This might be a good time for people to do a little penny pinching and squeezing the most of your food money.
So here is an ancient fable about a cabbage, a chicken, and your hard-earned cash, or in today’s jargon, your limited digital currency.
Imagine you are in a supermarket and a dwarf wanders in to do a little shopping. Normally, one doesn’t see dwarfs because they live in a universe a few seconds behind ours and humans are not good at looking back in time. However, this dwarf forgot to turn on his time cloaking device. He was hungry and didn’t have much gold to spend. He did have two younger dwarfs or dwarfettes with him to learn the ways of human food markets, super and otherwise.
Dwarfs are also telepathic and can hear a whole range of things that humans ignore or fail to hear. As he was walking down the produce aisle, he could hear Glad-us the cabbage singing “Pick me! Pick me! I’m healthy. I’m nutritious and a good buy.” The dwarf agreed and he even had a store flier that read, “Buy one and get one free.” It’s hard to argue with a free cabbage.
The dwarf was old school where cabbages were cheap, easy to grow, considered a staple and very versatile. You could chop them up for coleslaw. Or add them to salads, soups, stews and stir fries. You could even make cabbage rolls, and who doesn’t like a good plate of cabbage rolls?
Next, the dwarf headed over to the meat coolers because there was a sale on whole chickens. You could buy two in a plastic sealed bag. It was almost a two-for-one sale and a whole chicken is much cheaper than the plastic trays of various chicken parts. He didn’t understand why people would pay more for that convenience. Also why do they sell all the parts except for backs? Where did all the backs go, he wondered?
He would use one right away and the other one he would freeze for the solstice celebration and because it was winter, things were easy to freeze. Chickens were wonderful things, you could roast them whole, cut them up to fry, bake, boil or broil. You could make soups, stews, and chicken pot pies out of them. A chicken can easily feed you for a week.
The bigger cuts of meat are often far cheaper than the cut-up versions so you can buy a roast and cut it into steaks or stewing meat. And they make much cheaper luncheon meats. The more cut up and processed it is, the more expensive it is.
The dwarf then walked around the store to pick up a few other things that he needed that might be on the 50 per cent off rack or otherwise on sale. Basically, if it wasn’t marked down, on sale, or a bargain of some sort, he didn’t buy it.
Kraft Dinner was one of his favorite human foods, so he went to check it out. This store was selling it for over $2 a box but another food store in town was selling it by the case at $10 for 12 boxes, so he would buy his there. It was a bit of a myth that one needed milk and butter for KD. He always considered that the deluxe version.
So that is the fable of yore. Cabbage could talk. Chickens are better whole and in pairs. Kraft Dinner is best bought in a case of 12. Also, mature adults think it is part of their clan duty to teach younger dwarfs how to shop, pinch their pennies, cut up their foods, and cook them.
Not only is it cheaper, but cooking can also be fun and an artform when you get into it. It certainly helps to make your house smell better. It is truly amazing how much food gets thrown away and wasted under our current system and dwarfs are not above doing a little salvaging. So if you want to save your money, think like a dwarf, gnome, pixie or an old-timer.