Store Bought VS Home Made....Finding a Balance

It's an age old debate.....which is better--to buy from a store or to make it yourself?

My feeling is, it depends.

In our mother's and grandmother's generations, you either had to make it yourself or you did without. Buying ready made anything was not an option or it was an expen$ive option. Women use to make everything from scratch....meals, cleaning products and even their own clothing. If you had an income producing job(or your husband did), you had the option to hire someone else to make your meals, clean your home/make the cleaning products and make your clothing.

When technologies took off after WWII, companies began marketing more convenience food/HBA products to the American public. Those items were NOT cheap! Being able to afford Swanson TV Dinners & Cokes & Mac and Pizza Kits in a Box were a status symbol of their day.
Can you imagine.......being able to afford Kraft Mac & Cheese being a status symbol?!?lol

As technology advanced & factory farms grew, the relative price of those new processed foods came down to where it was cheaper now to buy those than to make food from scratch using farm fresh ingredients. People over the last few generations have gotten disconnected from the earth, from growing food.
People moved away from the farm and rural areas.

Nowadays it's not uncommon to find urban children who have never seem a farm animal or food growing in the ground in person.
And if you were to survey American adults you would find that a surprising number of them don't know how to cook at all.....even the basics!  Their cooking skills span from "open the box and remove item" to "press the ON button on the microwave".....or even sadder, "pick up the phone and make a reservation".

People don't know how to prepare food from scratch and the really sad part is that they don't care to learn! They would rather buy processed foods they can stick in a microwave and eat NOW, because god forbid they have to wait 30 minutes for something to cook in a 'real' oven. And even sadder, the fact that they don't use coupons or wait for sales to at least get their food for the best possible price.

Enough of my rant.....basically I believe that home-made anything gives you more control over your life. Yes, it takes more of your time but it's time well spent.

You can make food just how you like. Leave out ingredients you don't want or like, put in healthier ones. High Fructose Corn Syrup is hidden in so much processed foods nowadays, as are other unhealthy chemicals. It's difficult to avoid the bad stuff unless you diligently read your product labels.

I think you can balance using Store Bought & using Home Made things. Both have their place in my life. Some processed foods are ok and even better when you can get them cheaper w/coupons. And anyone should & can teach themselves basic cooking skills.

We must go back to previous generations' times, when being self-sufficient was important. The more life skills you have, the better you are equipped to handle situations that may come up in your life.

Personally, we garden each year and raise as many vegetables as we can. We freeze &/or can what we don't eat and share with our neighbors. We also either join a CSA and/or frequent farmer's markets for what we don't grow ourselves. We buy some local farm meat/dairy as well when the budget allows, as we aren't in a place where we can have chickens or cows. We buy from the store when we can't obtain food from these other sources. And we use coupons whenever possible.

I don't use many commercially made cleaning products. You'll find few scented this and that sprays/etc. in my home. Ok, I do have a few candles and simple deodorizers(Renuzits)but that is all.

Why pay all that money for chemicals when you can clean most anything without all the 'fragrance air pollution' using baking soda, vinegar, bleach and lemon?

And most of the new 'green' cleaners are just water, baking soda & vinegar anyway! You are paying a premium price for those pretty colored plastic bottles it comes in. Save the bottles and refill them with your own homemade cleaners!  You'll cut down on the cost to you and the amount of plastic that needs to be manufactured and then dealt with when the product is gone.

Sluggy