From freezers to farmers' markets: how past generations stretched their food dollars
Buying in bulk saved money, but adjusting one's expectations helped too
As CBC News recently reported, inflation climbed to 5.1 per cent in January, a rate not seen since 1991. (That was a recession year so rough that even Santa Claus was having a tough time getting work.)
In the face of price jumps at the supermarket in 2022, Canadians have been making ends meet by using food waste apps, shopping at dollar stores, and finding help within their communities.
If there's one thing as certain as prices going up for the basics of life, it's that the CBC has reported on how Canadians were coping with those increases.
Here are some of the strategies Canadians used in the 1960s, '70s and '80s to curb their spending, especially on food.
1962: Shopping at the farmers' market
In 1962, CBC-TV broadcast Making Ends Meet, a seven-part summer series hosted by Percy Saltzman. Each week it focused on aspects of household spending such as housing, cars or food., and each episode of the show featured real families in varying income brackets speaking frankly about how they handled spending.
One family grew at lot of their own food. But another, the Thomas family, went to a farmers' market to buy in bulk. Mrs. Thomas said that hamburger meat, for example, although "not top quality," cost 25 cents a pound compared with 49 cents at the supermarket.
"I buy about 20 pounds of this at a time and put it in the freezer," she explained.
Saltzman asked Mr. Thomas to estimate how much his family saved by buying in bulk compared with shopping "in the conventional manner."
"That depends how conventional we want it to be," replied Mr. Thomas. "I like steaks, for example, but we don't have these very often."
Lorraine Fairley baked all the bread for her family of six, and said its cost was half that of buying it at the store. She admitted there was one thing she'd change with a bigger budget.
"If we had more to spend, I think we'd get more wine," she said.
1972: Starting a fruit and vegetable co-op
"Is there any way to buck the rising prices and falling quality?" asked an announcer in a 1972 news item about the climbing cost of food in the grocery store.
There was a way to "bypass the middleman" and save money, he said. A group of neighbours in a building in Toronto's St. James Town thought they had found it by starting a co-op.
By going directly to the wholesale market, where the producers sold to the supermarkets and greengrocers, the co-op saved on the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Two women, identified as Jane Kennedy and Sharon Kennedy, inspected the goods sold in crates at the Ontario Food Terminal in Toronto. Their co-op was modelled on a "successful" one nearby, said the announcer.
"The money we have is what everybody's already paid for the groceries they've ordered," explained a woman at a successful food co-op as it distributed produce like oranges, apples, lettuce and potatoes. "Because we have no storefront, no paid person, and no money to go into transportation, we can sell the things back at exactly the amount we paid."
1973: Freezing meat on sale
Mrs. Thomas may have been ahead of her time. In 1973 the CBC's Norman DePoe reported for CBC News on the sudden popularity of househol deep freezers. He said sales of them had grown by 100 per cent in a year and people were filling them with meat, fruit and vegetables purchased in bulk.
"The meat will keep indefinitely, protecting against both starvation and sudden price surges," DePoe said.
Around the same time, DePoe also reported on the price of bacon increasing so much that consumers found it "shocking, a scandal, disgraceful."
An operation like Chambers Food Club, which had 40,000 members in Ontario, was another way to save.
"You pay a nominal membership fee, you get the benefits of bulk buying," said DePoe.
1981: Adjusting one's expectations
CBC News recently reported on the rise in inflation Canadians are facing in 2022. Inflation was also climbing in 1981, but unlike today's Bank of Canada interest rate hike to 0.5 per cent, the bank rate in 1981 was much higher. The CBC reported on a rate change in February that year that sent the interest rate down to 17.08 per cent.
"For middle-class Canadians, inflation has taken the edge off the good life," said Knowlton Nash, host of CBC's The National, in March that year.
Reporter Marguerite McDonald recapped what the "good life" had meant in the 1960s and '70s: a house in the suburbs, a "big new car" every year, all available with "cheap" credit even if it wasn't possible to buy them outright. Salaries and wages had grown during the period too.
"But at the same time, we began to pay much more for what we eat, where we live, and how we get around," she said, going on to detail some of those price hikes for things like ground beef,
Interviewee Douglas Tigert of the School of Management at the University of Toronto noted that consumers' purchase habits had changed.
"They're buying cars that represent good value for them. They're buying it wholesale, factory outlets, co-ops, street vendors, discount warehouses."
McDonald met a family of three in which both parents, Anita and Hendrik Hart, worked. They had voluntarily scaled down their lifestyle to devote more of their income to supporting international development.
"I believe that I can carry my belongings to work in a shopping bag as well as in an expensive attache case," said Hendrik Hart,
The Harts bought their clothing second-hand, mended things, bought their food in bulk, and avoided "packaged goods" at the supermarket.
Even so, McDonald said the Harts felt they still lived "very comfortably indeed."
"They've just lowered their expectations," she said.
