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Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):
I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.
Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.
Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!
I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.
Pierre Berton's The Great Depression mentions someone who had his kids drink coffee because they couldn't afford milk.
Milk was more expensive than coffee?
Always has been as far as I know. Some quick googling claims that at the moment if you buy an average container of ground coffee (that you brew yourself, we're not talking Starbucks here) you can get it for about 26 cents per 12 oz cup (and probably cheaper if you get the cheapest brand available and/or brew it weakly). Milk is about 4 dollars per gallon which makes ten 12 oz cups, which is 40 cents each. Order of magnitude is the same, so I can't imagine getting coffee because you "can't afford milk", you'd probably just get smaller amounts of milk, but in the past the difference was probably larger.
With a high-end home bean-to-cup coffee machine, my marginal cost of decent espresso is about 40p per shot:
We pay 95p per imperial (20oz) pint to have milk home-delivered, so a half-pint glass of milk costs us slightly more than an espresso shot, but the milk in a late still costs less than the coffee. You could halve the cost of milk by buying in bulk at the supermarket, but then drinking proper espresso coffee is a premium experience as well.
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