfully at end-of-school to explain that there was a support scheme if we couldn't afford school dinners. The young shaver had been rocking up to lunch with a single biscuit or one carrot stick because he was too busy to make a sandwich before he left home. Red faces, the parents.
DeleteAllow me to introduce the bottle scraper, courtesy (allegedly) of the frugal Dutch.
ReplyDeleteAs a German I will use a Tubenausdrücker
DeleteWhat really grinds my gears is how much toothpaste ads apply. They cover the entire brush. Idiots be brushing their teeth foaming at the mouth like a race horse, without EVER figuring out that you need a pea size quantity actually.
ReplyDeleteMy parents were born in the early 1920's. My mother simply couldn't throw away slivers of bar soap. She explained that during the depression her mother collected those slivers and then sewed them up into a mesh bag to be completely used up.
ReplyDeleteIn 2014 when we were cleaning out the vanity in her residence I found a container that must have had 25 slivers of soap in it. I had to stop, sit down and collect myself- Depression induced habits sometimes didn't die.
Vector, I read or heard a story years ago about an elderly lady from I think the Singer family (she an heiress of the sewing machine empire family) who died in her home and the relatives found under her bed a shoebox with soap scraps that she had saved. The story had a bit of a Grey Gardens feel, but as I remember it she wasn't demented or crazy - just thrifty despite her massive fortune.
DeleteI've tried to Google to find confirmation of that story, but have never been successful.
My paternal grandparents were much the same, Depression-era upbringing. They had the same sense of being very generous with what they had, but also being very thrifty and wasting nothing. You could always count on them for help when you needed it, and they were very generous to their church and other charities. You make a very good point that the coronavirus generation will have their own sets of habits that likely will persist. Here's hoping hand-washing is one of them!
ReplyDeletethe one that really bothers me is the mustard in the squeeze bottle. you are supposed to keep it cap down and squeeze out that golden elixir? well, all of the mustard does not slide down to the cap, and, the opening is too small for any kind of long handled spoon to fit through so you can scrape out that yellow goodness. the only thing does fit through there is a butter knife, but that barely works. you end up throwing out at least one portion of mustard, if not more? or, you end up with those 'still some left' mustard bottle sitting around, waiting to be rinsed out in to some soup ro stew or something. bad design and food wasting, combined.
ReplyDeleteI-)