I was homeschooled all throughout elementary school with my sisters in the basement of our house. My parents didn’t love the methods that public schools used to teach kids, and this choice leaned into their already alternative parenting methods. My sisters were born in a pool in our home, we didn’t really eat sugars, and our only screen time was watching an episode of a PBS kids show every day. As you might be able to imagine, it was a pretty quiet childhood with very little awareness of pop culture or news. Though we had a homeschool group of friends outside of just my family, my socializing was pretty limited up until I went to public school in sixth grade.
I never really thought of my childhood as unusual until later on in life, in the later years of high school and then college. But, I did know how it affected my relationship with food. I remember going to the Whole Foods in Minneapolis with my mom and my sisters, clinging to the sides of the cart and grabbing the metal poles, thrusting my hands up into the mist that showered the fresh fruits and veggies every so often. I am sure it was exhausting for my mom to deal with three girls while getting food for the week, but back then I had no idea. We would say hi to our favorite worker, a biker named Ian sported sleeves of smiley face tattoos. I remember him pulling bright oranges from boxes and stacking them on the wooden crates, or carefully lining up leeks in the cold section. The variety of fruits and foods in the store wowed me, not completely understanding the abundance of what was before me.
At the deli, we picked up “mouse cheese”, or swiss cheese as normal people call it. The woman who worked there often gave us little samples, letting us try everything from parmesan to asiago. Then, we would make it to the cereal section. Which was right next to the remedy section of the store, my least favorite. As a kid my mom made us take fish oil with breakfast every day. It was thick and creamy on a spoon, mixed to be a sort of yogurt consistency. If we were lucky, it was strawberry flavored which cut the bite of the thick foul flavor. My mouth would revolt at the taste, twisting my tongue around like an angry cat trying to get the taste out.
In the grain aisle, tall and thin containers lined the aisle, filled with rice and lentils and oats. A scale dominated the center of them, allowing customers to weigh their goods and grab the thin green plastic bags hanging by the sides. At the end, a few of the tall tubes contained different flavors of chocolate. Milk chocolate bites, dark chocolate squares and chocolate covered squares. I would listen to the soft rush of rice waterfalling into the plastic bag my mom held below and wish that it was the thick, rain drops of chocolate pieces instead. But it never was, and we would push the cart past the final tubes with little acknowledgement, knowing that if we asked the answer would always be no.
The combination of our weekly Whole Foods trip and abundance of leafy greens from our backyard garden made up most of our meals. Raspberries only entered our house in the summer, coming from the bushes that lined our chicken yard. Eggs came from the chickens in the homemade coop that we owned, and our milk came from a local dairy farmer, one of the few that sold raw milk in the Twin Cities. It was a simple diet, with overwhelmingly healthy choices. The rare times that we had dessert, it would be strawberries sprinkled with sugar in the spring. I envied the other kids in my homeschool group that brought meat sticks, little individually wrapped sweets and white bread to our outings. It looked so appetizing, so much more flavorful than the PB&J sandwich that my mom packed me, made with all natural peanut butter and the oil half mixed in, the thickness forcing my jaw to work double time to chew it. The only reprieve from the health world was when we went to my grandma’s house, who kept her cupboards stocked with Nutella and jelly beans. It fed my sugar cravings in a way that maple syrup with yogurt could not.
As a kid, I was completely unaware of the 2008 financial crisis. Money didn’t really register for me, and I never questioned the lifestyle that my family led. Of course all of our clothes were hand me downs, our bikes from cheap garage sales, and trips limited to camping with discount supplies in local state parks. Being homeschooled, my lack of exposure to the outside world meant that I didn’t know there was another way to live. The recession was a staple of my childhood just as much as the unattainable chocolate tubes, yet I didn’t know about it.
Mortgage backed securities connected to U.S. real estate decreased in value, which only worsened with the stock market crash and international banking crisis. The rise of interest rates along with the cost of mortgages, the demand for housing fell and the crisis spread to global markets. The bailouts that the government provided didn’t do much, and the U.S. fell into a recession. Like all economic changes do, it affected the lower and middle class families the most. It wasn’t just my parents cutting coupons and shoving bills into mason jars for the week, it was everybody. It was the greatest recession since the Great Depression, and caused a loss of over two trillion dollars in the global economy. And through it, my parents raised three girls on a single income.
What seemed like dire misfortune to my five year old self that I wasn’t allowed to eat Lunchables was actually the strength of my parents managing to maintain the healthy lifestyle they wanted for us despite financial hardship. I still see eating berries as a treat, and buying clothes from a brand name store as a luxury. My lack of awareness of the crushing economic downswing didn’t change how it affected not only my life in the moment, but how I would think about money in the future. Shopping in Whole Foods today, I recognize the cheaper brands that my mom picked out when she had three toddlers hanging off of her. As I feel the plastic bag weighing heavier with the pattering sound of chocolate dropping, I think about standing in the grocery aisle and staring wide eyed at the sweets and longing to pull down the handle to release them.
