Getting Back to the Times of My Grandmother

For a long time, Americans have been eating out of boxes, bags, and cans. Convenience foods made life easier, and in many two-income families, prepared foods were necessary. They became a symbol of American leisure proving we could work, play, and eat on the fly, packing more and more into each day.

Lately, though, I’ve wanted to return to the arts of my grandparents. At times of great need in American history, people have turned to thrift. The emergence of victory gardens, recycling and repurposing, and living a simple lifestyle were part of the fabric of early American life, all the way through the World Wars. Even through periods of decadence, the American people knew that self-reliance was part of our very being, and we could survive if necessary.

Mass manufacturing changed all of that. As two-income families became commonplace, convenience foods were a necessary blessing—the TV dinner emerged as a symbol of the new, modern family saving the homemaker time in the way factory-produced cloth had a century earlier. Just pop the dinner in the oven and save time to do some of the other, more pressing things a busy homemaker or working mom had to do. Or better yet, get some of that coveted leisure time moms were looking forward to as industrial America invented more and more time savers.

American industry gave us breathing room, replacing many of the labor-intensive jobs that were essential to running a household, and provided us things that would have been luxury items to earlier generations—at a fraction of the cost of what our grandparents would have paid. Today, it is so cheap to buy prefabricated items that many of us have lost the arts of our grandparents. People don’t weave cloth. They don’t make their own clothes. They don’t cook from scratch. These are skills that may not always save us money, but learning them gives us back that DIY pioneer spirit.

I decided to try to get back to my roots before I lost them forever.

I started with sewing. I don’t sew well. I bought the pattern and cloth, determined to make a pair of pants and a simple shirt. It was not pretty. I gave up. Reading the pattern was hard—more like deciphering ancient Greek. There were a ton of techniques I needed to learn. Soon, I realized that in order to make the same shirt that cost a few bucks at the local big-box store, it would take me hours and three times as much money in material cost. The ragged thing I ended up with was nothing I could wear in public, even on Halloween.

I tried the yarn arts—another indispensible skill of earlier generations. I always wondered about the skill of “darning socks,” which I read about in Victorian and American literature. When a sock gets a hole, we toss it. I tried to darn a sock. It made a bunchy lump under the toe. Who wants that? A person who has to knit his own socks, that’s who. Knitting a sock isn’t instant gratification. Anyone who spends time manufacturing his or her own clothes will certainly darn a sock to save it. I never produced a sock, only a sagging tube and a bunch of squares and rectangles—I even turned a couple of those squares and rectangles into blankets. Being left-handed and not skilled, no one had the patience to teach me, and YouTube hadn’t been invented yet. Somewhere in my basement lies a bag full of cranberry colored crocheted squares waiting to see their time in the sun as an afghan.

I didn’t save any money with the yarn arts, and not a sock, hat, or glove came from my needles. Still, I’m pleased with this skill. Knitting and crocheting is now chic and vogue. I see knitting circles emerging. I even watched a woman knitting a sweater in public while listening to a keynote speaker at a major conference. Knitting is back. It’s more than just the cost of producing items. It’s bonding with others willing to take a step back from the fast pace of life to enjoy fellowship.

My grandmother would have been much prouder of me in the food department. I want to get rid of cans, boxes and prefab food as much as possible. I make things myself. I can, freeze, preserve, and dehydrate. I started this while living in a suburban city, but was lucky enough to move out to rural Rhode Island where I took pseudo-homesteading to the extreme, planting a garden of epic proportions and foraging farms for B-grade produce to preserve, can, and dehydrate. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan well enough in the garden. The bugs came and I wasted a lot. Still, I learned and improved.

I’ve been canning up a storm. I got pears from my parents’ neighbors, which I promptly made into pear butter and scorched, got tons of B Grade apples which I’m dehydrating at this moment and turned into jars of sauce, and a megabox of tomatoes straight from the farm, which, when turned into sauce didn’t produce nearly as much as I’d hoped, but tastes pretty darned good. Food production is, in fact, labor intensive and sometimes costs more than buying mass-produced items from the store, but I’m willing to go there for my health and higher quality food for my family. My son refuses to eat store-bought items like bread and yogurt. “Where’s my favorite kind?” He wants the food I make on a regular basis.

I noticed that I rarely go to the grocery store. I go downstairs into my pantry and take something I’ve preserved or cooked from scratch myself or to the local farm and cook what’s in season. Yesterday, I picked up eggs at the farm and selected a bunch of vegetables from the “take what you need and leave what you can,” box. I realize that such farmstands are a blessing in today’s day and age that would have been par for the course in days gone by. I’m grateful for my farmers.

Sewing, fixing, gardening, and preserving food are becoming more and more commonplace among my friends. What was once curiosity has become a lifestyle. I might not get off the grid, but I will try to do better to live by the “waste not, want not” ideal that my grandmother espoused.

These are the arts of our grandparents. The distinction of whether they fall into frugal, simple, self-reliant, or just tasty isn’t important. The important part is learning that all things worthwhile come from hard work, not just a can.

And that’s a lesson that would make my grandparents proud.

Bio: Dawn Casey-Rowe teaches in Rhode Island where she lives with her family and dog, trying unsuccessfully to get off the grid. She loves fitness, sustainability, gardening. She planted way too many cucumbers this year, and her corn died. She blogged about this at CafeCasey.com. You can find her on Twitter at @runningdmc.