Her claim at the time is probably realistic if you lived on a farm and spent your time on growing food. My grandparents did it. What little money they made off of farm crop sales was used to keep an old pickup running and to buy dry goods. My grandmother had a double barrel shotgun. Many a day she would make breakfast with eggs right from the henhouse and bacon from the smokehouse. She would go out after and get rabbits or squirrels for the mid day meal.
Hand to mouth living.
I’m familiar with that lifestyle, I grew up walking behind the plow and shot squirrels with a .22 rifle as a boy. The funny thing is people who lived that way didn’t worry much about a sudden ice storm because they were not dependent on electricity. We had electric power but when it went out we still had heat, we could still cook and we were inconvenienced, not endangered.