Food is so expensive today. I don’t do a very good job of keeping track of how much I spend on food. I just know that it’s a lot. Maybe I should use this hundred-year-old food expense record sheet from a hundred-year-old home economics textbook. Here is what it said about the record sheet:
Food Expense Record
All expenses chargeable to the food account may be entered under the general heading of “food.” This does not give as much information as is frequently desired and it is helpful and quite usual to make a few subheadings.
Care should be taken to enter only food items under “groceries.” The bill from the grocery frequently includes other items than food – such as soap, brooms, matches, mouse-traps, etc. Frequently, the man of the household and sometimes school children must secure the noon-day meal away from home. The cost of these meals is chargeable to the food account.
Economics of the Family (C.W. Taber and Ruth A. Wardall, 1923)
I think it is interesting to separate the food from everything else! I have actually no idea how much I spend on just the food part!
I generally shop for groceries once a week. And, I often think about whether I spent more one week than the previous week – and consider it to be a good week if I spent less (though that seldom happens).
Sometimes I think my groceries are really high at the checkout, but then I realize I bought detergent, vitamins, and other higher-cost items. I think a budget is always a good think.
I’m often surprised how quickly a few seem higher-priced items add up.
I see your point that a mouse trap should not come under the food heading. What if we ate the mice we caught??? No, don’t listen to me. I wouldn’t eat a mouse, only a mousse.
Yuck- that’s gross. Definitely let’s stick with the mousse. That said, the fact that a hundred-year-old book lists mouse traps as an example of a non-food item that might be purchased at a grocery store suggests that mice might have been a bigger problem a hundred years ago than they are now.
My grandmother (born 1898) kept a household accounting book. My first memory of what accounting meant was seeing her neat log book. I expect she probably did keep the cost of food as separate from the other household expenses. She was the first person in her family with post-high school education having business secretarial training. I actually wondered why my mother didn’t do the same and wonder if we are not so much lazy as lucky that many of us do not need to keep track of what we spend in each part of our lives so closely.
We kept track of expenditures for the first year or so after we got married – and then that fell by the wayside. Similarly to what you said, I felt very fortunate when we discovered that we didn’t need to track expenditures that closely.
I used to keep a list but after the boys were out of the house our food bill dropped dramatically and I didn’t feel the need to continue…. But when I was going through 6 gallons of milk a week It certainly helped track the expenditures!
This reminds me of when we also were going through 6 or 7 gallons of milk a week – and the challenge was finding a place in the refrigerator for all the milk. Those were the days!