Well, I wish I could say I still weighed 105 pounds. LOL.
You were blessed to have been raised on a ranch with lots of healthy living. My mother encouraged healthful eating habits, too, but I ate poorly at school in my teenage years. I drank soda and ate junk food. At home, my mother cooked a variety of meals, but our traditional meal was spaghetti and meatballs with a salad. We always had fresh fruit, too.
I didn’t start thinking about food ingredients until I had children. I was careful about what I fed them. When I became a single parent and went broke, I tried to stay the course. I even baked bread from scratch for a while. But, eventually, I had to start buying the cheap bread. We still ate fruit, veggies, and meat & poultry. Also, like you, I never used margarine - only butter.
However, I didn’t have six kids. If I did, I don’t know what I’d do, but I know I wouldn’t be spending $444 at Trader Joe’s. (lol)
When I was a single mom, I was in college during the day and worked as a cocktail waitress at night 4 days per week-my aunt who lived in SA provided daycare in return for me babysitting her 2 kids on the weekends when she worked. My pay and tips paid for books and tuition (you could not do that now), as well as a cheap, closet-sized apartment in a semi-rural neighborhood and food for me and the cub, if I was careful. Most of the people there were Hispanic-I am, too so I fit right in fortunately.
There were stores in the area where I lived that catered to the residents-working/lower class people, most with kids-those stores had day-old bread and pan dulce from local small bakeries, plain packaged generic rice, beans, lentils, fideo, etc, produce from surrounding farms that might be a few days old, bruised/not perfect fruit, bulk priced ground beef and chicken, etc.
Those places were a major benefit for single moms, and other hard-pressed working class folks in the early 70’s-I haven’t seen one in 30+ years, though-I wonder why? It appears that everyone just gets an EBT card now and goes to the big box stores. I even see big ol’ heifers waddling down the aisles in the nearest grocery store to me-a small-chain store in the nearest town-less than 900 people- 18 miles away. Their carts are full of loaves of white bread, pre-cooked dishes and sandwiches from the deli counter (at $6.35 and up each) frozen pizzas, boxes of sugary cereal, frozen, precooked meat, boxed mashed potatoes, hot dogs, bags of candy, chips, etc-and at least one case of soda. Not a veggie or piece of fresh meat in sight. And at the checkout, they swipe their Lonestar card. It pisses me off every time I see that...
If margarine had 2-3 more ingredients, it would be soft, flavored plastic-anything like that can’t be good for humans-Velveeta “cheese” is about the same-my 1st husband called it industrial strength cheese whiz, referring to the bottled stuff some people use for nachos or fondue...
If I had 6 kids, I don’t know what I’d do either in this economy-it is hard enough to make ends meet just for me-but the guy in the article could learn to cook-maybe ask a woman who has a bunch of kids for some recipes-and as you say-stop shopping at Trader Joes...