Food Insecurity

 I'm making bean soup from a mix today and as I drop in the packet of spices,  I remember all the half used packet of seasonings that Mom saved... She never used the full amount and could not bear to throw anything food or food related away; wasting food was just not done in our family.

I remember we'd have ham for New Years... then ham sandwiches, leftover ham dinners, etc... then she'd shave any bits of ham off the bone and mix them with buttered noodles (Schinkenfleckerln), then the ham bone would go in a soup pot. One year I watched her eyeing the ham bone after it's soup duty, assessing whether there was anything else that could be done with it...

I asked her about the food supply during the war. Apparently while Hitler was in power, some food stuffs were rationed but they were not hungry. But there were definitely shortages.  But during the first few years after the war, when markets and food supply chains were broken, food was scarce.

Ever have those tiny bugs in your flour? Did you throw away the whole bag? Mom would sift out the bugs from the whole bag of flour, as her mother did; even all those years later the flour was too precious to just waste it. 

I don't know what Dad's family experienced here in the US; I know there were shortages as well but not like post-war Europe. I think Dad's aversion to wasting food came from living through the Depression and helping his mom run the boarding house in Wasco. As far as I can tell his family lived suburban or semi-rural. I know that his paternal grandmother raised chickens and would often kill one to cook when the family gathered for Sunday dinner; he had fond memories of  her chicken and dumplings. I also know that in his mother's boarding house, you ate what was on your plate as it was prepared, with a minimum of conversation, and were thankful for it. But with the agriculture in Ventura and in the Central Valley, I can't imagine there was hunger but there was no waste.