Not true. My family did without. As children from a broken home we lived in a 50’s suburban neighborhood on Long Island and had no car til I was 12 y.o. We carried groceries home from the grocery store which was about a mile away.
You may have had to do without, but you were able to buy groceries. During the Great Depression many (if not most) families didn’t have grocery money and during WWII, everything was rationed. Anyone who had a plot of land grew their own food, i.e. “Victory Gardens.”