Dollar Stretcher TNG--The Next Generation (L-O-N-G)

Warning: this is NOT for the black-belt frugalites. This is addressed to the up-and-comers.

In the current generation, we’re eating canned, boxed, frozen, and individually-packaged foods, and we’re having to go to extraordinary lengths to afford them—a second (or third) job, stacks of coupons, stacks of flyers, stacks on online coupon codes, decks of Special VIP Shopper cards, even online auction sites and Froogle.

If this is what it takes to get along in THIS generation, what will following generations have to do just to get by?

They will have to downshift from birth—literally. By then, all the possible combinations of coupons, in-store sales, online sales, and special shopper cards won’t be enough to afford this epidemic of affluenza called “convenience foods.” Exactly whom will they be convenient for in the future?

At that point, we’ll all be paying $3.00/gallon and more for gas (and $3.00 will seem like a discount), all sorts of new taxes will have been enacted, old taxes will have been raised beyond belief (AMT will be the new norm), inflation may or may not be lurking in the background, and conveniences will become luxuries once again. That’s right, I say “once again.”

You see, the LAST generation lived just fine without individually-wrapped peanut butter or cheese slices, frozen single-serve meals, toaster pastries, squeezable mayonnaise, and all manner of things we take completely for granted today. For them, pre-sliced bread WAS the absolute end-all do-all of convenience. Look how far we’ve gone on just one idea!

That one idea has led to millions of others in the name of shelf stability, ease of use, and ease of transport and storage. Now there isn’t a village anywhere on earth that hasn’t heard of or seen canned vegetables, dehydrated foods, sliced bread, individually wrapped cheese slices, or even bottled water. Convenience has covered the earth.

Some souls cannot afford even the lowliest of convenience foods, because they cannot even support their current way of life NOW. This same predicament awaits us in the future, but most of us have earning capacity through employment. You see, it really doesn’t matter what side of the have/have-not issue you’re on, things are eventually going to get and remain out of reach for all of us.

This is where your TNG skills are going to come in: since we have greater economic burdens to look forward to, we need to refine our acquisition skills EVEN MORE than we are today—this means going beyond the coupons, flyers, price books, and all the things you do now just to get by. This means looking deeper into the foods you eat, and deciding how and where you’re going to get the most and best nutrition for your dollar (which will probably be worth .50 in the future), while learning how to get the most food for your money as well.

To concentrate your efforts on finding bargains, you might take a look into yesteryear—a time when people all over this country had to conserve because of war, famine, and economic depression. You also might want to go past that—to a time when Victorian frugality was the norm, and people bought strong vinegar in barrels and diluted it when they used some.

Next-generation dollar stretchers won’t be burdened with coupons, flyers, and all that other stuff—instead, they will have an intimate knowledge of where the lowest price-per-unit can be found on concentrated foods. These foods will be the densest in nutrition, will take just a little to make a lot, will be the absolute cheapest per serving, and won’t come plastered with hazardous nutrition labels (that actually serve to tell us what’s NOT in the food as well as what’s in it). There won’t be any coupons, rebates, or store sales for these foods, because they’re already at rock-bottom prices.

I’m talking about dry rice, dry beans, dry whole grains, dry milk, dried meat replacements, sprouts of all kinds, and fresh produce—you know, mostly the stuff our grandparents ate. None of this stuff has nutrition labels, and all of it has more nutrition than its pre-prepared counterpart. As for bread, we don’t need it to survive, or even thrive—it’s a convenience food for civilizations that have lots more than bread to eat.

Today’s baby food also comes to mind as one of those “taken for granted” convenience foods—any pediatrician anywhere will tell you that a baby is breast or bottle-fed until teeth emerge, then soft finger-foods are given until sufficient teeth come in for chewing meats. Gerber, Heinz, Beechnut, and all the other baby food companies have been profiting from us needlessly for HOW long now?

Even meat is a convenience food when you think about it. There are a myriad of ways to get protein into our diets without having to resort to meat, but it’s a CONVENIENT way to get protein (as well as saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, and antibiotics) into our diets—just as cereals are a CONVENIENT way to get fiber, and dairy products are a CONVENIENT way to get calcium, bread and pasta are CONVENIENT ways to get lots of carbs, and fruit juices are a CONVENIENT way to get sugar into our systems.

When you think about it, nutrients are like nicotine—the product is the same, but the delivery system is different (especially in those “stop smoking” products). Cigarettes, the CONVENIENT way to ingest nicotine, are slowly being replaced by patches, gums, and pills (which still contain nicotine). The once-pristine and concentrated food eaten in the last century has been replaced by the “patches, gums, and pills” of the food industry (canned, frozen, pre-packaged and refined into oblivion).

If we hope to continue stretching our meager dollars, made even MORE meager by the coming hyper-inflation, higher taxes, and lower wages, we need to get on the ball and eliminate all traces of pretense—this means the convenience foods people were born into thinking were the “norm” for the family. If my own mother had any clue as to what was REALLY inside those TV dinners and canned vegetables she so gladly embraced after tearing off her apron, I’m sure she‘d scream. She died never knowing about the disease and sickness brought on by the long-term use of these so-called “foods”, and I‘m sure she had no clue that the FDA never ( to this day) required any kind of research into all those additives and preservatives commonly used to see what long-term effects lurked inside each one. Now we all know—through infertility, miscarriages, and the genetic-level embedding through premature births, child diseases and health malfunctions present at birth, adult diseases now present in children, and children dying before reaching adulthood, and adults succumbing to aging and disease much earlier than previous generations.

Do your best. Do BETTER than that by your family, now and in the future with today’s dollars. Tomorrow’s dollars will only be worth beans, and dried beans at that. Start today by eating REAL foods—fresh fruits and vegetables, dried whole grains, small amounts of nuts, and dried alternative protein sources. You don’t need bread, pasta, milk, or other sick manipulations of once-whole foods. You only need to drink clean water, but a teabag (any color) in it is acceptable.

Get used to this idea of non-convenience foods, because this is all you’re going to be able to afford in the future (even with coupons, if you can find them). If you still have Depression-era, WW1, or Dust Bowl relatives alive, ask for their guidance. Scout for books dealing in this sort of food cooking and preserving. In general, you’ll need to learn to stop paper-cutting yourself to death over what you think are deals, and come back to Mother Nature—your rebate will be in the form of terrific health and spare change in the bank.

Cost-per-serving will be your new rule of thumb and unit price (if it isn’t already). The cost per serving is gotten by dividing the price of the product by the number of pyramid servings it contains, both dry and cooked if the product swells when cooked (such as beans, pasta, rice, etc.). This information will not be on any store shelf, so you need to figure this out before purchasing the product. Chances are good that if you bought the absolute best bargain per measure, you likely got the best bargain per serving, too.

It might help to consult the Food Guide Pyramid to know how much is in a particular serving, and it might also help you if you carried measuring cups around when scooping and bagging dried foods sold in bulk. Using what I call “the power of the pyramid” will show you how you can literally feed the neighborhood (or your own brood) for pennies per serving.

These same exact principles can be applied to all food products, and cost per serving, as well as nutritional content, should always be in the forefront of your mind when shopping for your family—now and in the future.