So we went grocery shopping on the weekend, because we are Party People, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but grocery store prices have gone up a bit. Flour – do you buy flour regularly? If you’re not a baker, flour might not play such a big role in your life, but flour is TEN DOLLARS MORE EXPENSIVE than it was five years ago and twice as expensive as it was last summer.
Remember a few summers ago when all of the news outlets were like "SHARK ATTACK! SHAAAAAARK!"? I spent that whole summer quietly convinced that I was going to get attacked by a shark, even though I live inland and the last shark sighting here was, mmm, never. I’m a naturally anxious sort, and even though I can tell when the news outlets are just fear mongering, when there is fear to be mongered ("mongered"?) I am your gal. And so this weekend, standing at the check out line with my groceries costing me FIFTY DOLLARS more than they did six months ago, I could hear every fiber of my being shrieking "SHAAAAAAAARK!"
We have to do some cost-cutting, obviously. I’m not going to cry too much about this since there are people starving in the world, and places where there are food shortages and so my groceries costing substantially more still makes me lucky. Still, though – it’s hard to look at our already pared-down budget and try and figure out what we can cut, when we already live such relatively spartan lives. It makes me feel sort of grim and tight-lipped, although another part of me feels a sort of pioneer resilience to this, that I may as well roll up my sleeves and start making my own laundry soap because there’s really no sense in complaining.
A while back, I was talking with a friend who I’ve known since The Girl was a baby and her daughter was a baby and we both were young and poor. We were laughing about how very, very poor we both had been and then she said "Things aren’t any easier now, are they?". We both went silent as we wondered how that could be, how we could be making technically middle-class incomes and still feel as poor as our student days, as the days when we walked for hours with our babies in second-hand slings, too poor to go into stores.
Of course, we’re not that poor anymore. But your expectations and worries keep adjusting accordingly regardless of how much money you make – I worried when we were poor and I worry now that we’re not poor and I’d probably keep worrying about money if we made a million dollars a year, although that doesn’t seem too likely. And now my groceries cost more and we have to cut back a little bit, but my children are still well fed and the wolf isn’t actually at the door and the surface of the lake is still calm and shark-free.
So without trying to monger fear: are you cutting back right now? How are you handling the higher food prices?